FIFTH COLUMNISTS

What is the fifth column? It commonly consists of a fairly large group of the so-called “best people” who object to their country’s government and are ready to overthrow it even, if necessary, with the aid of foreign powers. Country after country in Europe collapsed at the first touch of the Nazi Army — sometimes before the arrival of the Army — because the upper officialdom had rotted from within.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 121

All governments have the problem of “subversion” by enemy agents or disaffected citizens. Seldom is it handled quite sanely by due process of law. Often–we note our own land–it becomes a source of which-hunts and neighborhood terror. This lack of balance doubtless comes from the fact that the offenders are not ordinary criminals, easy to catalogue, with penalties to match. They are men of different loyalties from those demanded by the state. A stable or confident regime is not greatly worried by them; for they are a small minority. But in times of war, or to any regime under stress, they are more disturbing than ordinary criminals.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 58

The Quislings and Lavals were not all in the West: the Soviet Union provided many collaborators and traitors of its own. Only 20-odd years had elapsed since the revolution and there were still many people who felt aggrieved by the regime. Many others were motivated by fear of the Nazis or the desire to adapt and survive, while yet others, especially in 1941, believed that the Germans had come for good. Finally there were weak, venal or just plain criminal types who were prepared to commit treason.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 440

…Later, Hitler’s “fifth column” so penetrated many governments of Europe that they collapsed at the first touch of war. Broadly speaking, this fifth column included men like Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier, who weakened the defenses of their nations by destroying democracy in Spain and, later, by giving the Czech fortifications to Hitler, in order to tempt his armies eastward. It included American industrialists who sold scrap iron to Japan, and strengthened her against the USA. None of these people considered themselves traitors. Nor, probably, did Quisling and Laval and others who, with various excuses, took part in puppet governments serving the invader.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 58

…The picture is clearly not a simple one of Stalin, as despot, getting rid of his enemies. It is a complex picture, combining the acts of many groups. Stalin’s responsibility was that, being “distrustful and suspicious”–a not unnatural state in a man whose close friend has been assassinated and who has heard in open court that his own assassination was planned–he appointed Yezhov, gave orders to hurry up the investigations and sentences, and devised the theory that enemies multiplied as socialism nears success. Yezhov, later found to be a madman, gave the affective orders. The Central Committee, convinced by Stalin’s argument and Yezhov’s reports, also approved the acts. The actual initiators, as stated by Khrushchev, were “provocateurs”–i.e., agents of Nazi-fascism–and “conscienceless careerists”–i.e., men who invented plots to advance their own jobs.
This analysis by Khrushchev does not greatly differ from that of my exiled friend, who said that the Nazi fifth-column “penetrated high in the GPU and arrested the wrong people.”… The Soviet investigators who are reviewing the cases will, I think, eventually get to the bottom of them. They will find the key, most probably, in actual, extensive penetration of the GPU by a Nazi fifth-column, in many actual plots, and in the impact of these on a highly suspicious man who saw his own assassination plotted and believed he was saving the Revolution by drastic purge.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 68

… In Dniepropetrovsk, the NKVD had discovered that such ‘born scoundrels” as Generalov (Shura’s husband), though they took formal oaths of loyalty to the Party, had in fact organized ‘spy nests and Trotskyist underground groupings’. They were working for ‘world capitalism’.
Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 47

Volodya continues, “The country was approaching war, and an opposition party had been formed with an underground regional committee, printing press and so on. It had a relatively large army which was ready to act at any moment. All this forced Stalin to take measures to liquidate what we called the fifth column.
Richardson, Rosamond. Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 141

FOREIGN AGENT INFILTRATION

The Soviet secret police had long guarded against routine foreign espionage. In 10 years they caught no less than 10,000 agents of foreign powers, creeping illegally across their borders. But the investigation of the Kirov murder led into higher and higher ranks of the Communist party, and seemed to indicate connection with the enemy even in these ranks. It was the first time that any nation in Europe began to glimpse the tactics that the world today knows as the Nazi fifth column — the penetration by the enemy into the citadel of power itself.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 128

QUESTION: Why were so many people executed after the Kirov assassination? Were any of them punished because they were political opponents of the present regime?

ANSWER: One hundred and three persons were executed as members of murder gangs who crossed the Soviet border with revolvers and hand grenades to commit murder and other acts of violence against Communists and Soviet officials. Such gangs have existed ever since the revolution drove out the White Guard armies, but Berlin gave them shelter after Hitler came to power. They have for two years been bragging in newspapers published in Berlin and Yugoslavia of their successes in murder and destruction beyond the Soviet frontier. Today the whole world knows about Nazi terrorist tactics across frontiers.
These cases were handled by border guards until the assassination of Kirov aroused a storm of popular resolutions calling for drastic action against terrorists. A court martial composed of well-known members of the Supreme Court thereupon made a rapid clean-up of all these cases in several cities, publishing the fact that the terrorists had been armed when arrested, had run the border from Poland and Rumania and had plotted and carried out murders. The trials were in camera, since open discussion of details was tantamount to accusing several governments of acts that rank as causes of war.
Strong, Anna Louise. “Searching Out the Soviets.” New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 357

Domestic realities were crucial. The VKP’s membership screenings in 1933-1935 provided “evidence”–real or perceived–that “enemy agents” posing as emigres had infiltrated the USSR and the party. The possibility that a fifth column existed within the VKP prompted a shift in party attitudes toward foreign comrades. From that assumption flowed the concern that “enemy agents” “masked” as students and political emigres had infiltrated party schools, factories, and other Soviet institutions.
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 411.

GPU HEAD IS TRAITOR

In the Far East, the chief of the G.P.U. fled to Japan, and many of his subordinates were arrested as Japanese spies and wreckers.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 134

ALL THE CONSPIRATORS PUT TOGETHER FORMED A SMALL PART OF THE POPULATION

For much as these events preoccupied the press of the outside world, the fact remains that all the elements of the counter Revolution–Trotsky supporters, NEP men, and kulak’s–together formed a comparatively small proportion of the vast population of the Soviet Union.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 165

Who was under investigation? We know comparatively few names but Medvedev notes the following groups: “jurists,” “educational administrators,” “scholars,” “biologists,” “technical intelligentsia,” “designers in the garments industry,” “executives, chief engineers, plant managers,” “painters, actors, musicians, architects, film people,” “military commanders.” If to these we add kulaks, largely engaged in agricultural sabotage, it appears that the opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat came, as we might expect, primarily from the upper professionals and the wealthier peasants. This group of professionals engaged in sabotage–economic, political, or cultural–and other anti-socialist activities, may have been large, but apparently, from the continuing efficient functioning of the nation, they constituted but a small proportion of the population or of the professional class.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 130

The anti-Soviet commentators and Khrushchev give the impression of an all-encompassing “terror” which virtually paralyzed Soviet life. But this was clearly false. Industrial production increased at a rapid rate between 1936 and 1940, the life of the average Soviet citizen went on much as before, for some it even took a special swing upward:
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 132

TROTSKY HEADED THE NAZI 5TH COLUMN IN THE SU

From the moment Hitler took power in Germany, the international counter-revolution became an integral part of the Nazi plan of world conquest. In every country, Hitler mobilized the counterrevolutionary forces which for the past fifteen years had been organizing throughout the world. These forces were now converted into the Fifth Columns of Nazi Germany, organizations of treason, espionage, and terror. These Fifth Columns were the secret vanguards of the German Wehrmacht.
One of the most powerful and important of these Fifth Columns operated in Soviet Russia. It was headed by a man who was perhaps the most remarkable political renegade in all history.
The name of this man was Leon Trotsky.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 185

When the Third Reich came into being, Leon Trotsky was already the leader of an international anti-Soviet conspiracy with powerful forces inside the Soviet Union. Trotsky in exile was plotting the overthrow of the Soviet government, his own return to Russia, and the assumption of that personal power he had once so nearly held.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 185

In the winter of 1921-1922, the leading Trotskyite, Krestinsky, had become the Soviet ambassador to Germany. In the course of his duties in Berlin, Krestinsky visited general Seeckt, Commander of the Reichswehr. Seeckt knew from his intelligence reports that Krestinsky was a Trotskyite. The German general gave Krestinsky to understand the Reichswehr was sympathetic with the aims of the Russian Opposition led by War Commissar Trotsky.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 197

In Moscow, a few months later, Krestinsky reported to Trotsky what general Seeckt had said. Trotsky was desperately in need of funds to finance his growing underground organization. He told Krestinsky that the Opposition in Russia needed foreign allies and must be prepared to form alliances with friendly powers. Germany, Trotsky added, was not an enemy of Russia, and there was no likelihood of an early clash between them:
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 197

This High Command of the Opposition was named the “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” It was constructed on three different levels or layers. If one of a layers was exposed, the others would carry on.
The first layer, the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center headed by Zinoviev, was responsible for the organization and direction of terrorism.
The second layer, the Trotskyite Parallel Center, headed by Pyatakov, was responsible for the organization and direction of sabotage.
The third and most important layer, the actual Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, headed by Bucharin and Krestinsky, comprised most of the leaders and highest ranking members of the combined Opposition forces.
The entire apparatus consisted of not more than a few thousand members and some 20 or 30 leaders who held positions of authority in the Army, foreign office, Secret Service, industry, trade unions, party and government offices.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 230-31

The conspiratorial apparatus of the Trotskyites, Rights, and Zinovievites was, in fact, the Axis Fifth Column in Soviet Russia.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 233

Trotsky began by stating flatly that “the seizure of power in Russia could be consummated only by force.” But the conspiratorial apparatus alone was not strong enough to carry out a successful coup and to maintain itself in power without outside aid. It was therefore essential to come to a concrete agreement with foreign states interested in aiding the Trotskyites against the Soviet government for their own ends.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 237

By the autumn of 1934, Trotskyite and Right terrorist groups were functioning throughout the Soviet Union.
A list had been compiled of the Soviet leaders who were to be assassinated. At the head of the list was the name of Joseph Stalin. Among the other names were Voroshilov, Molotov, Kirov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Menzhinsky, Gorky, and Kuibyshev.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 245

The official public records of these trials, comprising more than 1,500 pages of detailed testimony, are not only fascinating reading but also represent the most comprehensive public expose ever made of a contemporary secret state conspiracy. In addition, these records contain the first full disclosures of the inner workings of an Axis Fifth Column. They are an invaluable source of material for this period in world history, in which the Axis Fifth Columns played a major role.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 409

In this conjunction of men and motives, the killers who held power in Berlin and Tokyo found their opportunity. In the capitalist democracies they found allies among industrialists, aristocrats, anti-semites, native fascists, reactionary army officers, political adventurers, and prostituted journalists and politicians. In the USSR a corps of potential Quislings could be recruited only from the ranks of the secret dissenters within the Party and from such diplomats and army commanders as favored continued Soviet collaboration with the Reichswehr against the Western Powers rather than a program of collective security designed to checkmate Japan and the Axis. The elements of such a “Fifth Column” were in fact organized and partially mobilized for action with the aid of Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and other dissidents. Thanks to the vigilance of the NKVD and to the inhibitions, confusions, and quarrels among the conspirators, the plot ended in failure, exposure, belated repentance, and punishment.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 267

Had the plot not been exposed and crushed, the Soviet Union in the early 1940s would have suffered the fate of Spain, Czechoslovakia, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The Nazi technique which prepared 16 other countries for occupation, subjugation, and partial extermination between 1938 and 1941 was precisely the technique set forth in the confessions of the accused in the Moscow trials. Had the conspiracy not been ruthlessly suppressed, Hitler and Hirohito would have won their war not only against Soviet Union but against Britain and America as well.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 268

The truly shocking result that Trotsky, whose services to the Revolution had been magnificent and honored as such by Lenin, became in the last sad end the chief tool of his country’s foes.
Duranty, Walter. The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc., 1941, p. 72

The testimony of Radek, Sokolnikov, and Pyatakov outlined the following version. Trotsky conducted negotiations with Hess, the deputy chairman of the Nazi party. Referring to these negotiations, Trotsky told the “center” that in 1937 Germany was planning to attack the USSR. In this war, Trotsky felt, the Soviet Union would inevitably suffer a defeat in which “all the Trotskyist cadres would also perish in the ruins of the Soviet state.” In order to save these cadres from destruction, Trotsky obtained a promise from the leaders of the Third Reich to allow the Trotskyists to come to power, promising them “compensation” in turn: they would be granted concessions and Germany would be sold important economic objects of the USSR; she would be provided with raw materials and produce at prices below the world market, as well as territorial concessions in the form of satisfying German wishes for expansion in the Ukraine. Analogous concessions would be made to Japan, to whom Trotsky promised to give the Priamur and Primore regions in the Far East; he also pledged to guarantee oil “in case of war with the USA.” In order to expedite the defeat of the USSR, Trotsky ordered the “center” to prepare a series of the most important industrial enterprises to be taken out of commission at the start of the war. Radek and Sokolnikov “confirmed Trotsky’s right to speak in the name of Soviet Trotskyists” in negotiations with the fascist powers, and in conversations with German and Japanese diplomatic representatives they promised the support of “realistic politicians” in the USSR for Trotsky’s position.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 118

Who was united under Trotsky’s Fascist banner? All the counter-revolutionary elements rallied under that banner. What means did the conspiracy use? High treason, the defeat of their own country, sabotage, espionage, and terror.”
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 92

HITLER PRAISES TROTSKY’S BOOK

Hitler read Trotsky’s autobiography as soon is it was published. Hitler’s biographer, Conrad Heiden, tells in Der Fuehrer how the Nazi leader surprised a circle of his friends in 1930 by bursting into rapturous praises of Trotsky’s book. “Brilliant!” cried Hitler, waving Trotsky’s My Life at his followers. “I have learnt a great deal from it, and so can you!”
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 216

ANTI-STALIN GROUPS FORM UNDER TROTSKY’S LEADERSHIP

The chief defendant at all of the three Moscow trials was a man 5000 miles away.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 312

By the summer of 1932, an agreement to suspend past rivalries and differences, and to work together under Trotsky’s supreme command, was under discussion between Pyatakov, as Trotsky’s lieutenant in Russia, and Bucharin, the leader of the Right Opposition. The smaller group headed by the veteran oppositionists, Zinoviev and Kamenev, agreed to subordinate its activities to Trotsky’s authority.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 230

KAMENEV UNHAPPY THAT STALIN WAS NOT KILLED

“A pity,” said, Kamenev, when the terrorist Bakayev reported the failure of one of his plots to kill Stalin. “Let’s hope the next time we’ll be more successful.”
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 247

TROTSKY MAKES HIS PEOPLE PAWNS OF THE GERMANS AND JAPANESE

“From now on,” wrote Trotsky, “the diversive acts of the Trotskyites in the war industries” would have to be carried out under the direct “supervision of the German and Japanese high commands.” The Trotskyites must undertake no “practical activity” without first having obtained the consent of their German and Japanese allies.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 276

TROTSKY TALKS WITH HESS

It was clear to Pyatakov that Trotsky had not invented this information. Trotsky now revealed to Pyatakov that for some time past he had been “conducting rather lengthy negotiations with the Vice Chairman of the German National Socialist Party — Hess.”
As a result of these negotiations with Hitler’s deputy, Trotsky had entered into an agreement, “an absolutely definite agreement,” with the government of the Third Reich. The Nazis were ready to help the Trotskyites to come to power in the Soviet Union.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 281

Trotsky had agreed (1) to guarantee a generally favorable attitude towards the German government and the necessary collaboration with it in the most important questions of international character; (2) to agree to territorial concessions–the Ukraine; (3) to permit German industrialists, in the form of concessions, to exploit enterprises in the USSR essential as complements to the German economy (iron ore, manganese, oil, gold, timber, and so forth); (4) to create in the USSR favorable conditions for the activities of German private enterprise; (5) in time of war to develop extensive diversive activities in enterprises of the war industry and at the front. These diversive activities to be carried on under Trotsky’s instructions, agreed upon with the German General Staff.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 281

Pyatakov, as Trotsky’s chief lieutenant in Russia, was concerned that this out and out deal with Nazism might be difficult to explain to the rank and file members of the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 281

GROUPS ALLIED AGAINST SU WERE RUTHLESS AND DETERMINED

The USSR was an arena in which the enemy met defeat in political warfare years before he failed in military warfare. The secrecy of each maneuver and counter move makes it impossible as yet to reconstruct the intricacies of the plots within plots and wheels within wheels whereby the Soviet Citadel was attacked and defended. Every aspect of this hidden war is still wrapped in a haze of speculation and controversy, save only the central fact that the attack was unscrupulous, merciless, and ineffective and that the defense was ruthless, relentless, and successful. What is beyond question, although wholly ignored in most contemporary comments, is that fascist conspirators did all in their power during the 1930’s to disrupt and weaken the Soviet Union, as they were doing simultaneously in other communities earmarked for subjugation. Their arsenal of weapons, here as elsewhere, included assassination, sabotage, bribery, blackmail, treason, and rebellion.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 257

As the present century has amply and bloodily demonstrated, wherever the working class moves toward power, the bourgeoisie will work to destroy it by every means at its disposal, war, terrorism, massacre, counter-revolution, sabotage, subversion, lies. If a working class in power is not able to thwart these attempts it will be defeated and socialism destroyed.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 132

TROTSKY ADVOCATED KILLING STALIN

No one can know the precise time at which Trotsky made up his mind that Stalin’s leadership of the party must be destroyed by violence.
Footnote: but in the Bulletin of the Opposition, October 1933, Trotsky wrote: “the Stalin bureaucracy… Can be compelled to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard only by FORCE” He later told the New York American (Hearst), January 26, 1937: “Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the state. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination.”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 264

Moral revulsion at assassination as a political weapon was a sentiment unknown to Trotsky, for all his initial Marxist objections to individual terrorism.
“We were never concerned,” wrote Trotsky, “with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life. We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can be solved only by blood and iron.”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 267

…Trotsky made his papers available to an international commission that investigated and disproved the charge that he had supported the policy of assassination, and Sedov also answered the false charge in Livre sur Le Proces de Moscou. His assistant while writing a book, which was published in 1937, was Mark Zborowsky, a penetration agent whose code name on his NKVD file was TULIP.
Zborowsky had so successfully ingratiated himself into Sedov’s circle by 1937 that he was regarded as totally loyal in Trotskyist circles. The TULIP file reveals that it was from Zborowsky that Stalin, in January 1937, obtained material that was claimed to be evidence to renew his charges against Trotsky. But TULIP, who can hardly have been unaware of Sedov’s real views, appears simply to have relayed to Moscow information that he believed “The Boss” wanted to hear. For example he wrote to the Center: “On Jan. 22 Sedov, during our conversation in his apartment on the subject of the second Moscow trial and the role of the different defendants, declared, ‘Now we shouldn’t hesitate. Stalin should be murdered.’ ”
“Stalin’s deep fear of assassination would, therefore, have been inflamed by a more detailed report of the intentions revealed by Sonny–as Sedov was known by the NKVD–which Zborowsky dispatched to Moscow on Feb. 11:
“Not since 1936 had SONNY initiated any conversation with me about terrorism. Only about two or three weeks ago, after a meeting of the group, SONNY began speaking on this subject again. On this occasion he only tried to prove that terrorism is not contrary to Marxism. “Marxism”, according to SONNY’s words, “denies terrorism only to the extent that the conditions of class struggle don’t favor terrorism. But there are certain situations where terrorism is necessary.” The next time SONNY began talking about terrorism was when I came to his apartment to work. While we were reading newspapers, SONNY said that the whole regime in the USSR was propped up by Stalin; it was enough to kill Stalin for everything to fall to pieces.”
Costello, John and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly illusions. New York: Crown, c1993, p. 282

The evidence showed that for a long while there existed in the Soviet Union the two groups of Oppositionists, that led by Trotsky from abroad, and the Zinoviev-Kamenev group. They had hated each other almost as much as they had hated Stalin and the other leaders of the Soviet government. With the success of Socialistic construction, however, both groups began to realize that what little mass support they might have had in the beginning had completely fallen away from them. In desperation emissaries from Zinoviev and Kamenev went abroad to meet Trotsky’s agents and Trotsky himself. They hoped by joining forces to make up some of the ground they had lost.
But Trotsky had no such illusions. He knew that mass support could never be won again in the face of the triumphant success recorded by the Soviet Government. Therefore he suggested, and insisted, that only the murder of the present leaders could pave the way to the return of the Trotsky-Zinoviev group to influence in the Soviet Union.
Shepherd, W. G. The Moscow Trial. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936, p. 7

And then–this was a truly fascist touch–all those tools that they had used in the various Commissariats to help them carry through their plans were to be assassinated too, so that none would be left alive who could tell the world of their crimes.
On one point all the accused men spoke with one voice: Every communication received from Trotsky harped on the theme: Kill Stalin.
One of the defendants described a meeting in Kamenev’s flat, with both Zinoviev and Kamenev present. This defendant, Lurie, had expressed his qualms at working with the “Gestapo.” Zinoviev had brushed the objection aside. “The ends justify the means,” he declared.
Shepherd, W. G. The Moscow Trial. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936, p. 8

Berman Yurin was another of the accused who confessed to having entered the USSR expressly for the purpose of murdering Stalin.
“Stalin must be physically destroyed” was the point emphasized to me over and over again by Trotsky in personal conversation, said Yurin, narrating his conversations in Copenhagen with Trotsky.
Mrachkovsky, one of Trotsky’s closest confidents since 1923, told the court how Trotsky had made terrorism and assassination of basic condition on which he would agree to the merging of the groups.
By the time the hearing had ended there was no doubt of the guilt of the men in the dock, and that they richly deserved the death penalty that awaited them.
Shepherd, W. G. The Moscow Trial. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936, p. 9

TROTSKY ALSO WORKED WITH THE GERMANS BUT SOLD OUT HIS FOLLOWERS

Trotsky, in 1934, in his impatience to recover the power he had lost, was less discreet [than Lenin]. He entered into negotiation with the Germans, and tried at the same time to start negotiations with the Japanese. He had to have something to negotiate with, and so he offered territorial concessions to both those probable adversaries of Soviet Russia. Rather a reduced Russia than a Russia ruled by Stalin! Being an autocrat with an exaggerated notion of his own importance, he did not ask any of his supporters in Russia whether they agreed with him. To show the support he had in Russia, he gave away the names of his supporters in the course of his negotiations, and the information was promptly used, particularly by the Japanese, in the interest of their intelligence service. Trotsky’s supporters in Russia found themselves in an appalling situation, for they did not share his view of the future. It is, moreover, extraordinarily difficult to fulfill one’s duties during the day to the best of one’s abilities and then to undo it all secretly at night. Consequently, most of Trotsky’s followers disregarded his orders.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 293

FOREIGN SPIES WORMED THEIR WAY INTO SOVIET GOVERNMENT

Yet more: in this great purge the fact was established that the German, Japanese, and Polish espionage services had wormed their way far into Russia, gaining access to the highest circles. The Deputy People’s Commissar for Agriculture, a Galacian Ukrainian, proved to have been for many years a Polish spy. The Soviet ambassador in Turkey, Karakhan, was shot as a German spy…. Karakhan fell into the hands of a beautiful German woman, and as a result into the hands of the Hitlerist intelligence service.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 304

Another important personality, though not so famous, was Boris Steiger, the official head of the foreign section of the Fine Arts Department. In reality he was an important representative of the secret police for liaison with the foreign diplomats, and an influential adviser of the Foreign Ministry. The Japanese had found out something compromising in his past, and had blackmailed him. He became a Japanese spy. He, too, was shot.
Thus there had been discovered a whole series of high officials who had been carrying out espionage for foreign Powers. A morbid fear of espionage spread over Russia. Large numbers of foreigners, the remainder of the foreign specialists in the Soviet Union, and Communist refugees from Hitler, were arrested, some on suspicion of espionage, others because they were supposed to be in close touch with members of the Russian opposition.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 305

MANY HIGH GOVT OFFICIALS WERE FOREIGN AGENTS

It has not been realized in the world outside the Soviet Union that in these trials of 1936 to 1938 the most widespread conspiracy in the world’s history came to judgment. In that conspiracy were involved not only ex-leaders of the party and a former head of the government, but also fully a dozen members of the Government who were still in office, and the supreme commander of the army, the Chief of Staff, almost all the army commanders, and in addition a considerable number of senior officers; the Minister of Police and the highest police officials; the Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, almost all the ambassadors and ministers representing the Soviet Union abroad, almost the whole of the diplomatic staff of the ministry in Moscow; and also highly-placed judges and members of the governments of the federal republics.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 308

… but power was passing altogether from Stalin to a still somewhat nebulous motley of adventurers, militarists, and political police bosses and imperialists. They already were sufficiently strong to hold up a decision of the Government.
When we had all returned to Karlshorst, I was visited in my office by a comrade standing very high indeed. For though powerless still to overthrow the regime, we revolutionary Democrats were by this time strong enough to have our men in many key places.
Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 354

At least in the official rhetoric of the day, not a great deal distinguished “spies” from White Guards, kulaks, Trotskyites, and Zinovievites. From the Stalinist viewpoint, they may have operated from different perspectives, but they were all seen as threats to the USSR.
Considered this way, the 43,072 discovered in these categories up until December 1935 was large, especially considering that many of these people had held responsible posts. Imagine the outcry, and the fear, if in 1948 the FBI had announced that more than 40,000 enemies of the United States had been discovered operating inside the country’s ruling bodies. The allegation that one person, Alger Hiss, had been a Soviet agent was enough to send America into a minor frenzy, even though our enemies were on the other sides of the oceans. Forty thousand real and desperate foes, all presumably busy recruiting others, could inflict tremendous damage on any country.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 31

There is one important earlier case generally recognized as that of a genuine spy– Konar, who became Assistant People’s Commissar of Agriculture until accidentally exposed. He was a Polish agent who had been given the papers of a dead Red Army soldier in 1920, and in ten years had thus risen high in the hierarchy, until exposed by someone who chanced to have seen the real Konar.
Conquest, Robert. he Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 270

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated]: Comrades! From the reports and discussions held previously at the plenum, it is obvious that we have here a problem that could be characterized by three basic facts.
First–the harmful and diversionary espionage of foreign country agents, in whose ranks the Trotskyites played a very active part. They managed to involve practically all of our organizations to a greater or lesser degree industrial, administrative, and party organizations.
Secondly–agents of foreign countries, including Trotskyites, have managed to worm themselves not only into the lower party organs, but also they managed to get some top ranking posts in the government and party.
Thirdly–some of our leading comrades, in the Central Committee and in regions of the country, not only were not able to expose these agents, diversionists, spies, and assassins, but they became unwilling tools in this anti-State work and even unknowingly appointed some of these agents to responsible positions. These are undeniable facts, according to the reports and documents that we heard during this plenum.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 227

WHY DID THE VAST INTERNAL CONSPIRACY FAIL

This is by no means a complete list. How was it that this vast conspiracy was entirely unsuccessful? It failed simply because its membership was too exalted. There were generals, but they had no army. There were persons in high office, but nobody to execute their orders. Around the conspirators, and, still more important, beneath them, were everywhere the members of the new official class. Thus the conspiracy had no solid basis and could not grow into an effective movement.
The conspirators might have sent one of their members to Stalin to shoot him down during an audience. They actually discussed this, but no one had the courage to make the attempt. Thus all they did was to come together in groups at long intervals, and talk and whisper, without any practical result–until, after several years, the first attempt was made, much too late. The first attempt at once betrayed everything.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 308-09

TO GET HELP THE OPPOSITION PROMISED THE NAZIS LAND LIKE THE UKRAINE

Also leading the Germans into war, was their belief in the internal weakness of Russia and the alleged widespread disaffection against Stalin. Much of this fantastic idea may have resulted from the conversations which Stalin has always insisted took place between Trotsky and the opposition leaders and the Nazi Party heads. Among the principal accusations leveled against Trotsky had been the treacherous liaison with Hitler, to whom the minority groups were said to have promised the Ukraine and certain districts in Western Russia in return for military help against Stalin.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 119

SOVIET OFFICIAL SAYS GOVT IS INFESTED WITH SPIES AND TRAITORS

On October 7, 1937, Ambassador Davies wrote in his diary, “Ambassador Troyanovsky [Soviet Ambassdor to the US] came in and spent an hour with me. He gave rather an interesting account of conditions here that justified the executions. He described the naivete of his people even in the government in extending their trust and making party membership a guarantee of reliability. He stated that the country was in fact infested with spies of hostile countries, which spies were for years engaged upon this service as members of the Communist Party and even the government itself. He stated that he himself had had suspicions many times; that England and France were similarly infested; that Stalin might later give the world “his side” of this situation.
Davies, Joseph E. Mission to Moscow. New York, N. Y.: Simon and Schuster, c1941, p. 225

Stalin gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise. His brown eye is exceedingly kindly and gentle. A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him. It is difficult to associate his personality and this impression of kindness and gentle simplicity with what has occurred here in connection with these purges and shootings of the Red Army generals, and so forth. His friends say, and Ambassador Troyanovsky assures me, that it had to be done to protect themselves against Germany–and that someday the outside world will know “their side.”
Davies, Joseph E. Mission to Moscow. New York, N. Y.: Simon and Schuster, c1941, p. 356

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], Then the question has to be asked as to where and how the present enemies have the influence? Their strength is that they hold the party card in their hands, thus giving them the respectability to do their dirty work… doors open into our most important governmental posts.
They completely worm themselves into favor, becoming more patriotic than the best dedicated communist; they heap slavish praise upon the leadership in every section that they are in. They thus were able to get the top government secrets and thus, give them to foreign enemy powers. Thus, they were easily enmeshed in foreign secret services. Our mistakes are that we did not try earlier to unmask these enemies, thus weakening our fight against these present-day enemies.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 235

…sometime in January the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after accusing Ukraine of deliberately sabotaging the fulfillment of grain quotas, had sent Postyshev, a sadistically cruel Russian chauvinist, as its viceroy to Ukraine….
As we listened to these harangues, we often thought that perhaps there was hidden sabotage at work to discredit the Communist Party.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 210-211

SECRET POLICE GATHERING EVIDENCE AGAINST AND INVESTIGATING STALIN ALSO

It had so happened that earlier, while working in Moscow, I’d once asked that Lukashov be sent to Poland and Lithuania to purchase onion seeds and vegetables. When he was arrested, he was pressured to testify that his trade mission to Poland had actually been a secret political assignment to establish contacts with anti-Soviet organizations abroad. He refused to confess and was released–a rare thing. I told Stalin about the episode.
“Yes,” he said, “I know what you mean; there are these kinds of perversions. They’re gathering evidence against me, too.”
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 108

I was astounded also to discover that Molotov had my uncle’s personal secretariat so honeycombed with his own spies that he knew everything that went on in Stalin’s entourage, and even more amazed to learn that the GPU kept even Stalin under surveillance.
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 70

“Good day, Budu,” he [Stalin] said. “You see I’ve succeeded in getting your articles. I read them carefully. You’re quite right. There’s nothing anti-Marxist in them at all. I’m going to talk to Molotov about it.”
I told him why I had come to see him and about all the difficulties that had been put in my way. His face turned a pale gray from rage. He was beside himself.
“I won’t stand for anyone intercepting Nadia’s letters or phone calls,” he exploded. “She’s my wife. I guarantee her. The GPU has no business interfering with her!”
He picked up the telephone and called Dzerzhinsky.
“Felix Dzerzhinsky,” he said, when the GPU president answered, “will you come over to my apartment at once?”
He hung up and turned back to me.
“You stay, Budu,” he directed me. “We’re going to have this out.”
Dzerzhinsky arrived 15 minutes later. His face was twisted and lined with deep wrinkles. Dark circles surrounded his eyes. It was not difficult to see that the illness which had long beset him was getting worse.
He greeted me in a friendly fashion.
“Look here, Felix,” Stalin attacked, “your organization is going a little too far. My nephew here, Budu Svanidze, was called in by Artuzov for a strictly personal matter which concerns me alone. In the future, I want the GPU to keep its nose out of my private affairs.”
“What happened?” Dzerzhinsky asked.
“The GPU has been intercepting phone calls and opening letters addressed to us here.”
Dzerzhinsky became very serious.
“There must be some mistake, Comrade Stalin. There is an order of the Politburo covering that point. Letters addressed to members of the Politburo are never opened.”
“Let’s get it quite straight,” Stalin said. “I’m not speaking only of letters addressed to me personally. I do not want any surveillance of Comrade Alliluyeva [Stalin’s wife] and I do not want any discussions at the GPU concerning my conversations with my nephew. Make that clear to Artuzov.”
Dzerzhinsky promised that there would be no repetition of the offense. He stayed for a few moments longer, talking with my uncle, and then left after taking a cup of tea, which my aunt offered him.
When he had gone, Stalin said to me, “You see how it is, Budu, the GPU is becoming all-powerful. They don’t want to let anyone alone.”
I knew that Dzerzhinsky, who was an old member of the Party, affected an attitude of complete independence toward the Politburo. But I hadn’t dreamed up to now that the GPU would dare to spy on the secretary-general of the Party.
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 77

Ordjonikidze himself was being increasingly harassed. Police officers arrived at Ordjonikidze’s flat with a search warrant. Humiliated and frantic with rage, he spent the rest of the night trying to get through to Stalin on the telephone. As morning came he finally got through and heard the answer [from Stalin]. “It is the sort of organ that is even liable to search my place. That is nothing extraordinary….”
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 168

It is unclear whether the “neighbors” had been tapping Koba’s telephone on their own initiative or with the permission of Mekhlis.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 217

While Ordjonikidze was at the Commissariat, a search was conducted of his apartment. When he found out about this, Ordjonikidze immediately telephoned Stalin and expressed his indignation. Stalin said in reply: “It’s such an organ, that it might carry out a search at my place. Nothing to get upset about….”
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 194

These few examples reveal the GPU’s in method of operation. The system was similar in the control organ of the party. In the Fourth Section of the army it was considerably different because most of the staff was salaried. But there, too, the same system of investigating and spying reached everywhere. Nobody was spared, not even Stalin: there was a dossier on him, too.
Tuominen, Arvo, The Bells of the Kremlin: Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983, p. 184

WHEN STALIN AND HIS ALLIES TRIED TO BE LENIENT THEY WERE STABBED

It is no more than just to observe the Stalin was patient and acted slowly. Against those who wanted to execute Trotsky he urged exile, then banishment from the country. When Zinoviev and Kamenev committed acts which according to both Communist Party rules and Soviet law were treason, they were permitted to make repeated pledges to change their ways and given positions of some responsibility. Their pledges were found to be insincere. Their word of “honor” was continually violated.
Then, on December 1, 1934, Stalin received a wire that Kirov had been murdered. Stalin’s patience was exhausted.
Stalin’s attitude can be determined from statements he had made earlier. In reply to a question from the German writer Emil Ludwig as to why he was governing with such severity, Stalin had said that it was because they had been too lenient at certain times. He cited the fact that when General Krasnov marched on Leningrad and was arrested, his action merited death. But the Bolsheviks gave the General freedom on his pledged word that he would not take up arms again. He promptly went over to the counter-revolution. “It became clear,” Stalin said, “that with this policy we were undermining the very system we were endeavoring to construct.”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 28

If one leaves rumor and gossip aside, one finds numerous signs that Stalin favored what the Old Bolshevik would have called liberal policies. Indeed, as one scholar has recently shown, Stalin had identified himself with more relaxed social and educational policies as early as 1931. Stalin made conciliatory gestures to the “bourgeois specialists” and relaxed educational restrictions that had excluded sons and daughters of white-collar specialists. In May 1933, Stalin and Molotov ordered the release of half of all labor inmates whose infractions were connected with collectivization. The following summer, the political police (NKVD) were forbidden to pass death sentences without the sanction of the procurator of the USSR. The November 1934 plenum of the Central Committee abolished food rationing and approved new collective farm rules that guaranteed kolkhozniki the right to “private plots” and personal livestock.
Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 94

As a member of the war council of the 32nd Army on the Western front, he [Zhilenkov] had been encircled and taken prisoner. As a time-server with no principles and suddenly finding himself among senior party officers, he soon became a collaborator. The same was true of another of Vlasov’s aides, Lt. Gen. Malyshkin, chief of staff 19th Army. He had been arrested in 1938 and released at the beginning of the war. When Beria reported on a number of generals who had been condemned and then released, Stalin wanted to know who had petitioned on Malyshkin’s behalf. He begrudged the time wasted on having to hear about all the traitors he had overlooked in the 1930s.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 446

One of the first decrees of the Council of Commissars abolished the death sentence, in spite of Lenin’s protests. The Cossack General Krasnov who marched on Petersburg to overthrow the Bolsheviks and disperse the Soviets was taken prisoner by the Red Guards and released on his solemn pledge that he would not resume the fight. Later Krasnov headed one of the White armies in southern Russia. It took time before the revolution, amid the gruelling experiences of civil war, wiped away its tears, ceased to trust the pledges of its foes, and learned to act with that fanatical determination which gave it some new and repulsive features, but to which it owed its survival. We shall soon find the ‘man of steel’ among those who weaned the revolution from its sensitive–or was it sentimental?–idealism.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 178

A few days later these Yunkers were released. A second time they were paroled and a second time they broke faith with their liberators–they went South and joined the White Guard Armies mobilizing against the Bolsheviks.
With like acts of treachery thousands of Whites repaid the Bolsheviks for their clemency. Over his own signature general Krasnov solemnly promised not to raise his hand against the Bolsheviks, and was released. Promptly he appeared in the Urals at the head of a Cossack army destroying the Soviets. Burtsev was liberated from Peter-Paul prison by order of the Bolsheviks. Straightway he joined the Counter-Revolutionists in Paris and became editor of a scurrilous anti-Bolshevik sheet. Thousands, who thus went forth to freedom by mercy of the Bolsheviks, were to come back later with invading armies to kill their liberators without ruth or mercy.
Surveying battalions of comrades slaughtered by the very men whom the Bolsheviks had freed, Trotsky said: “The chief crime of which we were guilty and those first days of the Revolution was excessive kindness.”
Williams, Albert. Through the Russian Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 160

[In a talk with the German author Emil Ludwig on December 13, 1931 Stalin stated] When the Bolsheviks came to power they at first treated their enemies mildly. The Mensheviks continued to exist legally and publish their newspaper. The Socialist-Revolutionaries also continued to exist legally and had their newspaper. Even the Cadets continued to publish their newspaper. When General Krasnov organized his counter-revolutionary campaign against Leningrad and fell into our hands, we could at least have kept him prisoner, according to the rules of war. Indeed, we ought to have shot him. But we released him on his “word of honor.” And what happened? It soon became clear that such mildness only helped to undermine the strength of the Soviet Government. We made a mistake in displaying such mildness towards enemies of the working class. To have persisted in that mistake would have been a crime against the working class and a betrayal of its interests. That soon became quite apparent. Very soon it became evident that the milder our attitude towards our enemies, the greater their resistance. Before long the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries–Gotz and others–and the Right Mensheviks were organizing in Leningrad a counter-revolutionary action of the military cadets, as a result of which many of our revolutionary sailors perished. This very Krasnov, whom we had released on his “word of honor,” organized the whiteguard Cossacks. He joined forces with Mamontov and for two years waged an armed struggle against the Soviet Government. Very soon it turned out that behind the whiteguard generals stood the agents of the western capitalist states– France, Britain, American–and also Japan. We became convinced that we had made a mistake in displaying mildness. We learnt from the experience that the only way to deal with such enemies is to apply the most ruthless policy of suppression to them.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 13, p. 110

The period of increasing tolerance in Soviet history ended abruptly on December 1, 1934, when Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Party organization, and probably the second most influential party leader in the country, was assassinated at the Leningrad party headquarters by a discontented young party member.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 235

SPIES WERE EVERYWHERE UNDER THE CZARS

People talk about personally conducted tours under the Bolsheviks, but under Tsarism the secret police trailed me twenty-four hours a day, using three shifts.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 34

CHURCHILL DID EVERYTHING HE COULD TO DESTROY SOCIALISM

Churchill was socialism’s most outspoken opponent. He took such a dislike to communism that he did everything he could to set up barricades around the capitalist world, to organize it, and to position it against communism in hopes of reining in the socialist countries.
He did not just want to prevent the development of socialism; he did all he could to destroy it. Dulles picked up where Churchill left off.
Schecter, Jerrold. Trans & Ed. Khrushchev Remembers: the Glasnost Tapes. Boston: Little, Brown, c1990, p. 68

… in the days when the country was invaded by the armies of “14 states.” You will recall the threat of the notorious Churchill of an invasion by 14 states.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 291

… the inveterate Bolshevik-hater Winston Churchill (Chancellor of the Exchequer), was mounting a war against the USSR.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 280

Churchill had been the world’s loudest advocate of a crusade against Soviet Russia in the Civil War. He had referred to the Bolsheviks as baboons and had called for the October Revolution to be “strangled” in its cradle.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 462

STALIN KNOWS THERE ARE ALWAYS ENEMIES INSIDE THE PARTY

Stalin was aggravated by such talk [Gottwald’s contention that the Czech CP had no internal enemies]. Inside our own circle, behind Gottwald’s back, Stalin called him “a blind man, a pussycat. Gottwald, what does he know? He argues that there are no enemies inside his party. That cannot be!”
Schecter, Jerrold. Trans & Ed. Khrushchev Remembers: the Glasnost Tapes. Boston: Little, Brown, c1990, p. 132

As soon as our advisers arrived in Czechoslovakia, we started to get material on individual leaders….
Then material started to come in on Rudolf Slansky and other leaders of the Czech Communist party. They turned him into an enemy of the people. I do know how long it took, but not long, once Stalin got negative material on him. Stalin was triumphant because he had been proven right. He said he had sensed Slansky’s real nature all along. Gottwald, who had assured Stalin that he had no enemies within the party leadership, really had turned out to be a pussycat, and a blind man who could not see what his enemies were doing right under his nose. Gottwald, as they say, threw in the towel.
Schecter, Jerrold. Trans & Ed. Khrushchev Remembers: the Glasnost Tapes. Boston: Little, Brown, c1990, p. 133

Yes, Gorbachev would spit on Stalin–but carefully.
Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb. New York: Random House, c1993, p. 49

GREATER FREEDOM AND MORE LENIENCY ALLOWED WHEN THREATS ARE LESS SERIOUS

…The tendency since the abolition of the Cheka has, however, been toward restricted powers and activity–a tendency broken now and then by the pressure of some foreign threat of attack on the Soviet regime, or some internal crisis….
…The terror in Russia is and has been almost directly in proportion to hostile foreign movements against the Soviet state. Fear of intervention from without or of counter-revolutionary activity within have dictated its severity.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 195

But it is most probable also that terrorism by the Soviet political police would in the absence of foreign pressure have been vastly reduced–certainly to a point at which the word “terror” could not fairly be applied.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 196

To be sure, some signs of political liberalization did appear in the mid-1930s.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 101

[When] the level of tolerance and repression of those who oppose the Soviet socialist system is carefully compared with the history of repression of those who have opposed the dominant institutions of U.S. society over the 200 years of U.S. history, …[one] concludes that there is no qualitative difference between the two types of societies in this respect. The states of both the USSR and the USA have always done whatever was necessary to preserve their dominant system of property. Periods of increased repression in both countries have corresponded to the degree of the threat to the dominant class, while periods of tolerance have corresponded to periods of latency of opposition movements.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 29

ANTI-SOVIET ELEMENTS WORMED THEIR WAY INTO THE PARTY

[Zhdanov] frankly declared “…There were numerous cases of hostile elements who had wormed their way into the party, taking advantage of the purges to persecute and ruin honest people. There is no necessity for the method of the mass purge.”
Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 179

SUBVERSIVES PLANNED TO “DISMISS” STALIN

Shkiriatov said at the Central Committee plenum of Jan. 7-12, 1933,
“Regarding the leader of our party, Comrade Stalin–what means did they employ in their struggle against Comrade Stalin? According to Comrade Nikolsky’s statement, they said that they were prepared to remove Comrade Stalin, whereas in their testimony, Eismont and others tried to replace one word with another: they had spoken not of “removing” but of “dismissing” him. But we know what a discussion about “dismissing” the leader of the party could mean. We hold congresses, we hold plenum sessions, but as you can see, there is no question here of “dismissal” at a congress. Instead, discussions are carried on about “dismissal” in other ways. Anyone who has the slightest understanding in this matter knows by what methods Smirnov and others had planned to attempt this “dismissal.” And indeed Eismont doesn’t deny in his testimony that he had spoken with Smirnov about this. He said that “he must be dismissed.” We, on the other hand, consider, that all of these words–change, dismiss, remove–are one and the same thing, that there is no difference whatsoever between them. In our opinion it all amounts to violent dismissal.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 84

Rudzutak said the following at the Central Committee plenum of Jan. 7-12 1933, “Smirnov…maintains that he never said that it was necessary to remove Stalin while all his friends in the group assert that these discussions did take place.”
“In the materials given to you there is testimony by Poponin, whom Eismont had tried to recruit, seeking to convince him that the present leadership is leading the party and country to ruin, that it was necessary to replace the leadership, to replace General Secretary Stalin. In this exchange of theirs, they discussed and “selected” possible candidates who might be able to replace Comrade Stalin. Moreover, Eismont asked Poponin: “Couldn’t you, as a former military man, be of some use to us?” What does it mean when the question of replacing the leadership is discussed, when the question of electing candidates is discussed? What does it mean when the question “Couldn’t you, as a former military man, be of some use to us?” is posed? Does this not testify to the fact that this is a real organization, openly set against the party and calculating on the use of violent measures, an organization that had been checking up on the sentiments of military officials toward Comrade Stalin? In any case, we can consider it an established fact that the preparation for the implementation of this counter-revolutionary venture had commenced, and that Eismont had begun to seek out military officials appropriate for it….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 91

At the January 1933 plenum, too, the last of the new cycle of plots was exposed. The distinguished Old Bolshevik A.P. Smirnov, Party member since 1896 and formerly member of the Central Committee’s “Orgburo,” was charged with two other Old Bolsheviks, Eismont and Tolmachev (members since 1907 and 1904, respectively), with forming an anti-Party group.
A. P. Smirnov’s group is said to have had contact with Old Bolshevik workers, mainly in the trade unions, in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities. Realizing that no legal methods could break Stalin’s grip, they had to a large degree gone underground, with a view to organizing for a struggle. Their programs seems to have covered the revision of the unbalanced industrial schemes, the dissolution of most of the kolkhozes, the subjection of the OGPU to Party control, and the independence of the trade unions. Above all, they had discussed the removal of Stalin. When taxed at the plenum Eismont said, “Yes, there were such conversations among us. A. P. Smirnov started them.” Unlike Ryutin and his friends, none of the three had had any connection with the Trotskyite or Rightist oppositions. The exposure of this plot was described in the Khrushchev era as “the beginning of reprisals against the old Leninist cadres.”
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 26

YEZHOV DESCRIBES THE DEGREE OF SUBVERSIVE PENETRATION OF THE KREMLIN

[The June 6, 1935 speech of Yezhov to the Central Committee plenum]
For the party and country, the murder of Comrade Kirov is the most poignant political event of the past decade.
…These facts show that during the investigation of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Comrade Kirov in Leningrad, the role of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky in the preparation of terroristic acts against the leaders of the party and Soviet state has not yet been fully revealed. The latest events show that they were not only the instigators but in fact the active organizers of the murder of Comrade Kirov, as well as of the attempt on the life of Comrade Stalin that was being prepared within the Kremlin.
Soon after the murder of Comrade Kirov, a new network of Zinovievist-Kamenevist and Trotskyist-white guard terrorist cells was uncovered.
What makes this so grave is that several of these terrorist groups were uncovered in the Kremlin itself.
The entire country, all of us, considered the Kremlin to be the most well defended, the most inaccessible and inviolate territory, where the protection of our leaders is properly secured. But in fact the very opposite turned out to be the case. Thanks to the total blunting of political and classic vigilance of many Communists holding responsible positions in the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and, first and foremost, Comrade Yenukidze, the class enemy has succeeded in organizing terrorist cells within immediate range of the headquarters of our revolution. As you will see from the facts that shall be presented to you, this blunting of political and class vigilance nearly cost Comrade Stalin his life and borders on treason against the interests of party and country.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 162

…Comrade Yenukidze was in fact responsible for all order in the Kremlin, including its security.
The investigation conducted by the NKVD revealed five terroristic groups that were connected with one another yet acting independently of one another.
Two groups were organized within the Kremlin and three outside the Kremlin. They all set as their chief task the murder of Comrade Stalin….
Utilizing their time-tested tactics of double dealing, Zinoviev and Kamenev took all measures to evade responsibility for the murder of Comrade Kirov and for preparations of an attempt on the life of Comrade Stalin.
Only under the pressure of absolutely indisputable facts, as expressed in the depositions of dozens of their closest supporters, were they forced to acknowledge their “political and moral” responsibility for this whole affair. Nevertheless, they continue obstinately to deny their direct participation in organizing these terroristic groups….
In his deposition, Kamenev says the following:
“My counter-revolutionary conversations with Zinoviev promoted the creation of an atmosphere of embitterment against Stalin. Consequently, this might have created a situation justifying terror as regards Stalin much as Kerensky created a situation for carrying out violence against Lenin. I confess that I have committed a grave crime against the party and against the Soviet state. My counterrevolutionary actions and those of Zinoviev not only created an atmosphere of malice and hatred toward Stalin. They also served to incite the counter-revolutionaries to acts of terrorism. There is no doubt now in my mind that Rosenfeld perceived our attacks and slander on Stalin as a program of terror. I take responsibility for the fact that, as a result of the situation created by Zinoviev and me and as a result of our counter-revolutionary actions, a counter-revolutionary organization has arisen whose participants were intent on perpetrating the vilest crime of all: the murder of Stalin.”
I believe that it is difficult to expect Kamenev, in his position, to confess to any more than that. But there is no need for any more confessions on his part. The investigators have at their disposal an absolutely sufficient quality of facts that prove direct participation by Kamenev and Zinoviev in the organizing of terroristic groups, facts that follow fully from the policies of their own programs, which they issued to their supporters in their struggle against the party and government.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 163

[Yezhov continues], These facts and ideological positions show that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky, embittered by the successes of the Revolution, have, in their hopeless attempt to make their way into the leadership of the party and country, slid down definitively into the mire of the White emigre world and have advanced to the most extreme forms of struggle–namely, terror.
These facts now show that the murder of Comrade Kirov was organized by Zinoviev and Kamenev and that it constitutes only one link in a chain of terroristic plans of the Zinovievist-Kamenevist and Trotskyist groups.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 165

Making reference to a personal assignment from Stalin, Yezhov announced that he would “get rid of all of that scum which the revolution and the Civil War had sent sloshing into the organs of state security. People who have come from the Central Committee Orgburo will sweep out all that grime with an iron broom.”
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 30

Yezhov received me very courteously in his office. It was adorned with a large Kherossan carpet… stained in places. Yezhov is said to have shot several people in his office…. He shook my hand. He said Stalin had confidence in me… then he added that there were “enemies of the people” in the Narkomindel as well as in other Commissariats…. I tried to find out who were these “enemies of the people”…. He smiled enigmatically and then said, “You know, even Stalin does not expect to be notified of the names of persons to be arrested…. The technique of our work does not permit this…. Complete and unconditional secrecy is essential….
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 256

YEZHOV DENOUNCES TROTSKYISTS INTERNAL ORGANIZATION AND TACTICS

[From Yezhov’s September 25th, 1935 report to a conference of regional party secretaries]
Please permit me, comrades, at this time, to briefly dwell on certain matters which have become very important today. The first matter concerns the expulsion of Trotskyists.
One thing is clear beyond dispute: it seems to me that Trotskyists undoubtedly have a center somewhere in the USSR. It is impossible for a Trotskyist center from abroad, located relatively far from the USSR and poorly informed about our conditions–it is impossible, I say, for it to direct with such detail those Trotskyist organizations which have unfortunately held out in our country and which, we believed, had been crushed.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 200

[Yezhov continues] Everywhere the same methods are practiced by Trotskyists who have held out in our party. Trotskyists try at all costs to remain in the party. They strive by every device to infiltrate the party. Their first device is to remain at all costs in the party, to give voice everywhere to the general line, to speak out everywhere in its favor while in fact carrying on their subversive work. But nevertheless, it sometimes happens that a Trotskyist slips up and is caught, is expelled from the party, in which case he takes all measures to run off with his party card. He always has in reserve a registration card, approaches another organization and is registered. Such people are expelled three or four or even five times each. They move from one organization to another–we have quite a few people like that. Trotskyists try at all costs to keep their party card….
Their second device is not to carry out their work in the party. They do not, as a rule, carry on party work at all. They focus their attention on working among nonparty people….
Above all, Trotskyists strive to infuse the nonparty people with the spirit of Trotskyism….
Foreign intelligence officers, saboteurs, knew that there is no better cover for their espionage and subversive operations than a party card, and they relied on that fact. For this reason, it is necessary to hide behind a party card at whatever cost. And they utilized every means of deception in order to obtain a party card for a spy or for a saboteur. We can assert firmly that Poles, Finns, Czechs, and Germans have been openly gambling on this….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 201

PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SPYING AND ESPIONAGE AGAINST THE SU

[Dec. 29, 1935 NKVD report on Trotskyists]
…Adhering to his Trotskyist convictions, Pukat attempted to leave the Soviet Union with the assistance of the Latvian Embassy in Moscow in order to continue his struggle against the party under the direct leadership of Trotsky.
According to his own testimony, Pukat was recruited in 1930 by the secretary of the Latvian Embassy, who entrusted him on one of his visits to the embassy with gathering material of an espionage character concerning enterprises in the city of Kostroma….
“…I discussed my departure for Latvia with the secretary of the Latvian mission, who, in the course of my conversation, inquired what kind of industry was to be found in Kostroma. After my explanation, he proposed that I prove my devotion to Latvia and earn my entry permit by gathering material of an espionage character. I agreed to this and, upon returning to Kostroma, I recruited my sister Anna Pukat, who joined me in my espionage activities at the Banner of Labor factory, where she was working. I also recruited Emma Mashen, who was working at the Lenta [machine-gun ribbon] factory as an industrial quality inspector, as well as Marov, a metal worker at the Rabochy metallist factory. I gave information to the Latvian mission concerning: the quality of machine gun ribbons produced by the Lenta factory, concerning the [energy] capacity of the boilers at the Znamia Truda factory, and the blueprint of the Rabochy metallist factory, which I stole from Dadze, the head of construction.
The information which I obtained was carried by my mother Anna Yanovna Pukat to the Latvian mission. On the other hand, I myself carried the blueprint of the Rabochy metallist factory [to the Latvian mission] in May of 1935.”
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 202

AS SU GETS STRONGER OPPOSITION BECOME GREATER NOT SMALLER

[Plenum of the Azov-Black Sea Territorial Party Committee, “On the verification of party documents”]
The Central Committee letter concerning the murder of Comrade Kirov was a most important Party document in mobilizing Bolshevik vigilance:
“We must put an end to the opportunistic complacency that issues from a mistaken assumption that, as our strength increases, the enemy grows more tame and harmless.
“Such an assumption is fundamentally wrong. It is a throwback to the rightist deviation, which had tried to assure one and all that our enemies will crawl quietly into socialism, that in the end they will become true socialists….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 208

Bukharin wanted us to act with greater determination. We were to snatch the initiative from the hands of the Stalin-Molotov-Kirov triumvirate. We should stimulate the younger generation of workers and peasants into a movement of opposition.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 2

In a word, things were going fine. The Soviet Union was building a new life on its own surrounded by hostile capitalist states whose intelligence services spared no means or effort to interfere with the Soviet people’s work. Our state and army were gathering strength from year to year; the ways of economic and political progress were clearly defined,…
Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 142

TROTS ARE DIRECTED BY JAPANESE INTELLIGENCE THROUGH KNYAZEV

We should add that the rather large group of Trotskyists in Sverdlovsk was in fact directed by Japanese intelligence through Knyazev, formerly head of Japanese intelligence [in Sverdlovsk]…
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 305

BELOBORODOV GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO TROTSKYIST DUKAT TO KILL STALIN

At any rate, people not only discussed the question of terror. They also concretely prepared for it. At any rate, many attempts were made to carry out terrorist acts of assassination. In particular, the Azov-Black Sea counter-revolutionary terrorist group headed by Beloborodov assigned a group under the direction of a certain Dukat from the Trotskyists, who tried to hunt down Comrade Stalin in Sochi. Beloborodov gave instructions to Dukat so that the latter would take advantage of Comrade Stalin’s stay in Sochi on his vacation, so that he could find a propitious moment to carry out his assassination. When Dukat failed in his attempt, Beloborodov vilified him in every way possible for failing to organize this business.
In Western Siberia, there were direct attempts to organize an assassination attempt against Comrade Molotov, in the Urals against Comrade Kaganovich….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 305

SHEBOLDAEV SAYS HE CAUSED HARM BECAUSE OF THE ACTIVITIES OF TROTSKYISTS

[Sheboldaev’s Jan. 6, 1937 speech to the plenum of the Azov-Black Sea Territorial Committee]
… Comrades, I consider the decision of the Central App to be absolutely correct. I consider the criticism and the party sanctions levied against me personally by the Central Committee to be, in my opinion, very lenient–because of the enormous harm caused by me as a result of the activities of these Trotskyists, who occupied the most critical posts, because of the undermining of trust toward the territorial committee of the party brought on by this entire affair. All of this has caused enormous damage to the party organization.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 343

PARTY LEADERSHIP IN THE ENEMIES HANDS

[Letter from Shcherbakov in Irkutsk to Zhdanov on June 18th 1937]
I consider it necessary to inform you of the following fact:…. The united Trotskyist-“rightist,” counter-revolutionary organization has been in existence here since 1930-31. At first this organization was led by Leonov, then by Razumov, so that, notwithstanding further materials, Snegov ought to be removed from his post because Murmansk is too crucial an area. The situation in East Siberia appears to be the same as in Sverdlovsk or in Rostov or perhaps even worse. The party and soviet leadership was entirely in the hands of enemies.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 456

[Aug. 3d 1937 letter by Stalin on agricultural trials]
The Central Committee of the Communist Party orders the regional committees, the territorial committees, and the central committees of the national Communist parties to organize, in each district of each region, two or three public show trials of enemies of the people–agricultural saboteurs who have wormed their way into district party, soviet, and agricultural organs. These trials should be covered in their entirety by the local press.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 457

[Postyshev’s speech to the January 1938 Central Committee plenum]
POSTYSHEV:…The Soviet and Party leadership were in enemy hands, from the regional leadership at the top to the district leadership at the bottom.
MIKOYAN: All of it? From top to bottom?
POSTYSHEV: The entire district leadership…. According to my count, [the regional leadership] was riddled with enemies for 12 years. The same holds true for the Soviet leadership–it too was in enemy hands. These leaders selected their own cadres. For example, our regional executive committee was infiltrated right down to the level of technicians by the most inveterate enemies, who had confessed their sabotage and who conduct themselves [even now] in a brazen manner. Everyone, from the chairman of the regional executive committee down, including his deputy, his consultants, and his secretaries–all of them are enemies. All of the departments of the executive committee were contaminated by enemies…. Now look at the departments having to do with trade: There were enemies there, too, who promoted their supporters, who appointed them to positions everywhere.
BULGANIN: Weren’t there any honest people there?!
POSTYSHEV: Of course there were.
BULGANIN: It looks like there wasn’t a single honest person there.
POSTYSHEV: I’m speaking of the top leadership. There was hardly a single honest man, as it turned out, among the top leaders, which includes the secretaries of the district committees and the chairmen of the district executive committees. What’s so amazing about it?
MOLOTOV: Aren’t you exaggerating, Comrade Postyshev?
POSTYSHEV: No, I’m not exaggerating. Take, for example, the leadership of the regional executive committee. The evidence is there, these people are under arrest, and they have confessed. They themselves have given testimony of their activities as spies and enemies.
MOLOTOV: This evidence must be checked and verified.
POSTYSHEV: This happened quite simply as follows: Shubrikov and Levin planted many of the enemy cadres from the center. Just look around you and see how many of our people turned out to be enemies. Levin promoted all the heads of the political sections to the positions of secretaries. And the majority of them turned out to be enemies. Take the secretary of the Ulianovsk City Committee, a Red professor, an inveterate enemy. The same for the secretary of the Syzran City Committee, a Red professor, also an inveterate enemy….
KAGANOVICH: You shouldn’t justify yourself by saying that they were all scoundrels.
POSTYSHEV: I never said all of them; I’m not so completely insane as to call everyone an enemy of the people. I never said that, I spoke only of the leadership of many of the district committees….
I repeat, I’m speaking of the leadership. The regional leadership turned out to be all in enemy hands–both the soviet and party leadership….
I ask you to check and verify whether the secretaries of the district committees were rightly or wrongly expelled. It is possible that there are mistakes here, but it seemed to us that they were rightfully expelled. The majority of them turned out to be enemies. This can be verified. They have confessed….
MALENKOV: What right did you have, Comrade Postyshev, to place the entire membership of the district committees of the party under the shadow of suspicion and political doubt?…
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 503-506

POLITBURO ORDERS SHOW TRIALS TO EXPOSE MASS FARMING SABOTAGE

[Oct. second 1937 Politburo decision on sabotage of livestock]
On the basis of investigative materials furnished by the NKVD of the USSR, it has been established that the subversive actions of enemies of the people in regions have taken an especially vicious form of sabotage and wrecking as it pertains to the development of animal husbandry. These actions have taken the form:
a) Of carrying on acts of bacteriological subversion by infecting cattle, horses, herds of sheep, and swine with plague, foot-and-mouth disease, anthrax, brucellosis, anemia, and other epidemic diseases.
b) Of undermining the work of supplying districts afflicted by epizootic with medications and disinfectants and by sabotage of biological factories producing serum.
c) Of sabotaging by contracting the sowing acreage of fodder cultures with the aim of narrowing the food base.
A significant number of veterinarians, zoological technicians, laboratory assistants of biological factories have been arrested for sabotage in the field of animal husbandry. As a matter of fact, it was they who organized the dissemination of infectious diseases leading to the death en mass of the livestock.
As a result of sabotage carried out in the sphere of animal husbandry, members of kolkhozy lost several hundred thousand head of cattle and horses this past year, not to mention small livestock.
With the aim of protecting the kolkhozy and sovkhozy from the sabotage of enemies of the people, the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party have decided to crush and annihilate the cadres of wreckers in the field of animal husbandry.
The Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party place all secretaries of regional committees, the Central Committees of the national Communist parties, all republic chairmen of councils of people’s commissars, and all chairmen of executive committees of regions under the obligation of organizing forthwith show trials for saboteurs in the sphere of animal husbandry, keeping in mind both unmasked veterinarians, zoological technicians, and laboratory assistants of biological factories, as well as officials of local land and sovkhoz departments.
With this aim in mind the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party propose that 3 to 6 open show trials be organized in each republic and region, that the broad masses of peasants be involved in them, and that the trials be widely covered in the press.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 459

YEZHNOV ADMITS MANY SUBVERSIVES WERE IN THE GOVT

[Yezhov’s November 23rd, 1938 letter of resignation to Stalin]
Investigative work has also suffered from a host of major deficiencies. The main thing is that investigations of the most important detainees were conducted by conspirators in the NKVD who had not as yet been unmasked and who succeeded thereby in putting a stop to the development of the investigative case, in strangling it at the outset, and, most importantly, in concealing their co-conspirators in the Cheka.
The area in the NKVD that was most neglected turned out to be that dealing with the cadres. Instead of taking into consideration that the conspirators in the NKVD and the foreign intelligence agencies connected with them had succeeded in recruiting during the past decade–at a minimum–not only the upper echelons of the Cheka but also the middle echelons and often also officials on the lower echelons, I was content with the fact that I had crushed the upper echelons and some of the most compromised officials of the middle echelons. Many of those who were recently promoted, as has now become clear, are also secret agents and conspirators.
It is clear that I must bear responsibility for all this.
3. My most serious neglect had to do with the situation, now brought to light, in the department responsible for the security of members of the Central Committee and the Politburo.
First of all, a significant number of as yet unmasked conspirators and vile people who had worked under Pauker are still there.
Second, Kursky, who replaced Pauker and who shot himself to death afterward, and Dagin, who is now under arrest, have also turned out to be conspirators and have planted more than a few of their own people in the security service. I believed in the last two chiefs of the security service. I believed that they were honest people. I was mistaken and I must bear responsibility for this….
Third,…I was often mistaken in [my choice of] many employees. I recommended them to important posts, and now they have been exposed as spies.
Fourth, I am to blame for the fact that I manifested a careless attitude, totally unacceptable for a chekist, in the way I pursued the task of resolutely purging the department responsible for the security of members of the Central Committee and the Politburo. This carelessness is especially unforgivable as it applies to my dragging out the arrest of the conspirators in the Kremlin (Briukhanov and others).
Fifth, I am to blame for the fact that, being suspicious of the political integrity of such people as that traitor Liushkov, former head of the NKVD board for the Far Eastern region, and, recently, the traitor Uspensky, the people’s commissar of the Ukrainian SSR, I did not take sufficient, chekist preventive measures. I thereby made it possible for Liushkov to escape to Japan and for Uspensky to escape who knows where, and the search for him is still going on.
…Yet, despite all these great deficiencies and blunders in my work, I must say that, thanks to the leadership exercised daily by the Central Committee, the NKVD inflicted a crushing blow on its enemies.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 539

THERE IS NO SOFT LIBERAL GROUP OPPOSING STALIN AND KEEPING HIM IN CHECK

In order to explain some of these zigzags it is also sometimes suggested that Stalin liked to play a sadistic cat-and-mouse game with his victims. Aside from the fact that there are no sources supporting this conjecture, the basic notion is nonsense. It arose as a kind of post hoc explanation of contradictory initiatives that did not fit scholars’ assumptions about Stalin’s plans. No one can read the discourse of the Stalinists throughout the 1930s without sensing their nervousness, even frequent panic. This was not a time for play; these were serious matters in which lives were sacrificed to save a regime its leaders felt was hanging by a thread. Stalin evidently distrusted the NKVD until late 1936 and the army until mid-1937. It would have been insufferably stupid of him to play with elite lives in such circumstances, and no one has ever accused him of being stupid.
Alternatively, it is suggested that there was a group within the Stalinist elite who attempted to block Stalin’s plans for terror. This group is variously said to have included Kirov, Kuibyshev, Ordjonikidze, and Postyshev, and it has been claimed that their resistance to Stalin’s plan for terror forced the dictator to zig and zag to appease or fool them. We have already noted the lack of any documentary evidence for such a group. Rather we have seen time and again how the nomenklatura “we” closed ranks against “them” as soon as doubts arose about potential enemies. They voted as a unit without dissent. Kirov was certainly no softy in Leningrad, and we have texts from Kuibyshev that are equally firm against the opposition. Now that we have considerable evidence on Postyshev’s conduct and discourse, he becomes practically the last candidate for “rotten liberalism.” According to the leading expert, the rumored attempts by Ordzhonikidze to save his deputy Pyatakov still lack documentary support. There was no moderate block.

By accepting a priori that Stalin planned everything and that social and political relations played no role in the 1930s, even scholars who work very closely with documents have no choice but to explain zigzags as Stalinist game playing. Such an explanation is based on no documentary evidence and is weakened by the inability to find any traces of an anti-Stalin moderate faction.
…Stalin certainly had a drive constantly to prepare his positions and to increase his personal power and authority. But there is precious little evidence for a plan for terror…. We have seen several instances in which Stalin does not seem to have had the most radical or harsh attitude toward persecuting oppositionists…. On the other hand, Stalin’s “angelic patience” with the opposition (to use Mezhlauk’s words) can be explained in other ways. It could reflect genuine indecision at various points about how far and when to move against his purported opponents and threats.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 580-581

Ordjonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry after 1932, is often regarded as a moderate who was opposed to Stalin. Indeed, most of his public statements after 1932 were moderate in tone–as were Stalin’s…. He was in complete charge of heavy industry–the most important branch of the national economy–and it is inconceivable that Stalin would leave an opponent in such a position.
Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 128

On the one hand, Stalin and his closest associates may already have been preparing for a major purge and attempting to set in place a series of decisions, personnel, and practices designed to facilitate a subsequent unleashing of terror. According to this explanation, the countervailing soft-line measures were the result of a liberal faction within the leadership that tried to block Stalin’s plans. Said to consist of Kirov, Kuibyshev, or Ordjonikidze, and others, this group would have favored a general relaxation of the dictatorship; now that capitalism and the hostile class forces had been defeated, there was no reason to maintain a high level of repression.
But the documents now available make this view untenable. There is little evidence for such a plan on Stalin’s part nor of the existence of a liberal faction within the Politburo. Above and beyond routine squabbles over turf or the technicalities of implementation, neither the public statements nor the documentary record shows any serious political disagreement within the Stalin group at this time.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 102

Kirov’s speech to the 1934 party congress, often taken as a sign of his liberalism, actually praised the secret police’s use of forced labor and ridiculed the opposition. The thunderous applause Kirov received is sometimes used to show that he was more popular than Stalin. But Kirov was identified with Stalin, and the parts of his speech producing general ovations were the parts in which he praised Stalin and abused the opposition. Applause for him and his accomplishments in Leningrad was rare and only polite. Careful scrutiny of Kirov’s speeches and writings reveals little difference between them and Stalin’s utterances, and Soviet scholars familiar with closed party archives scoff at the notion that Kirov was a moderate, an opponent of Stalin, or the leader of any bloc.
[Footnote: The memoir of one of Kirov’s Leningrad co-workers can remember nothing from his experience with Kirov that suggests “liberal” opposition to Stalin.]
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 45

MOLOTOV SAYS A TERRORIST ATTEMPT WAS MADE ON HIS LIFE IN 1932

…In 1932, after I had already been appointed chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, I went to Siberia to procure grain.
There, apparently, an attempt on my life was made. In a road accident we rolled over into a ditch.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 242

HIGH OFFICIALS LOST FAITH IN THE CAUSE

Past mistakes and losses of life had been great because we proved too trusting of individuals who could no longer be trusted. Their degeneration was already complete, and we got rid of them belatedly…. But why should those individuals have initially proceeded in one direction and then made a U-turn to march in the opposite direction? Personal ambition would be something petty and narrow. The trouble was that they no longer believed; they had lost all faith in the cause and consequently had to seek a way out. But only implacable enemies of Soviet power could point to another way out. Either I defend the October Revolution or I am against it and look for allies among its enemies.
You see, it’s never easy when you must grapple with difficulties. Not everyone has sufficient stamina for it. But the party keeps moving forward. It keeps advancing. The opposition desperately looked for a crack in which to hide. No way. You are known by the public. You are Trotsky, you are Bukharin. You feel you are supposed to say what you have always said. They repeated their past affirmations of faith, but down deep they no longer believed in the cause. Here you have what turned them into such spineless creatures in the end….
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 266-267

In the Politburo itself were people who did not believe in our cause. Rykov, for example. And Zinoviev, too.
…The kulak mentality can still be seen today, and on a grand scale, too. Party members defend the kulaks! “They’re hard workers…” some argue. Many writers say such things. Complete blockheads!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 269

REPRESSIONS OF WIVES AND CHILDREN WERE NECESSARY

CHUEV: Why were the repressions extended to wives and children?
MOLOTOV: What do you mean, why? They had to be isolated somehow. Otherwise they would have served as conduits of all kinds of complaints. And a certain amount of demoralization. That’s a fact, definitely. That was evident at the time….
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 277

TROTSKY WORKED WITH THE NAZIS

In his writings published abroad he implied–and in his letters to partisans in the USSR explicitly ordered–that now the struggle against the party should resort to all means up to and including terror and wrecking within the country, and dirty, traitorous political deals with governments of bourgeois states, including Hitlerite Germany. Trotsky and others maintained ties with the intelligence services of bourgeois countries with a view to speeding up an armed attack on the USSR by the aggressive imperialist nations.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 288

STALIN WANTS TROTSKY OUT OF THE WAY BECAUSE WAR IS COMING

Trotsky and his followers were a significant challenge to the Soviet Union, competing with us to be the vanguard of the world Communist revolution. Beria suggested I should be put in charge of all anti-Trotskyite NKVD operations so as to inflict the decisive blow on the headquarters of the movement….
Then Stalin stiffened, as if giving an order, and said, “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year, before war inevitably breaks out. Without the elimination of Trotsky, as the Spanish experience shows, when the imperialists attack the Soviet Union we cannot rely on our allies in the international Communist movement. They will face great difficulties in fulfilling their international duty to de-stabilize the rear of our enemies by sabotage operations and guerrilla warfare if they have to deal with treacherous infiltrations by Trotskyites in their ranks.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 67

Contrary to what was later written by General Volkogonov, who was not in the room that night, Stalin did not rage over the failure of the assassination attempt. If he was angry, he masked it in his determination to proceed with the elimination of Trotsky. Certainly, he was displeased that the attempt had been botched, but he appeared to be patient and prepared to play for higher stakes, putting his whole agent network on the line in a final effort to rid himself of Trotsky.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 77

Stalin and Trotsky opposed each other, resorting to criminal methods to achieve their ends. The main difference was that during his exile abroad Trotsky opposed not only Stalin, but also the Soviet Union. This confrontation was a state of war that had to be resolved through victory or death. There was no way for Stalin to treat Trotsky in exile as merely a writer of philosophical books; Trotsky was an active enemy who had to be destroyed.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 81

SECRET POLICE DID NOT KILL SEDOV

Trotsky’s son, Sedov, who took his mother’s name, was closely watched by our agents. He was the chief organizer of the Trotskyite movement in the 1930s after he left Turkey and moved to Paris in 1933. We used two independent networks. One was headed by Mark Zborowski,… Volkogonov, however, claims in his biography of Trotsky that Zborowski arranged the smuggling and also helped to kill Sedov in a French hospital, where he died in February 1938 under mysterious circumstances after his appendix was removed.
Sedov definitely died in Paris, but I found no evidence in his file or in the file of the Trotskyite international that he was assassinated. If that were the case, somebody would have been decorated or claimed the honor. At the time, there were accusations that heads of intelligence were taking false credit for elimination of Trotskyites, but no details or examples were provided. The conventional wisdom is that Sedov’s death resulted from an NKVD liquidation operation. In fact the record shows that Shpigelglas reported Sedov’s death from natural causes to Yezhov, who commented: “A good operation. We did a good job on him, didn’t we?” Shpigelglas was not about to argue with Yezhov, who tried to take credit for Sedov’s death when reporting it to Stalin. This contributed to the belief that the NKVD did away with Sedov.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 82

When Eitingon and I discussed with Beria the plan to eliminate Trotsky the death of Sedov was never raised. It is easy to assume that Sedov was assassinated, but I do not believe that to be the case, and the reason is very simple. He was so closely watched by us and trusted by Trotsky that his presence in Paris kept us informed about Trotskyite plans to smuggle agents and propaganda materials to the Soviet Union via Europe. His liquidation would have lost us control over information about Trotskyite operations in Europe.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 83

Sedov’s operation was successful and for a few days he seemed to be making a normal recovery. Then he had a sudden relapse which baffled his doctors. Despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain on Feb. 16 at the age of only 32. The contemporary files contain no proof that the NKVD was responsible for his death.
Andrew and Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield (Pt 1). New York: Basic Books, c1999, p. 75

On the night of 13 February 1938 he [Lyova, Trotsky’s son] was seen wandering half-naked and delirious through corridors and wards, which for some reason were unattended and unguarded. He was raving in Russian…. Another operation was carried out urgently, but it brought no improvement. The patient suffered terrible agony, and the doctors tried to save him by repeated blood transfusions. It was in vain. On 16 February in 1938 he died at the age of 32.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 396

This was the third time he was mourning a child; and each time there was greater remorse in the mourning. After Nina’s death, in 1928, he reproached himself for not having done enough to comfort her and not even having written to her in her last weeks. Zina was estranged from him [Trotsky] when she killed herself; and now Lyova had met his doom at the post where he had urged him to hold out.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 398

Much later, in 1939, a message of dubious trustworthiness, which reached Trotsky through an American journalist, claimed that Sergei had still been alive late in 1938; but after that nothing more was heard about him.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 402

STALIN TOLD THE SECRET POLICE TO NOT TRACK DOWN ORLOV

Vyshinsky, clearly distressed, was relieved by my final remark: “But Comrade Stalin personally ordered the NKVD not to track down Orlov or persecute members of his family.”
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 231

THOSE WHO FOLLOWED STALIN REPRESSED PEOPLE

Despite my rehabilitation, my medals have not been returned to me; let no one forget that I, too, have been a victim of political repression. [But not by Stalin]
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 431

MANY IN THE OPPOSITION WORKED WITH THE NAZIS

The Bolsheviks have always prided themselves upon their dialectic materialism, that is, upon an unbiased logical interpretation of facts…. Their logic told them that Nazi Germany would attack them, and that the preliminary stages of this attack would be an attempt to win the support of every doubtful, disgruntled, subversive, and disloyal element in the country. What more fertile soil could be found than the former Opposition, whose members combined personal hostility toward Stalin with the bitterness of defeat and the longing to regain lost power?
All this may sound complicated and far-fetched, but in reality it is simple and true, and what is more, provides the only reasonable explanation of what happened in Russia. The Bolsheviks were caught by their own logic. Once they assumed, as they did assume–rightly, as history showed–that the Nazis would attack them, it followed that there would be a German finger in every treasonable pie, large or small, cooked in Russia. If this wasn’t immediately obvious, as in the Kirov case, it must be sought for and found. On that principle they proceeded, and found it because it was there. When Stalin and associates believed in 1933-35 that Hitler planned to attack them and would use the former Opposition or any other anti-Kremlin forces to further his ends, they were working to some extent on an hypothesis. As time went on this hypothesis, which as I have said was already a logical conviction to them, was confirmed by fact after fact,…
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 215

RIGHTS RESORTED TO TERROR & SABOTAGE AS THEIR SITUATION BECAME MORE DESPERATE

If the Bukharinites were to seriously oppose the Party program, if they really felt the program would destroy socialism by its economic policy and bureaucratic administration, they had to organize and act. Appeals to the Party and the workers had gotten them nowhere and the Bukharinites were, in fact, a comparatively small and isolated group. Therefore the only course open to them was one of fomenting rebellion–especially among the richer peasants–sabotage, wrecking, assassination, and terrorism. As they turned from a political group into a conspiracy, Bukharin testified, moral and psychological disintegration began….
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 68

Terrorism is a policy inconsistent with true Marxism; it is the last refuge of leaders without followers. The Opposition leaders had waited with Marxist patience for the outburst of the masses. When this not only did not take place but receded into improbability, the removal of the Party leaders by terrorism, as was admitted by Smirnov and Radek, was a logical policy.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 215

NEAR THE END TROTSKY UNITES WITH ALL SORTS OF ANTI-SOVIET FORCES

It was clear in 1936 to anyone who was carefully analyzing the class struggle on the international scale that Trotsky had degenerated to the point where he was a pawn of all sorts of anti-Communist forces. Full of himself, he assigned himself a planetary and historic role, more and more grandiose as the clique around him became insignificant. All his energy focused on one thing: the destruction of the Bolshevik Party, thereby allowing Trotsky and the Trotskyists to seize power.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 138 [p. 120 on the NET]

By the mid-30s the Trotskyites in all countries were serving three principal purposes for world reaction:
(1) They acted as the main instrument by which Western reaction hoped to gain a foothold inside the land of socialism, the USSR, as a fifth column behind the lines of socialism which was to aid, and complement by espionage and sabotage inside the Soviet Union, the open war preparations made outside.
(2) They acted as an arsenal of right-wing reactionary propaganda and slander against the Soviet Union, the Communist parties, the militant socialists and trade unions, and the anti-fascist and peace forces, an arsenal of reactionary right-wing propaganda dressed up in left-wing words.
(3) They acted as an instrument to aid the capitalists by trying to penetrate the working-class, the popular and national liberation movements, above all the Communist parties–spying on them, confusing them, and disrupting them from inside.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 82

TROTSKY CLAIMED COUNTER-REV COULD ONLY TAKE OVER BY A BLOODBATH NOT FROM WITHIN

Trotsky claimed that counter-revolution was impossible without a bloodbath that would cost tens of million lives. He pretended that capitalism could not be retored `from inside’, by the internal political degeneration of the Party, by enemy infiltration, by bureaucratization, by the social-democratization of the Party. However, Lenin insisted on this possibility.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 141 [p. 121 on the NET]

THOSE ALLOWED TO RETURN STILL TALKED OF ASSASSINATION

Such was the atmosphere of those days; men of gentle character and high ideals, like Generalov, talked calmly of assassination.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 10

My next visit, on Generalov’s suggestion, was to a man high up in the Dniepropetrovsk administration. Generalov had hopes of this man, whom we will call Brezhnov, partly because he was an underground Trotskyist. For this reason I however had misgivings about asking his assistance, but ardour overcame my convictions.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 14

SOVIET LEADERS DO NOT KNOW OF THE SECRET UNDERCOVER PILOTS

At this time, the vanguard of the opposition was in the Soviet Air Force. On May 15th, 1935 Bulganin, as Chairman of the Moscow Soviet, gave the French visitors a gala reception. Laval was taken to our principal airdrome, but also the center of our most restive airmen. The visitors were conducted by a party headed by Politburo member and People’s Commissar of Defense Marshall Voroshilov. All smiles, he “presented” outstanding pilots. He invited Laval to join a particular group of senior officers, which included some of the most courageous members of the undercover opposition.

…Stalin, together with Molotov, Chubar, Voroshilov and others of the Kremlin, chose to pay an unexpected visit, on May 2nd, 1935, to the Frunze Central Military Airdrome, one of the centers of his irreconcilable enemies. Pilots were braced and even kissed and all manner of sweet, winning words were said to them.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 31-32

The enemies of Stalin, as of Lenin and socialism, were masked so cleverly that it was sometimes impossible to see through the heavy mist of falsification and outright provocations.

Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 77

SUBVERSIVES AND TERRORISTS DECIDE IT IS TIME TO ACT

In August, 1936,… my own conclusion was that the time for delay was past. We must make immediate preparations for a general armed uprising.

I was sure then, as I am today, that if Comrade X had chosen to send out a call to arms, he would have been joined at once by many of the big men of the USSR….

Through my mind flashed a succession of Russian terrorists of the past, women among them. No other country had so persistent a tradition of assassination as ours. Passionlessly, Klava Yeryomenko had come to the conclusion that she should take her place in that tradition. Her plan was one of stark simplicity. Stalin would come down to his palace at nearby Gagry. She would gain entry. When the principal tyrants were gathered together, she would destroy them. She too would perish, but they would be no more. She already knew officers of Stalin’s bodyguard who could be won over. A clever woman, she said, could get what she wanted, especially if she was also good-looking. With the disappearance of Stalin, Molotov, and Yezhov, Comrade X could then seize the Kremlin and the principal government offices; Riz would take command of the Black Sea Fleet; Belinsky and Demokratov together would control Leningrad; Sheboldayev and Gunushvili would take over the Caucasus; Generalov the Ukraine, and so on. In two or three days it would be all over, the country would be in the hands of the new men.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 48

Our purpose this time was not only to hold discussions. We had moved a decisive step further: we went to assess the chances of an armed uprising against Stalin in the immediate future.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 156

COMRADE X TURNS DOWN ASSASSINATION OF STALIN IDEA BECAUSE 15 HAVE FAILED

Nevertheless, although in principle we were opposed to terroristic acts, I considered it right, in the changed situation, to put Klava’s proposal before Comrade X. He gave it serious thought, but in the end rejected the suggestion. He pointed out that there had already been no less than 15 attempts to assassinate Stalin, none had gotten near to success, each had cost many brave lives. ‘There is a right place and time for everything,’ he said, ‘but now (in mid-1936), Yeryomenko’s suggestion is out of place.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 49

SUBVERSIVES TRIED MANY TIMES TO KILL STALIN AND HIS ALLIES

… “In other words,” Smolninsky asked at last in a hushed voice, “you are suggesting that I should organize the assassination of Zhdanov?”

I replied that this is what I meant…. I had already sent both to him [ Zhdanov] and to Malenkov letters declaring my reasons for escaping abroad and informing Zhdanov how and why, just before the war, the idea of organizing his assassination had arisen.

But, though it was I who made the suggestion in Leningrad, the initial proposal to assassinate Zhdanov was not mine. I must also stress that I had no personal motive whatsoever for desiring Zhdanov’s death, nor are acts of personal terror any part of the revolutionary democratic program. The development of events and ideas alone forced us to consider such action. Further, though there have been many successful and unsuccessful acts of terrorism against the Stalin regime, not one of them has been the work of the men grouped around Comrade X.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 157

… I remembered Klava Yeryomenko, who was then still at liberty, saying to me only the previous autumn: ‘It will be your duty to kill Stalin if he asks you to make him rockets and bombers.’

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 319

We Georgians are a very superstitious people–and very fatalistic also–and I doubted that my uncle was entirely an exception to that rule. On the eve of a battle in which he might easily lose his life–for the youth of Moscow were reading the tracts smuggled in secretly from Paris, in which Trotsky’s son Sedov was clamoring for “the immediate death of Djugachvili”–Stalin felt more assured when he had at his side a young man [me], not only of his country, but of his tribe:…

This, of course, is only my personal interpretation of Stalin’s attitude; but I believe it is correct.

Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 122

[The Editors of Secret Documents state], All the facts point to a definite doing-away with Stalin. There cannot be any other conclusion. The whole gamut of lies, falsification of historical truths and documents–noticed even by foreign journalists, writers, analysts, who in 99 percent of the cases were or are anti-Communist, cannot be just pushed aside!

It is also interesting to note that many important and damaging documents in the Archives are either “missing,” or in the hands of Western Intelligence Agencies!

Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 270

KILLING STALIN BEFORE THE WAR WOULD HAVE BEEN STUPID AND SPELLED ENGLAND’S DOOM

All the members of the council [our counter-revolutionary group] spoke in agreement, and a resolution was passed: Hitler was enemy No. 1; until that enemy was accounted for all anti-Stalinist activity was to cease.

Today the question is raised whether we were not mistaken, and fascist emigres have not stinted their attacks upon me since I appeared in the West [in 1948]. And not only fascist. An American Russian language newspaper, Novoye Russkoye Slovo (November 30th, 1951), has even gone so far as to accuse me of committing a crime in not shooting Stalin. This is so ridiculous a charge that it is hardly worth answering. Whose flag, do these gentlemen think, would now waive over the Elysee Palace in Paris if we had then ‘assassinated’ Stalin? And were we to take a step which might have brought Britain, then engaged in a moral struggle with Hitler, under Hitler’s jackboot?

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 189

Mikhail Boikov claimed that in July 1936 members of a terrorist organization shot at President Kalinin while he was at a resort. Tokaev mentioned several groups that discussed assassinations and professed membership in one of them. We may recall the reports that a plot against the government existed in the armed forces. Medvedev, without specifying his sources, recounts several attempts on the life of Kirov in 1934 that constituted a “real hunt” for him.

Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 89

SOME PARTY MEMBERS WERE WORTHLESS

Another interesting example of the attitude of prominent personalities was given me by Col. Gorchakov. He and his young wife, Raissa, had asked me in for a drink. He said that it was years since he had had a chance to relax, but now that the ‘dam Germans with their air-raids’ sent a man to cover, he could put his feet up. He was already soaked in drink and I could see the expression of disgust on Raissa’s face. She was better educated than her husband, for he had only been through a series of Party courses some 15 years earlier, while she had recently taken a diploma at one of Moscow’s university-level colleges. Finally, as he was pressing vodka on me, she lost her patience with him and burst out: ‘All you think of is that bottle. I can’t imagine what the Government is paying you for. If I were Stalin, I’d send you for a fortnight’s cure to steam your brain clean.’

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 207

RUSSIAN REFUGEES HAVE NO SUBSTANCE

I met many of these “Russian refugees” in the course of my work. They are one of the strangest phenomena I have found in the Western world. They are such thin shadows of the past that one even doubts if they are real at all. One hesitates to speak frankly to them less their brittle corporeality should disintegrate altogether, like thin ice in late spring.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 307

WESTERN SPIES ARE IMMORAL AND UNSCRUPULOUS

Here, since our subject concerns the ethics of the relations between man and man, man and the State, and one nation with another nation, I must relate the sorry sequel to my action. It is not only the men of the Soviet secret service who are devoid of moral standards, not only the USSR which is in danger of founding the protection of the State on sand. While I was away from Berlin on business, I received a letter from the diplomat to whom I had written. It was couched in terms which, to put it mildly, were brusque and unceremonious. I put this down, at the time, to his poor command of the language in which he wrote. This Allied representative wanted me to meet a certain person who would speak to me “in his name”. Disturbed though I was by the fact that the diplomat now knew my whereabouts, I decided to meet his representative. As it turned out, the meeting was an elaborate prelude to the insult he offered me. Speaking in the most condescending way–not that I stand on ceremony, but still I was not quite a nobody, and certainly not used to being addressed in such a manner–this person had the actual impudence to suggest that I should make him a secret report on the extent of Soviet knowledge of German aeronautics, and ended up by offering me 10,000 rubles for the service!

I have never in my life been more astonished. My hand for a moment rested on the butt of my automatic, but I controlled myself; even with a worm like this, I could not sink to Serov’s level. “A wonderful proposal,” I said, striving to measure my words. “Mr. So-and-so is asked by me to take steps to look after Prandtl, and the answer I get is the proposal of a dirty little spy. In Russian, we have an expression for all such scallywags which you may care to take back to your master”–and I pointed. The agent actually tried to argue back, and compelled me to draw my pistol to get rid of him. I do not suppose it had ever occurred to him or his master that the Soviet world, like the Western, is composed of individuals, and that a Soviet man may have more honor than many a lackey of the Western regime.

But this is not all. I had to unburden myself to somebody. One feels when such a thing happens as if the insult had left its trace, like the passage of a snail. I told the whole story to my personal driver, called Boldakov, an unpretentious decent Soviet man. He had a similar story to tell. An agent had offered him 500 marks–if he would get me to the Western Zone unprotected, to be kidnapped! I could have wept with mortification. I did not want to go to the West, but somehow I had considered that world to be above such things, and the thought had been a kind of encouragement. Now I had the sense of being set about by amorality on all sides. It was a blow to be made to realize that the same disease existed everywhere. It was also depressing to discover again how the two worlds intermingled.

Nor, when at last I was driven out of self-preservation to cross the frontier, did the official insults cease. I was approached by a man who, I think, represented a certain military intelligence service and offered a trifling sum of money and free passage and entry to a certain Western country–in return for information on the set-up and activities of certain opposition groups in the USSR. This man clearly knew that I myself was an active oppositionist.

Many people would like to imagine that coming from the Eastern to the Western world was like coming out of darkness into full sunlight. Alas, for me it was no such thing.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 342

… Soviet intelligence treated him [Tank] exactly as I was to be treated by the British Intelligence within a year; he found himself in a villa surrounded by armed sentries and with a pair of young intelligence officers constantly in the next room.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 351

My situation was unbearable. I wanted to be a loyal son of my country and as such to play an honorable part in trying to influence its policy at home and abroad…. And to my unutterable disgust, the war-time Ally who was loudest in denouncing the tyranny which I opposed, so far from giving our anti-Stalinist struggle its moral support, attempted to buy me, to kidnap me, spied on me mercilessly and used its knowledge to threaten to betray me to the MGB!

We were not communists at all.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 358

STALIN COMPLIMENTS TOKAEV

… Stalin, of all men, had said that the “single-mindedness and caution of Tokaev are evidence of his maturity”, and “Tokaev is not to be hampered in his work; if he makes no promises, that means he will give the country a great deal”; (these are his words as reliably reported to me).

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 345

TROTSKY ADVOCATED TERRORISM IN HIS PUBLICATION

In the Trotskyite Bulletin of the Opposition, Nos. 36-37, of October 1933, we find a number of direct references to terrorism as a method of fighting against the Soviet government. Here is an example:

“It would be childish to think that the Stalin bureaucracy can be removed by means of a Party or Soviet Congress. Normal constitutional means are no longer available for the removal of the ruling clique.

They can be compelled to hand over power to the proletarian vanguard only by force.”

Trotsky was beyond the reach of the arm of Soviet law when he wrote the above sentences in which he advocated terrorism. So none of the Trotskyite and other bourgeois critics of the trials will be able to claim that Trotsky was forced to write the above lines by the OGPU. So when the various accused at the trials declared that they had organized terrorist acts on the direct instructions of Trotsky, they were compelled to say what was actually true and, to put it in the words of Comrade Vyshinsky, “no chatter, no slander, known simulations, and no Trotskyite line can obscure this fact!”

Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 226

Once again calling Trotsky’s open letter from 1932 a terrorist directive, Vyshinsky added a reference to one more article written by Trotsky which contained, in his words, “in rather open, uncamouflaged form… directives for terror.” This time, Vyshinsky quoted not two words, but several sentences from Trotsky’s article: “It would be childish to think that the Stalinist bureaucracy can be removed by means of a party or Soviet Congress…. For removing the ruling clique there remain no normal, ‘constitutional’ means. The bureaucracy can be forced to transfer power to the proletarian vanguard only by force.” “What can this be called,” Vyshinsky declared, “if not a direct call… for terror? I can assign no other name to this.”

Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 123

Trotsky argued that after all the experiences of recent years it would be childish to think that it was possible to depose Stalin at a Congress of the Party or of the Soviets. “No normal constitutional ways are left for the removal of the ruling clique. Only force can compel the bureaucracy to hand over power into the hands of the proletarian vanguard.”…

The Soviet Union, Trotsky reasserted, remained a workers’ state.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 203

THE VERY PEOPLE WHO SHOULD HAVE PROTECTED THE STATE MOST WERE THE CRIMINALS

In order to fully realize the utter monstrosity of these crimes, one must not lose sight of the fact that not only were these crimes committed but they were committed by the very people who were entrusted with the protection of the interests of the Soviet state against every kind of encroachment. These people should have been the first to protect Soviet industry and safeguard it from all damage, but they acted like downright traitors. Pyatakov, Assistant People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry, should have been the first to protect this important section of the Soviet economy but as a matter of fact he was its wrecker-in-chief. Rataichak should have been the first to safeguard the chemical industry. Livshitz, The Assistant People’s Commissar of Railways; Chernov, the People’s Commissar of Agriculture; Grinko, the People’s Commissar of Finance; Sokolnikov, assistant People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs–all these people should have been the first to sound the alarm at the slightest sign of any danger to the interests of the Soviet state, but instead they acted as wreckers, in breach of the trust placed upon them, and in violation of their duty to the land of the Soviets. This really is monstrous and shows the utmost limits of moral depravity these people attained.

Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 254

SUBVERSIVES PENETRATED THE GOVT AND WERE ELIMINATING BONA FIDE MARXISTS

The enemies of the workers’ state had penetrated the Party, the State police, and the judicial system, and, as we might expect, made use of the situation to get rid of pro-socialist people in every field.

Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 130

…Opponents hiding within the party led conspiracies to expel the greatest possible number of loyal Communist cadres. About this question, one opponent testified:

“We endeavored to expel as many people from the party as possible. We expelled people when there were no grounds for explusion (sic). We had one aim in view—to increase the number of embittered people and thus increase the number of our allies.’

J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 177.

…Furthermore, enemies of the people and foreign secret service spies penetrated the NKVD, both at the local and central level. They tried by all means to disrupt investigations. Agents consciously deformed Soviet laws, conducted massive and unjustified arrests and, at the same time, protected their acolytes, particularly those who had infiltrated the NKVD.

“The completely unacceptable defects observed in the work of the NKVD and prosecutors were only possible because enemies of the people had infiltrated themselves in the NKVD and prosecutor offices, used every possible method to separate the work of the NKVD and prosecutors from the Party organs, to avoid Party control and leadership and to facilitate for themselves and for their acolytes the continuation of their anti-Soviet activities.

“The Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) resolves:

1. To prohibit the NKVD and prosecutors from conducting any massive arrest or deportation operation ….

The CPC and the CC of the CPSU(b) warn all NKVD and prosecutor office employees that the slightest deviation from Soviet laws and from Party and Government directives by any employee, whoever that person might be, will result in severe legal proceedings.

V. Molotov, J. Stalin.”

Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 191 [p. 167 on the NET]

Over the Purge period, the Stalinists themselves, except for a small and peculiar personal following, were destroyed.

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 446

This idea of Stalin’s was grasped best of all by Evdokimov, who declared, “The counter-revolutionary band of Trotskyists, Zinovievists, Rightists, ‘Leftists,’ and other counter-revolutionary scum has seized the leadership of the overwhelming part of the region’s cities. This band set itself the task of undermining Soviet and Party work, in order to discredit the party and the Soviet regime. It suppressed self-criticism in every way, instilled bureaucratism in the party and Soviet organizations, and persecuted people who dared to speak out against them, which was a direct mockery of the inner -party and Soviet democracy.” As confirmation of this, Evdokimov offered the testimony of arrested party functionaries about how, in order to arouse dissatisfaction with the party apparatus, they “suppressed self-criticism, smothered the living word, and left without any consequences the declarations and complaints of workers. Anyone who tried to criticize these conditions at a meeting was persecuted.”

Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 245

Under the command of Menzhinsky and Yagoda, countless innocent people were arrested and many were shot just because they served Lenin faithfully and were loyal Bolsheviks. Even some of the members of Security force, loyal Bolsheviks, who worked underground against the Tsar, fought for the Revolution, then on trumped-up charges, were arrested, sometimes without Lenin or Stalin knowing about this until it was too late. How was this possible?

We must understand that the enemies were entrenched inside every important position in the NKVD and State Security–well hidden, well masked and cleverly utilizing their power, getting rid of dedicated communists.

Being chairman of the NKVD, Menzhinsky and Yagoda hired only former ruling class kulaks, barons, whiteguards who really terrorized the dedicated communists and workers, those who showed that they were absolutely loyal to the party, to the motherland, to Lenin and Stalin, and other leaders of the state. Among these lackeys of Yagoda was an officer called Ofitserov. In some cases where a member of the security team would get drunk, thus having to be given a reprimand plus five days in jail, Ofitserov, instead of the prescribed reprimand, had that person shot. On Stalin’s demand, [the engineer] Nazvanov was released but not without Ofitserov putting a pistol to his back, stating, “Next time, I shall get you!”

Thus, Nazvanov [an engineer] was saved from the clutches of these hidden enemies of Lenin and Stalin, and of Socialism, hiding under the cloak of performing their duties to save the “socialist state” from “perceived enemies.”

Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 72

The foul murder of Comrade Kirov was the first serious warning showing that the enemies of the people will practice duplicity and, in so doing, will disguise themselves as Bolsheviks, as Party members, so as to worm their way into our confidence and open a path for themselves into our organizations….

The Central Committee of the CPSU in its closed letter of January 18, 1935, regarding the foul murder of Comrade Kirov, gave a resolute warning to the Party organizations against political complacency and parochial gaping.

Stalin, Joseph. Mastering Bolshevism. San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1972, p. 4

However, the best indication that the programs of the “amnesty” and the “police purge” were endorsed, was not personnel changes–always of uncertain significance–but a decree put out by the conclave of the Party. This document recalled that the Central Committee had frequently warned against arbitrary expulsions from the Party, and then went on to condemn the procedure practiced by local and regional leaderships, of mass expulsions without careful examination of the charges. In a way that was very unusual for this kind of Party document, the decree listed a large number of cases from major regions throughout the country to show how widespread these excesses were, and then concluded that “careerists” and in particular “disguised enemies” had instigated most of the unjust punitive actions against members, their families, and friends.

…Many organizations of the Party and their leaders have not been able to identify and unmask the skillfully disguised enemy…. The worst traitor, usually such a disguised enemy is shouting louder than anyone about vigilance, rushing to ‘unmask’ as many [people] as possible and doing all this in order to conceal his own crimes from the Party and to turn the attention of the Party organization away from the uncovering of the real enemies of the people. A vile double-dealer, such a disguised enemy is doing his best to create a climate of unwarranted suspiciousness in Party organizations, a climate where any member of the Party who stands up for a slandered communist is immediately accused of lack of vigilance and collusion with the enemy…. Instead of exposing and unmasking the instigative activities of such a disguised enemy, Party organizations and their leaders often follow their lead, create an atmosphere where honest communists can be slandered with impunity and themselves adopt the line of unfounded mass expulsions…. Moreover, even after the discovery of enemies who have been infiltrating the Party apparatus and slandering honest communists, our Party leaders often do not take measures to liquidate the consequences of sabotage in Party organizations concerning the unfair expulsion of communists from the Party. It is time for all Party organizations and their leaders to completely unmask and exterminate the disguised enemy who has been infiltrating our ranks and trying to conceal his hostility behind a false clamor for vigilance and remain in the Party to pursue in it his vile [and] treacherous work.”

Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 203

The party had been infiltrated by alien and anti-Soviet elements.

Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 317

For seven years he [Inzhir] lived a double life. He devoted his knowledge and talents to the service of the regime he hated but thereby greatly benefited. He could not in fact do otherwise for the slightest act of sabotage in the kind of work he was doing threatened him with death. At the same time, as a secret informer of the political department of the NKVD, he took his revenge on the Bolsheviks by entangling and compromising Party members with whom he came into contact in the course of his work, and thereby helped to liquidate them.

In these activities Inzhir evidently found an inward satisfaction… As to the Bolsheviks he betrayed, his conscience did not trouble him in the least.

Berger, Joseph. Nothing but the Truth. New York, John Day Co. 1971, p. 102

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ATTACKS THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY’S RECORD

[Resolution of the Plenum the Central Committee, March 3, 1937, on Yezhov’s report of what was learned from the sabotage, subversion, and espionage committed by Japanese and German Trotskyite agents]

The Plenum of the Central Committee believes that all the facts established during the investigation of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite center and its local accomplices show that the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs was at least four years late in unmasking these most vicious enemies of the people.

The Motherland’s traitors–Trotskyites and other double-dealers, in union with German Japanese counterintelligence–had managed with relative impunity to carry on wrecking, sabotage, espionage, and terrorist activities and to damage socialist progress in many branches of industry and in transportation. They were able to do this not only because of defects in the work of party and economic organizations, but also because of slipshod work by the Department of state security of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs….

Despite numerous warnings by the Central Committee on redirecting all Cheka work toward a more organized and acute struggle against counter-revolution… the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs has not carried out these party and government directives and has turned out to be unable to expose the anti-Soviet Trotskyite gang in time.

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 114

CULTURE DIRECTOR SAYS SOLZHENITSYN PROVED HE WAS A SUBVERSIVE FROM THE START

[Memorandum from Shauro, director of the Department of Culture, to the Central Committee, June 20, 1975, regarding the publication in the West of Solzhenitsyn’s The Oak and the Calf and proposing publication of a book to expose Solzhenitsyn as a slanderer–rejected by the Writers’ Union]

In his new work Solzhenitsyn declares his long-standing hatred of the socialist social order, of Lenin and Leninism, of everything Soviet. Calling himself a “writer-member of the underground,” he confesses that since his youth he nurtured plans to undermine the Soviet government. The book The Oak and the Calf represents the cynical confession of an ideological saboteur.

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 297

SURROUNDING WORLD CAPITALISM HAS MADE SOVIET SOCIALISM SOMETHING IT IS NOT

In a very real sense, Soviet world policy today is Our Baby. We have made it what it is. It is opposed to socialistic theory and is inimical to Soviet interests as these were conceived for 15 years after the Revolution. So the world policy is a departure from world socialism and a reluctant adaptation necessitated by a ring of armed imperial enemies.

Nearing, S. The Soviet Union as a World Power. New York: Island Workshop Press, 1945, p. 87

Communist Russia, born in the throes of foreign intervention, has never got free of its obsession that the capitalist States all around her are planning her overthrow.

Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 157

But far more striking and far more convincing was the new direction taken in internal policy in Russia. In insisting, day in and the out, that a united attack of the capitalist world on “the one Socialist State” was imminent, Party and Government had perhaps over-reached themselves.

Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 194

The intense repression in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, far from being an inherent characteristic of socialism, was rather a result of the extraordinary crisis in which Soviet society found itself at that time.

Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 298

They [the Soviet leaders of the 1920s and 1930s] expected further foreign wars because it was in the nature of imperialism, as Lenin had also argued. They anticipated ceaseless struggles against the domestic enemies of revolution, whether peasant-capitalists or foreign spies. The result was a society that was kept in an almost perennial state of mobilization.

Overy, R. J. Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow. New York: TV Books, c1997, p. 22

Then there were the distorting effects that unremitting capitalist encirclement had up on the building of socialism. Throughout its entire 73 year history of counterrevolutionary invasion, civil war, forced industrialization, Stalinist purges and deportations, Nazi conquest, cold war, and nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union did not know one day of peaceful development.

Parenti, Michael. Blackshirts and Reds, San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997, p. 84

CAPITALIST ENCIRCLEMENT ALWAYS MEANS POSSIBLE FASCIST ATTACK

Indeed, it would be ridiculous and stupid to close our eyes to the capitalist encirclement and to think that our external enemies, the fascists, for example, will not, if the opportunity arises, make an attempt at a military attack upon the USSR. Only blind braggarts or masked enemies who desire to lull the vigilance of our people can think like that. No less ridiculous would it be to deny that in the event of the slightest success of military intervention, the interventionists would try to destroy the Soviet system. Did not Denikin and Kolchak restore the bourgeois system in the districts they occupied? Are the fascists any better than Denikin or Kolchak? Only blockheads or masked enemies, who by their boastfulness want to conceal their hostility and are striving to demobilize the people, can deny the danger of military intervention and of attempts at restoration as long as the capitalist encirclement exists. Can the victory of socialism in one country be regarded as final if this country is encircled by capitalism, and if it is not fully guaranteed against the danger of intervention and restoration? Certainly it cannot.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 161

MANY TIMES STALIN SEEMED TO NOT KNOW WHAT SUBVERSION WAS HAPPENING

Moreover, many of his [Stalin] speeches gave the impression that he was not well-informed about the repression. For example, at the February-March plenum of the Central Committee in 1937 he demanded that there be no arrests of Trotskyists and Zinovievists who had broken all ties with Trotsky and ended oppositional activity. At that very time thousands of such people were being arrested. Stalin also rebuked those who considered it a trifle to expel tens of thousands of the party. At that very time not tens but hundreds of thousands were being expelled and arrested.

Shortly before the arrest of the civil war hero Serdich, Stalin toasted him at a reception, suggesting that they drink to “Bruderschaft.” Just a few days before Blyukher’s destruction, Stalin spoke of him warmly at a meeting. When an Armenian delegation came to him, Stalin asked about the poet Charents and said that he should not be touched, but a few months later Charents was arrested and killed. The wife of Serebrovsky, a deputy people’s commissar of Ordjonikidze’s, tells of an unexpected phone call from Stalin one evening in 1937. “I hear you are going about on foot,” Stalin said. “That’s no good. People might think what they shouldn’t. I’ll send you a car if yours is being repaired.” And the next morning a car from the Kremlin arrived for Mrs. Serebrovsky’s use. But two days later her husband was arrested, taken right from the hospital.

Alikhanova tells about the case of Broido, one of Stalin’s former aides in the Commissariat of Nationalities. When NKVD men came to his door late at night, rather than let them in he rushed to the internal Kremlin telephone and called Stalin. “Koba, they’ve come for me,” said Broido. “Foolishness,” Stalin replied. “Who could bring charges against you? Go calmly to the NKVD and help them establish the truth.” Still, Broido was lucky. After only two years in prison he was freed in 1940.

The famous historian and publicist Steklov, disturbed by all the arrests, phoned Stalin and asked for an appointment. “Of course, come on over,” Stalin said, and reassured him when they met: “What’s the matter with you? The party knows and trusts you; you have nothing to worry about.” Steklov returned to his friends and family, and that very evening the NKVD came for him. Naturally the first thought of his friends and family was to appeal to Stalin, who seemed unaware of what was going on….

In 1938 Akulov, onetime procurator of the Soviet Union and later secretary of the Central Executive Committee, fell while skating and suffered an almost fatal concussion. On Stalin’s personal orders outstanding surgeons were brought from abroad to save his life. After a difficult recovery lasting many months, Akulov returned to work, whereupon he was arrested, and in 1939 he was shot.

In 1937 Milchakov, who was working in the administration of the gold mining industry, was suddenly removed from his job and expelled from the party. But a few days later the party organizer of the administration searched him out and said anxiously, “Let’s go to the Kremlin; Stalin’s asking for you.” In the Kremlin office were Stalin and Kaganovich. “What have things come to,” said Stalin, “if they’re expelling people like Milchakov?” Then he said to Milchakov: “We’re appointing you deputy chief of Glavzoloto (the Chief Administration for Gold Mining). Go and carry out your duties.” Two or three weeks later Milchakov became the head of Glavzoloto, after the arrest of Serebrovsky. After another two months, however, Milchakov was arrested and did not see Moscow again for 16 years.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 526-527

Of course Stalin did not and could not know about every instance of lawlessness.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 533

PEOPLE DECEPTIVELY ACT LIKE THEY ACCEPT THE PARTY LINE WHILE UNDERMINING IT

…many of the people I knew who made public speeches in defense of Stalin’s interpretation of the Dictatorship of Proletariat were already engaged in underground anti-Stalin work.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 114

WHILE IN THE PARTY TOKAEV ADMITS HE BEGAN UNDERGROUND ILLEGAL ACTIVITY IN 1932

This was the conclusion [underground work was forced on us] at which I and a small group of comrades arrived in the autumn of 1932. This was the beginning of my formal adherence to an inner party underground opposition faction. We now ceased to be part of the Stalinist machinery except so far as our formal adherence to the Party could be regarded as such, but this in any case was an essential cover for us.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 206

TOKAEV DESCRIBES THE NEEDED VERBAL DECEPTIONS OF A GOOD SUBVERSIVE

Other necessary qualities [to combat Stalinism besides knowing its philosopy] are those of the partisan fighter in the field of politics. It is not enough to be pugnacious, it is not enough to be able and prepared to carry out orders; it is essential to be capable of initiating and organizing action oneself. This does not mean the ability to stage a full-scale revolution, but it does mean the ability to wage small but all-important battles in everyday life: sow the seeds of thought in others’ minds, inspire the belief that it is possible for men to be men and not homunculi; seize on any of the countless openings given by permitted discussions of the Party line, engage in an argument without ever exposing oneself too far, and come out of it the victor, never discredited. It means never to forget that in this sort of activity what matters is not words or even acts, but the right words, the right act, the timely word, the timely act. The capacity to appraise a situation correctly is of the utmost importance.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 209

OPPONENTS OF STALIN ARE THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY

The very existence of such moderate and reasonable men as Rusanov in such high-up positions shows the absurdity of the myth that the higher Soviet officialdom is a monolithic body of fanatical Stalinists.
There are many thousands of people who are constantly opposing the Stalinist line; there are hundreds who are constantly plotting against the regime; there are even groups who plan terrorist acts against leaders in the Kremlin; and in the last World War the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, almost to a man, raised the standard of the struggle for its own independence.
Nor is it true, as some “experts” say, that every Soviet citizen has a spy at his elbow. If it were, it would mean that the whole country is made up of spies, and a more foolish and unfounded slander could not be imagined.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 226

SECRET POLICE HEAVILY INFILTRATED BY SUBVERSIVES WHO PROTECT OTHER SUBVERSIVES

My hope that the storm had passed me over was shaken before the end of January 1935, when I was again summoned to the NKVD, “by way of a prophylactic measure,” as the examining officer assured me. The Zhukovsky Academy command were not to know anything about it, he said; “tomorrow morning you will be back at your lectures”….
This NKVD inquisitor was of about the same age as myself but at the time I never suspected what I learned later, that he too was an underground oppositionist, one of the boldest inside the NKVD system. He knew all about me, about the underground group to which I belonged and the military underground meeting which I had attended, and why I had gray hair, but in those days he never gave me the slightest hint. It was not till later, when he had been shot, that I came upon his name in a special resolution of our underground group, mentioning his services to our cause, not Stalin’s, and understood at last why he had summoned me, as he had summoned many others: he was busy saving men, not destroying them. A number of outstanding personalities of the underground owed their lives to him, among them some of the anti-Stalinists who are working at this moment in the Soviet Union. His investigations were made under orders from NKVD headquarters, but he knew what questions to ask and how to ask them in such a way as to satisfy his superiors and yet to protect the men he examined.
Keeping in mind the memory of this heroic comrade, I am filled with horror, when, nowadays, I hear that “all the NKVD” ought to be exterminated as Stalinist terrorists.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 249

…As I passed the Dynamo Stadium I suddenly heard a voice behind me: “Don’t look around, keep on going, but listen…” It was Belinsky [one of my closest friends]. He told me that my group already knew and approved what I had done and were doing all they could to save me. I must know that a hard struggle had begun. Men, even in the NKVD, who were on our side, would take whatever steps they could to sidetract my case. But it would not be easy. Key positions must not be exposed. Still–there was a chance. I was not alone.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 260

On May 13, 1937, Artuzov, a second-rank commissar of state security and the head of the central division of the NKVD USSR, was arrested on the basis of personal instructions from Yezhov. In the records of the interrogation that were made by investigator Alentsov, Artuzov confessed that in 1913 he was recruited into “the Tsarist intelligence service.” In 1914, he became a French intelligence agent, in 1925, a German agent, and 1933, a Polish agent. Moreover, he admitted belonging to an anti-Soviet organization of Rightists that was active within the NKVD and was headed by Yagoda.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 30

On occasion the wrong kind of person penetrated the NKVD, which gives an indication of its poor investigative abilities. One NKVD officer was the son of an executed kulak, another the son of a tsarist officer arrested in the Civil War. Another man, an imperial officer who went on to fight on the White side against the Reds, reported that a friend of his with the same background entered the police in the 1920s and saved many former White officers. Eventually rising to become deputy director of the NKVD in the Ukraine, the man was exposed and shot in 1937. Here a real enemy of the Soviet state had wormed his way into a powerful position.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 78

Once more, [at the Bukharin trial] a vast network of assassins was discovered. At least 8 groups were working on the destruction of Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Yezhov. And, this time, they were shown not simply to be under the protection of high officials in the Party and the Army, but actually to have been nourished and sponsored by the NKVD itself. Seldom can terrorists have had such advantages as those supposedly enjoyed by the plotters. Apart from half a dozen members of the Government, including the Head of the Secret Police itself, they actually had on their side the NKVD officers Pauker and Volovich, responsible for guarding their prospective victims.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 397

One concern was precisely what Kotelnikov alleged to have taken place-that “enemies” had secured positions that allowed them to issue party cards to other “enemies.”
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 240.

SECRET POLICE WERE NOT THAT SECRET

The greatest misconception about the GPU is to consider it a secret police. Undoubtedly, it has secret agents, correspondents, and informants. A state threatened for so many years by the secret plotting of counter-revolution, and today riddled with spies, has need of a defensive organization capable of functioning in secret. But in its general function of guarding the Socialist state, the GPU is a public body. Its members wear distinctive GPU uniforms and the GPU is as accessible to the Soviet citizen as is the British police to the Briton. In performing its duties, which include more beneficent functions of police work such as the care of waifs, the GPU man may use all the tricks known to the European police of plain clothes disguise and general dissembling. No one considers this technique of investigation any more reprehensible in the USSR than a similar technique is considered, say, in France. Those who in the USSR fear the GPU are those who in other countries fear the police–namely, criminals and would be criminals.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 53

SEMEONOV TELLS OF HIS PAST TROTSKYISM AND WHY HE NOW REJECTS IT

Walking back to our cell, my neighbor, Semeonov, said, “Cheer up! It’s not so bad. I’ve been through it before.”
… I’ve had three years in Siberia under the Tsar,” he said, “with a slot in the wall, not a window. I’m an old Bolshevik,” he added proudly.
“What are you here for?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I am being questioned for association with the Trotsky Parallel Center.”
“Is that a crime?”
“Yes. THE TROTSKYISTS TODAY ARE AN ASSOCIATION OF ASSASSINS. They would lead the working class to an abyss of futility and disruption. I am an accused Trotskyist but, my friend, believe me, I reject it with my soul. It’s true I knew Trotsky. I have sat at the same conference table with him and Stalin. I was a revolutionary from my youth. I lost my health in a Tsarist prison. I fought against the Whites and was wounded in Elizabethgrad. I have offered my life to the working-class and today they accuse me of Trotskyism. I knew Trotsky in 1926. I met him and supported him in his opposition. I knew Zinoviev and Kamenev too, and joined them against the majority of the party. But I was a loyal Party member– an honored party member. I later accepted the majority decision and, when events justified it, I abandoned the minority standpoint. What did Trotsky do? He conducted an opposition to the extent of actively resisting majority decisions. He went into exile. From there he tried to keep in touch with me and those others who had been grouped around him. I rejected him and I rejected his policy. In 1926 I was expelled from the party. It didn’t affect me. I worked doubly hard for the cause to which I dedicated my life. I got a job in Narkomles–the Paper Trust. In three years I rose from director of distribution to direction in the Trust itself. Stalin complimented me. He thanked me at our Congress for my contribution to the success of the industry. What did it help me?
“By 1932, Trotsky, who had for six years waited for the collapse of the Soviet Union through peasant resistance to collectivization or external attack, was tired of waiting. He had given in his early days good service to the Soviet Union and was a glorious figure for his past services to the revolution. But now, with a new generation growing up, ignorant of his old service and knowing only of his hate of the successes of the USSR, Trotsky began to organize acts of sabotage.
“Towards the end of 1932, an engineer who had been buying machinery in France handed me a letter. It was from Trotsky. He wrote simply: ‘Are you still a friend of the Revolution?’ I destroyed the letter and ignored what it said. I had rejected Trotsky utterly since his policy of ideological opposition to the Party had changed to one of supporting an Imperialist war against the USSR in order to bring about what he called ‘the true revolution.’…
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 98

“But Trotsky, in his remote isolation, was a realist only in his capacity to destroy. He would not leave me alone. He sent me a second letter through a Lithuanian who pretended to be a tourist. The GPU intercepted the letter. I was dismissed from my job and tried in open court.”
“On what grounds?” I interposed.
“Communication with an enemy of the state.”
“What did it say in the letter?”
“Trotsky referred to a meeting that I had with him in 1925. It’s true I stood with him then on common ground, but that was a long time ago. It’s not the part of a Bolshevik to swear eternal fidelity to a policy…. He was living on his own past merits.
“I defended myself before the court. I rejected the charge that I had criminal contacts with Trotsky. I admitted our past friendship and declared that it had ended years before. I was asked:
“Why did you not denounce the bearer of the letter to the political police?”
“My true reason for not doing so was my fear of compromising myself even through suspicion. That was no answer for the GPU, I was sentenced to three years’ exile, under restraint….
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 100

“I was sent to a fortress in Uzbekistan where once the Tsar used to imprison those whom he wanted to teach. Here they gave me complete liberty within the fortress precincts. I wasn’t locked in my cell. I was given paper and ink and while I was there I finished a treatise on ‘Re-afforestation.’”
“Were you allowed letters?”
“As many as I liked or cared to send. They were all censored. But it didn’t matter. I almost enjoyed the monastic life that I lived. There were only eighteen other prisoners in the fortress. We were allowed to play volley-ball for two hours a day and that is how I have maintained my physique….”
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 101

“Besides,” Semeonov added, “I don’t believe for a moment that either Trotsky or Zinoviev or Kamenev took deliberate action against the USSR until the Stalin policy had been proved right and theirs wrong.
“You’ve got to admit that at a particular period in the Revolution Trotsky and the others did good work. I do not justify their behavior to-day. Should that prevent me from justifying their work of yesterday? I am not ashamed to have been associated with the Trotsky of the Red Train. Trotsky today, working for internal disruption, is another man….”
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 98. 100, 101, 103

AKULOV TELLS CRITICAL STALINIST FELLOW PRISONERS WHY HE IS A TROT

There were several in my [Lebedev, a Stalin supporter] cell imprisoned for Trotskyist activity…. There was at least one who avowed himself a supporter of Trotsky, who declared implacable enmity towards Stalin and who professed himself ready to suffer for his true revolutionary fate. He was Akulov, a schoolteacher from the Donbas who had fought against the Whites, been wounded three times, and who had reached a high position in the Communist Party at the time of the expulsion of Trotsky from the party. Unlike those others who had rejected Trotsky, Akulov continued openly to resist the Stalin line. He was expelled from the party and proceeded to organize an energetic opposition center. He succeeded in grouping around him a number of former Red Army men, old Bolsheviks who had been purged from the party, and some engineers. Later, his group was joined by former White partisans who since the revolution had entered various Soviet enterprises. The group passed from vocal criticism of Stalin, the Communist Party, and the Soviet government to organized sabotage in mines, helped largely by the engineers, wrecking which the White partisans willingly undertook, and experimental dislocation of railway traffic in which the former army men were adept. The old Bolsheviks maintained a campaign of rumors such as that the Ukrainian harvest had failed, and by creating constant apprehension among the workers almost succeeded in wrecking the five-year plan. Akulov proudly admitted that he had organized his work. From the rest of the prisoners he received bitter criticism. He defended himself fluently with skillful dialectic, but the prisoners, mostly sincere Stalinists, crowd over his bed whistling, shooting questions at him, or booing his least popular opinions….

(Akulov explains the Trot position)
“What shall we have tonight?” asked the Starost [supervising prisoner].
“Something to put us to sleep,” somebody suggested.
“Let Davidovich lecture on the Turbine Engine.”
“No,” said Krylenko, bounding upon his bed. “Let’s hear what Akulov has to say about his venerated Lord and Master in Mexico–Ex-Comrade Trotsky,”…
“Yes, yes,” somebody else shouted, “Akulov on ‘why Trotsky’s right when he’s wrong.’ or ‘why Trotsky’s left when he’s wrong and wrong when he’s right.’”
“Order,” shouted the Starost, solemnly standing up. He stretched his arm and there was a hush. “I call on Akulov to address us on ‘when left his right!’”
[Akulov then says,] “…We oppose Stalin. Yes, we oppose him with our bodies, our minds, and our souls, as a betrayer of the Revolution, a traitor to the working class of the world….
Is it not obvious that our own political revolution of 1917 should have been the signal for a series of political revolutions throughout the main countries in the world, introducing the economic revolutions which could have provided the basis for a world Socialist economy?”
“What if nobody took any notice of the signal except in Germany and Hungary where the Revolution failed?” Davidovitch asked. “Should we therefore have struggled on with a political revolution without attempting an economic revolution–although our country covers a sixth of the world and is one of the richest economically?”
“No,” Akulov went on, “we should not. We should have strengthened our political revolution by helping the proletarian revolution. Had we done that we need not have suffered the years of privations to build a gigantic heavy industry. We could have done it at leisure, secured by the workers’ states around us. We could have raised our standard of living immediately had Stalin not aimed at his one-street Socialism. We would not have had Socialism, but the standard of living could have been raised by the purchase of consumers’ goods and not inedible machinery.
[Akulov continues] “Why do you imagine that Lenin permitted NEP with all its capitalist abuses? As a step towards the five-year plan which your good Comrade Stalin claims? I think not. As a step towards socialism? Yes. I will tell you how I explain the paradox. Lenin wanted the New Economic Policy so that the relaxation of the economic struggle could lead to an intensification of the political struggle abroad. He knew that you can’t get Socialism in one country unless you have a proletarian revolution in the main industrial countries….
“To what extent has Stalin followed this line of Lenin? He has receded from Lenin’s grand policy of World Revolution to the National Socialism of the Russian fatherland. ‘Please, dear Workers all over the world, unite with your good bourgeois masters under the spurious slogans of Liberty, Democracy, and Peace at any price, and defend the workers’ (Russian) fatherland against the Fascist wolf.’ That is the contemptible advice that one who has the impudence to assume the mantle of Lenin dares to offer the world proletariat waiting for a policy, for guidance and help in overthrowing their capitalist oppressors.
“Whose fault is it that the Fascist wolves are snarling at the door of the country that gave birth to the workers’ revolution of 1917? Could not Stalin with a stroke have helped the German Communists to power in 1932? Instead of that, he let the Nazis in and left the Comintern to rescue Dimitrov. Internationalism! The word has become a term of reproach in the Soviet Union, almost as dangerous as Trotskyism.”
Akulov paused and smiled wryly. “It’s as dangerous to be an internationalist in the Soviet Union as it is to be one in Germany. No! It’s less dangerous. In Germany if you’re an internationalist they call you by the honorable name of Marxist. In the Soviet Union they call you a cancer, a reptile, scum, and filth. Where are the days of ‘Workers of the World, Unite’? Gone for ever? I think not. Gone only so long as the Stalinists’ bureaucracy survives. Historical necessity will give that slogan its original strength. The day of the true revolution will be the hour of International Proletarian Unity….
“Let Stalin keep his cheap aphorism of ‘To each according to his capacity.’ What does that capacity consist of? Capacity to manipulate the machinery of bureaucracy for one’s own ends! Compare the earnings of the humblest toiling workers with the earnings of an engineer. Do you call that Socialism? Is not the humble worker as entitled to the satisfaction of his needs as the opulent specialist? There are as glaring differences of wealth and privilege in the Soviet Union today as there ever were on the czar.
“Stalin’s policy of gigantism has brought us nothing. We now have Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk, Stalinsk, and all rest of it. The Americans have the Detroit motor works and the Niagara Falls. Has that made them Socialists? I grant that we have made industrial progress. That is the result of an energetic planned economy which I favor and do not dispute, but is that socialism? I think not.
“Again, because we have made great industrial progress in comparative figures, we are not therefore an advanced industrial country. On the contrary we are industrially still among the backward countries of the world. The mighty capitalist industrial countries could crack us like a dry nut unless…
“Unless what?” I asked.
“Unless the revolutionary spirit is so strong among the proletarians of those countries that they prevent it.
“But as things are what reason have they to defend a bureaucracy which in the name of Socialism preserves the inequalities and abuses of capitalism? The workers of the world have been disillusioned by the cynical disregard of principle shown by the Government of the USSR. Consider only these things–the reintroduction of the off-duty salute into the army, the restoration of the old military titles, the reconstitution of the Cossack regiments, the law for the abolition of free abortion, the encouragement of jazz music. Retrogressive steps all of them! Swaggering officers, swaggering engineers, swaggering bureaucrats! That’s your new Soviet fatherland. Each step that it takes towards its comfortable bourgeois goal, it calls a step towards Socialism.
“The Marxists–the true Marxists–have watched the fruits of the Revolution fall into dust in the hands of the Stalinists. I am proud that I have worked against the Stalin bureaucracy, I am proud that I have engaged in sabotage, I am proud that I have conspired to overthrow the usurpers of the Revolution. When Stalin and his functionaries are ashes, our true Socialist work will go forward, our inspiration Marx and Lenin, our leader Trotsky….
Sweating with the strain of his rhetoric, Akulov lay on the bed and poured out for himself a glass of water. The murmur of disagreement which had accompanied the whole of his speech grew into a roar before it was ended….
“Friends,” the Starost said, “I’m neutral…. Does anybody want to answer Akulov?”
There were about 12 volunteers, including myself [Lebedev].
“Allow me to answer,” a man called Lebedev asked quietly. “Comrades,” he said, turning to us all, “I can claim to be a Marxist. For years I studied the works of Marx. I’ve read all that Lenin has written and share his views. I fought in the streets of Leningrad during the Revolution. I come of revolutionary stock–my father died in a Tsarist prison in Eastern Siberia. I can say that my whole life has been given to the Revolution. I am a worker–a metal-worker. My father was also a worker in the Putilov factory.
“Those are my credentials. That is what permits me to speak with equal sincerity and infinitely more truth than that man.”
Pointing an accusing finger at Akulov he went on:…
“Forgive me, comrades, if I speak with heat. I stand here and say that Akulov lies in the motives which he imputes to the Stalinists, that he lies in his statement of Lenin’s intentions, that he lies in his charge that we are indifferent to the international working-class, and that he lies in his statement of the present condition of the USSR. I say further that his boast of wrecking is that of one who objectively is an enemy of the Revolution, even if charitably we grant that subjectively he is not.
“Let us take his charges as he produced them and consider his own proposals. ‘The political revolution,’ he said, ‘should have been international before any attempt at economic revolution.’ He calls that realism.
“Lenin waited and worked for the international revolution. Nobody can deny that the Soviet Union would have been strengthened by having workers’ states surrounding it instead of capitalist states. But that didn’t happen. The workers outside Russia were either unwilling or unable to make the revolution. The years passed. Capitalism by bloody repression held the working-class crushed in steel. Simultaneously it grew bolder in its attempt at a new intervention in the Soviet Union.
“Our own revolution was threatened by counter-revolutionaries. We held them in check. Lenin with his New Economic Policy brought the boils of counter-revolution to the surface in order better to lance them. The NEP was not a respite in order better to lance them. The NEP was not a respite to work for a world political revolution, however desirable that might be. It was a respite to plan the five-year plan and collectivization of the farms, the first steps towards our present Socialist economy….
“Akulov, like all Trotskyists, harps on the backwardness of our country. This is how he reasons: ‘It’s no use trying to build Socialism in one country unless that country, in addition to self-sufficient raw materials, is highly industrialized.’ ‘Very well,’ we reply, ‘we’ll highly industrialize the USSR which has as much raw materials as several other capitalist countries put together.’ ‘Oh, no!’ Akulov answers, ‘You can’t industrialize us. We’re backward!’
“Akulov is backward. He is living mentally at the beginning of the last decade when our country inherited not merely the backward conditions of Czarism, but a ruined industry and a wasted countryside.
“We Socialists have changed all that. With one hand we held the capitalist countries at bay. With the other we wielded the tools which have raised our industry to a foremost position in the world. These are facts. Akulov can’t deny them. And can he deny that he and those like him have done everything to ruin our efforts? Can he deny that we have built an economic condition which offers to every worker a share according to his capacity to produce? By what stretch of the imagination can he call that capitalism? Is that not a progressive step towards the Communist society when each will give according to his capacity and receive according to his needs?…
“Akulov made cheap taunts about functionaries. Our Socialist society must have men to fill the function of managers, directors, and controllers. They are a condition of organization. Perhaps Akulov would prefer a blissful anarchy–without Socialism, certainly, but he’d have his political revolution.
“When he says that there are inequalities of wages and privileges comparable with those under Tsarism he lies. You all know it. No man has a sum of privileges in excess of any other. And wages vary, but the worst-paid worker is not much less well-off than the best paid. Remember, this is a transitional stage. We are on the way to our Communist goal [Right on brother–Klo]. Trotsky offers instead years of fruitless waiting for political revolutions whose opportunity may well not be seizable. He offers the workers of the world an abstraction.
“We, those who follow the Stalin line, offer the workers of the world a Socialist reality–our workers’ fatherland growing as a glorious example before their eyes.
“Akulov lies again when he says that internationalism is spurned today. When we speak of the workers’ fatherland we mean the fatherland of the workers of the world, Russia, home of the first proletarian revolution. Is it not a fact that the workers of the world turn their faces towards us as their revolutionary guides? When the working-class of the USSR forgets its brothers throughout the world, it will be a bitter day for the USSR. Happily, that day will never come….
“Let Akulov prattle of jazz and salutes and abortion laws. Those things neither make nor mar Socialism. A salute to a Tsarist officer by a peasant boy is a world different from a worker-soldier’s salute to his worker-officer. Why should I go on? Do we not know how much personal spite and venom is mingled in the idealistic phrases of Trotsky and his followers? Do we not know that it is they, the dispossessed, who are the place-seekers, the bureaucrats and functionaries who are as embittered as any dispossessed Tsarist capitalist?
“They conspire with the enemies of the Soviet Union. They boast of their treachery to the Soviet Union and brag that they do it in the name of the working-class.”
Again Lebedev pointed at Akulov.
“The working-class will remember you and your like, Akulov. It will not be garrotted by you and your megalomaniac leader. We’re going ahead without you and despite you. We’re marching out under the banner of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and woe to the traitors!”
There was a rattle of cheering when he ended. Akulov pretended to be asleep.
“I hope, Lebedev,” Krilenko said as an epilogue, “that when you march out under Stalin’s banner you’ll be able to smuggle me under too!”
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 136-148

HARDSHIPS OF THE FIRST 5 YEAR PLAN PROVIDED GRIST FOR THE OPPOSITIONISTS

The Opposition thrived during the year of the First Five-Year Plan, which, though a period of great triumphs, was also one of great hardships. The plan was magnificent in intention and miraculous in execution. I have worked among peasants who have been translated from wooden plows to modern textile machinery and know the difficulty of overcoming their ingrained hebetude and stupefaction. Is it any wonder that the conversion of peasants into industrial workers, of individualists into collective farmers, was a major operation accompanied by many pains? During the First Five-Year Plan there was tremendous enthusiasm among the politically conscious masses and among the youth. But there was also much discontent among those elements who found adjustment to the new conditions difficult. Trotskyists, ex-NEP men (Speculators) and Kulaks (rich peasants) found themselves bed-fellows in their hostility to the Stalin policy.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 213

SECRET POLICE WORKED HARD TO ROOT OUT AND UNMASK SUBVERSIVES

The great emphasis of 1937-38 was on hidden opponents, and the key word was “unmasking.” The central authorities pursued those they perceived as real, concealed enemies.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 79

“Early in 1936 about 40 NKVD men were summoned for a special conference by the chief of the Secret Political Department, Molchanov,” was how Orlov vividly recalled the blood-letting had been initiated. The assembled high-ranking officers were astonished to be told that “a vast conspiracy had been uncovered, headed by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other leaders of the opposition”. The conspiracy, according to Molchanov, had been growing over many years, nefariously establishing “terrorist groups in almost all the big cities and had set itself the aim of assassinating Stalin and the members of the Politburo and of seizing power”. Priority was to be given to mounting a full-scale investigation, with Stalin personally supervising the task, assisted by Yezhov, The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Costello, John and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly illusions. New York: Crown, c1993, p. 249

SECRET POLICE ARRESTED PEOPLE NEARLY ALWAYS FOR GOOD REASONS

Still, numerous reports indicate that even at the peak of the Terror, evidence often made the difference in a case. The NKVD detained people because of some connection with misdeeds, accidents, someone else already arrested, or a denunciation. If in the worst period these connections were often flimsy, they still existed in some fashion. Without that kind of suspicious link, or when clearly protected by documentary evidence, people were either not touched or were exonerated in investigations.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 90

OPPOSITION INTENSIFIES AS SOCIALISM GETS STRONGER

The more Socialist industry and agriculture develop, the more desperate, however, becomes the resistance of the remnants of former exploiting classes. When the Worker’s State was tolerating their existence as rich peasants and traders, they hoped for the gradual undermining of the Socialist elements in economy by means of the development of private trade and agriculture. As these were eliminated, their hatred intensified to an extreme degree. The development of Socialism means that those elements now find employment in some of the branches of Soviet industry and trade. They find employment at a time when whole branches of industry that never previously existed are being established in the country, when millions of backward and individualistic peasants are being absorbed into industry and are bringing many of their old peasant habits with them. Even without the activity of class enemies in Soviet industry, this would be a period of considerable strain and difficulty. If one can remember the muddles which occurred in England in 1914-15 in the shift from peace to war production, despite all the great technical ability at the disposal of the British bourgeoisie, one can understand that a certain amount of honest mistakes and muddle could occur in Soviet industry in the course of the great change through which it is passing. There is the opportunity of the class enemies. They can take advantage of the muddle and disorganization that exist, and work deliberately to intensify it; they can deliberately sabotage and try to represent the result as a product of honest muddle; they can take advantage of the difficulties of the ex-peasant in fitting himself into the new industrial life.
Formerly those elements–as rich peasants and traders–fought Socialist industry from without. Now they seek to undermine it from within, and because they are now part and parcel of the personnel of industry, it is not always easy to detect them. The utmost vigilance is necessary on the part of the factory committees, of the unions, and of all the organs of the Worker’s State, in order to meet and defeat the sabotage.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 143

AS THE TROTS ARE UNEARTHED IN 1936 THERE IS A PUSH TO SPEED UP THE COUP

But at the end of 1936 it was becoming clear that the groups of Trotskyists and Rights were becoming discovered to such an extent that the whole organization was in danger of being wiped out. And hence there was the development of the conception that a coup d’etat ought to be launched, independently of war. The evidence given by Rosengoltz makes clear what the plotters intended:…
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 224

Rosengoltz invited me to his villa in Gorinka where we had lunch and a long talk.
He was in good spirits although two of his intimate friends were arrested in January 1936…. He suggested a game of tennis on his private court. He has a most wonderful court. I declined because of my age…. He spoke for sometime about Stalin…. His enthusiasm surprised me…. He said he greatly regretted having belonged to the Opposition and that he would have liked the opportunity of a heart to heart talk with Stalin but was not allowed to see him. Since the assassination of Kirov no prominent member of the Opposition has been admitted to Stalin….
We talked for a while about the prospects at home. He said he had had a long talk with Shkiryatov, who had made some threatening hints. Shkiryatov had told him that the Opposition didn’t want to disarm and that extreme measures would have to be taken against its members. War was coming, he said, and a small anti-Party group could not be allowed to organize secret circles with defeatist slogans…. I asked what the slogans were…. Rosengoltz hesitated and then replied that he now had no contact whatever with the circles but that the Smilga people had had a hand in it…. When I pressed him to be more explicit he volunteered the explanation that there was a project to bring about “clemancism” in the Party–that is, in the event of war breaking out and our armies being defeated, and the Secretary-General wanting to bring off a new Brest-Litovsk, to carry out a mutiny of the troops during the war and change the leadership, after “shooting several leaders and Marshals,” as the Greeks had done after their defeat in Asia Minor…. I told him at once that objectively speaking such a plan amounted to the most blatant treachery and comfort to the enemy…. He blushed and agreed with me but said he had been led astray on the authority of Trotsky, who advised such tactics in his bulletins from abroad…. I asked him several questions about his friend Pyatakov and other members of the Opposition. He said he was no longer meeting them, to avoid rumors and denunciations about a resumption of the activity of secret opposition circles….
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 228

TROTSKY AND BUKHARIN ARE AFRAID THE MILITARY WILL TAKE OVER IN A COUP

Both Trotsky & Bukharin were afraid that in the event of a successful coup, the Generals would rule the roost and the civilian political groups would be left out in the cold.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 226

TROTSKY REFUSED TO STOP SUBVERSIVE WORK DURING EXILE

Trotsky, with the few thousand other exiles, managed to maintain political contact which kept the older members of the Party in a constant state of simmering excitement. Ordered to refrain from his activities under threat of imprisonment, he refused.
Barmine, Alexandre. Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat. London: L. Dickson limited,1938, p. 229

On 16 December 1928 a high official of the GPU arrived from Moscow and presented him [Trotsky] with an “ultimatum”: he must cease at once his “counter-revolutionary activity” or else he would be “completely isolated from political life” and “forced to change his place of residence.” On the same day Trotsky replied with a defiant letter [declining all overtures] to the leaders of the party and of the International:…
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 468

SUBVERSIVES GOT HOLD OF THE LIBRARY CENSORSHIP

And what happened was very bad. At a meeting of those who conducted the purges, it came to light that more than 60 percent of all books holdings have been withdrawn. There are libraries in which the portion of books withdrawn reached 80 or 90 percent. Correspondence from very different corners of the USSR indicates that the classics of philosophy, science, belles-lettres, and even revolutionary Marxism have been removed: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dickens, Hugo, resolutions of party congresses, reports of congresses of soviets,… The names of these “withdrawn” authors alone indicate criminal activity in the way to purge was conducted.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 78

[Sept. 15, 1932. Yaroslavski to Politburo on library purge]
Removed was all antireligious literature unmasking religion on the basis of scientific data (in spite of Lenin’s directions to use such literature widely), all trade union literature published before the Fifth Plenum of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Union’s Eighth Convocation [December 1928], literature about unemployment round-the-clock shift work and about the transition to the seven-hour work day, almost all popular literature regarding cooperatives, regarding social insurance, labor protection, and the building of kolkhozes and state farm’s published before 1930-31, all idealistic philosophers– except for Kant and Hegel–and the works of Spencer, Simmel, Bukharin, and others on historical materialism and sociology.
Several local boards of education, for example, went so far as to issue instructions to remove books such as Bebel’s, Lassalle’s, Plekhanov’s Our Differences, the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and Stalin’s Articles on the National Question.
In some libraries, in Leningrad in particular, works of Marx and Engels edited by Riazanov are being withdrawn and, because in many libraries there are no other additions of Marx, this means that they are withdrawing almost all works by Marx and Engels.
Here is more factual evidence to show the extent of the purging zeal. Removed from the library at Siniavinsk Peatbogs in Leningrad Oblast were Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov,… Kalinin, the “Communist Manifesto,” Chernyshevsky, books by Lenin, and so forth. From the Central Library of the Communications Union in Leningrad books by Rolland were removed, and this at a time when we are publishing Rolland’s letters and his appeal “War on War.” Removed from the library of the Glass Plant Named for October 25th in the Western Oblast were books by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Krupskaya, Yaroslavski, Krylenko, Bubnov, Bedny, Turgenev,… and others.
As a consequence of all these books being removed and the utterly wild, scandalous “purge” of libraries, the staff of the All Union Central Council of Trade Unions published in the September 4, 1932 issue, No. 206, of the newspaper Trud a resolution suspending this kind of “purge” and instructing the Public Culture Department to appoint a special commission to disclose those who were responsible for erroneously removing books from trade union libraries and for transferring books from trade union book holdings to local boards of public education and selling them.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 82-83

[Jan. 2, 1936 memorandum from Tal, Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the All Union Communist Party and Director of the Central Control Commission of the party to Orgburo “Concerning the Work of Glavlit”]

The political and economic section carries out final censoring for 32 publishing houses, ranging from the State Economics Publishing House to the State Medical Publishing House that publishes the Medical Encyclopedia, publications of the Central Committee of Esperantists, and so forth….
At the “Academy” publishing house, Glavlit’s authorized agent is Rubanovsky, who has received several party reprimands for Trotskyist errors and sympathy with the opposition’s views. (He worked in the publishing house while Kamenev was there and continues to work there even now.) Glavlit’s authorized agent at the Children’s Literature Publishing House Gorodetskaia, has received a severe reprimand and warning for permitting disclosure of a military secret.
Many political editors assigned to the leading newspapers are not sufficiently discerning in a political sense. They have a poor understanding of what they are supposed to do and often have a careless attitude toward their work. Because of this, a lack of uniform standards is quite often observed in the instructions given by political editors of various newspapers (one political editor passes what another prohibits); there is a huge number of anecdotal instances of very innocent things being prohibited, while strictly confidential information continues to find its way into newspapers.
If the state censorship at the center of the country is clearly unsatisfactory, then in the provinces, and especially in the raion’s, it is utterly catastrophic. With the exception of Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Smolensk, Gorky, and Rostov, Glavlit has no real control over what is published. Almost everywhere in the raions control over the newspapers is entrusted as a tag-on job to the chairman of the raion, the military commissariat, or the raion party committee staff.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 148-150

One of the key aspects on the “ideological front” was literature. In the first year of the First Five-Year Plan, its situation reflected, with a certain belatedness, the complex twists and turns of the intra-Party struggle. Representatives of leftist views, supporters of Trotsky, were still present on the staffs of literary journals and in literary associations, and adherents of the “right” still held important posts.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 269

HEAVY INFILTRATION OF HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS BY TROTS AND SUBVERSIVES

[1935 party review of higher educational institutions in Azov-Black Sea Krai]
During December 1934 and January 1935 in higher educational institutions and technical colleges there were a number of antiparty and counter-revolutionary sallies and speeches, most of which were not repulsed properly or in a timely fashion by party and Komsomol organizations. The faculties of higher educational institutions are severely infested with Trotskyists and the student body with class-alien and hostile elements who have easily infiltrated these institutions thanks to poorly organized admittance procedures.
More than a few alien and hostile elements have wormed their way into a number of these institutions’ Komsomol organizations (and the portion of Komsomol members in most of the institutions is significant: 30 to 40 percent). This explains why there have been quite a few instances of counter-revolutionary statements and speeches by Komsomol members….
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 134

STUDENTS OPENLY EXPRESSED ANTI-SOVIET, ANTI-STALIN ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS

The Akimov incident illustrates how weak is the political vigilance of party members at the Novocherkassk Industrial Institute. Akimov (not a party member), a recent graduate of the Institute’s Aviation Department given an appointment in plant No. 22, time and again expressed counter-revolutionary views when he was among party members, especially of late:
“Soviet authority can exist without communists. It’s much better for engineers to work for capitalists than in our industries…. Kirov’s murder wasn’t connected with Trotskyists; that’s all nonsense. Zinoviev is a good man. Each acted on behalf of the masses.”
Akimov was expelled from the Institute in 1934 for rowdiness, but several Communists vouched for him and he was readmitted and allowed to graduate. These Communists (Serdiukov, Gurenko, and Kabanov) have since been severely reprimanded by the party.
In Krasnodar, at the Kuban Pedagogical Technical College, student Diakov, ex-Komsomol member, systematically carried on counter-revolutionary conversations. This was known to a number of Komsomol members and Communists, but they did little to rebuff Diakov. As Diakov left the hall where a memorial service occasioned by Kirov’s murder was in progress, he said to a group of students: “One’s been done in, soon they’ll all be done in. They’ll all be killed off.”
Who is Diakov? It turns out he was expelled twice from a kolkhoz, once for acting under false pretenses, the second time for fouling up work records that caused a work brigade to fall apart. Yet this didn’t prevent him from being admitted as a student.
A student of the workers’ and peasants’ preparatory department [rabfak] at the Kuban Pedagogical Institute named Kriukova, who had been a member of the Komsomol since 1931, gave a note during class to the student next to her which read, “I salute Nikolayev for the murder of Kirov.”
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 136

[March 1935 memorandum from Stetsky on counter-revolutionary attitudes among students in Rybinsk]
As a result of acquainting myself with the situation there, the following became clear: At the Aviation Institute among the students (about 750 in all) it was revealed that two, Nekrasov and Voronov, carry on counter-revolutionary conversations with their classmates…. Nekrasov is a member of the Komsomol. He was reared in kulak surroundings: his mother is from a kulak family, one uncle is a dispossessed kulak. A year or two ago Nekrasov also expressed counter-revolutionary views to Komsomol members he was living with. About the building of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, he said, for example, “They built the Canal on human bones.” This is the language of the enemy. In connection with the murder of Comrade Kirov he began to make vile comments about how “it wasn’t worth risking anyone’s life to kill Kirov. The main leaders, not the accessories, need to be killed.” As a result of statements like this he was exposed by students who were party and Komsomol members as early as December 1934.
The second, Voronov, is the son of a specialist, his year of birth 1912, a member of the Komsomol, originally from the Azov-Black Sea Krai. In Voronov too counter-revolutionary sentiments manifested themselves a long time ago. He was expelled from an institute in Novocherkassk. He refused to take part in a day of voluntary labor (subbotnik) and was a blatant individualist who refused to participate in community work. Voronov after December 1 made comments about the murder of Comrade Kirov that were out-and-out counter-revolutionary. He said: “In my opinion [it] was poorly organized. They bungled the whole business. But this won’t be the end of the matter.” Students who were Komsomol members argued with Voronov, but they did not unmask him completely, and only after December 1 when he revealed himself more clearly did they tell the NKVD about him.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 138

HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS ARE INFECTED WITH SUBVERSIVE TEACHERS

[March 1935 memorandum from Stetsky on the social and economic sciences faculty]
Recently, numerous facts have demonstrated that social and economic sciences faculties are infested with former members of the opposition, double dealers, people who once belonged to other parties, and so forth. This points to a lack of proper leadership and to the slipshod way in which faculty members are appointed….
As a rule issues related to the appointment of faculty have not been of great concern to central administrative bodies until recently. These bodies do not have an accurate picture of who is teaching the social and economic sciences.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 139

[March 1935 memorandum “Concerning the Moral and Political State of Pedagogical Institutes” from Yezhov and Shkiriatov]
Our inspection revealed that three Moscow higher educational institutions administered by Narkompros (The History and Philosophy Institute, the Moscow Oblast Institute, and the Bubnov Institute) are infested with alien and anti-Soviet elements and that their activity has increased greatly since the murder of Comrade Kirov. Dozens of students in the classes and in the dormitories of these institutes have carried on counter-revolutionary conversations ranging from an open defense of bourgeois theories to direct threats against Comrade STALIN. At the History and Philosophy Institute 50 percent of the students in the literature department did not participate in Comrade Kirov’s funeral. In this department an anti-Soviet group consisting of 12 persons was formed at the end of October 1934 by a first-year student and Trotskyist named Tager and a non-party member named Rudiakova…. In the Bubnov Pedagogical Institute after the murder of Comrade Kirov some 20 students with an anti-Soviet orientation were exposed. The reasons that such a political situation exists at the Institutes are (1) infestation of the institutes due to admissions practices, (2) the presence of antiparty and anti-Soviet elements among members of the institutes’ faculty, and (3) the absence of Bolshevik vigilance on the part of the Institutes’ party organizations and weak mass-party work.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 144

[III. Alien and anti-Soviet elements on the institutes’ faculty]
The History and Philosophy Institute was headed by former “Bundist” and Trotskyist Prigozhin, who had been an influential participant in an illegal counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization until 1927. A double-dealer, he repudiated Trotskyism in the books he wrote, yet later, in his lectures, defended his Trotskyist views. When he came to the institute, he concealed from the institute’s party organization his former struggle against the party and thereby succeeded in becoming a member of the raion council. As the Institutes director he continued to pursue his Trotskyist line, transforming the institute into a mecca for Trotskyist faculty (25 in number) and of bourgeois specialists (11). These included Sten, a representative of the right-left bloc; Torbin, a Trotskyist expelled from the party who introduced Trotskyism into his teaching; Burtsev, assistant professor of political economy and formerly a very active Trotskyist; Ryndich, instructor of the history of the peoples of the USSR, and Goldenberg, instructor of Leninism, both ex-Trotskyists; Novikov, professor of dialectic materialism, an ex-Menshevik who sneaked idealist views into his teaching; Grishin, professor of Leninism, an ex-Bundist, who on Jan. 7 of this year at the Higher School of Communist Police passed counter-revolutionary Trotskyist directives with regard to a Zinovievist counter-revolutionary group; Feigelson, expelled from the Party in 1927 for belonging to a Zinovievist group; Gingor, ex-Trotskyist, exiled in 1929; Dakhshleger, a prominent ex-Menshevik recently fired for fascist, anti-Soviet attacks; Professor Kanchalovsky, who in his classes drew an analogy between slavery in ancient Greece and the economy of the Soviet Union; Bakhrushin and Got’e, professors of ancient history from former merchant families at one time exiled from Moscow; Liubomirov ex-SR; Gratsiansky, at one time purged from the All Union Council of the National Economy Staff; Asmus and Dynnik, ex-Menshevik sympathizers and idealists, Rubin, who was connected with the anti-Soviet group in the Literature Department; Gorev, who from 1907 to 1920 had been an active member of the Menshevik Liquidator faction, Yegorov, recently fired for teaching contraband Trotskyist views; Iskrinsky, the son of a priest who graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy; and so forth. All these faculty members worked unmonitored by the office of academic affairs and their departments and could day after day freely exert their corrupting influence on the backward part of the heterogeneous student body, stirring up anti-Soviet sentiments.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 145

He [Prigozhin] approved programs which, instead of the vulgar sociology of past years, were full of fresh new bourgeois empiricism and positivism. Interpreting an All Union Communist Party resolution about the teaching of the historical sciences to be a repudiation of Marxist-Leninist methodology. Prigozhin legalized the counter-revolutionary bourgeois teaching of history, particularly in the literature department, where the teaching of ancient and medieval history and history of ancient medieval literature and art is the monopoly of old nonparty professors, who in fact pursue bourgeois political directives, skillfully disguising them with “witticisms” and an “objective” exposition of the subject matter.
Prigozhin’s policies thus meant that a department in a Soviet ideological higher educational institution was handed over to a large group of enemies of our party and of Soviet power.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 146

FOREIGN AGENTS WORK TO OVERTHROW THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT

He [Orlov] had been an early member of the Cheka, and underground Soviet “illegal” in the 1930s in many European capitals and he was the NKVD rezident in Republican Spain when he left his post in Barcelona in the summer of 1938….
Costello, John and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly illusions. New York: Crown, c1993, p. xi

Orlov’s contribution was so far-reaching that a former senior CIA officer describes him as “the single most versatile, powerful, and productive officer in the 73 year history of the Soviet intelligence services.”
Costello, John and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly illusions. New York: Crown, c1993, p. 389

Exploiting the political turmoil of the civil war with a natural talent for deception and disguise, Reilly was soon running extensive underground operations in Russia for Lockhart and MI6. Using forged documentation, he managed to get himself appointed a commissar for the transportation of automobile spare parts during the evacuation of Petrograd, commuting to his apartment in Moscow on the special train reserved for Bolshevik officials. Dispensing several million rubles to the clergy through Patriarch Tikhon, Reilly’s plotting culminated in his bribing of the commander of a Lettish division of riflemen, Berzin, who had been introduced by Reilly to Lockhart as a potential leader of a military putsch to overthrow the Petrograd Revolutionary Government.
Costello, John and Oleg Tsarev. Deadly illusions. New York: Crown, c1993, p. 22-23

(Sinclair’s comments only)
That Germany and Poland, Romania and Japan have been filling the Soviet Union with spies and provocateurs is something which no sensible person will doubt for a moment. If such persons were sent into this country [the United States], and committed wholesale wrecking of machinery and destruction of human life, we should shoot them; and no doubt other nations which were getting ready to make war on us would denounce it as a terrible and barbarous action.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia?: Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 13

(Sinclair’s comments only)
You speak to the “obscene show trials.” I have searched your letter for any hint of the possibility that some men may actually have been guilty of waging war against the present Stalin regime inside Russia. I searched also in vain for any hint as to what Hitler and Araki [Japanese leader], to say nothing of the militarists of Great Britain, Poland, Romania, etc., may have been doing, or trying to do, inside the Soviet Union.
To me it seems the most elementary of political and military inevitabilities that secret war should be going on against the Soviet Union, and that reactionary intriguers provided with unlimited funds should be making whatever use they can of revolutionary extremism inside that country.
Arguments have a way of centering about personalities, and the question has become whether Trotsky accepted help from Hitler. I do not know anything about that, and I am not especially interested in it, because Trotsky does not loom that much in my mind. But I know that when unlimited funds are available, and when subtle and highly trained agents are working inside a political movement to use it, they can find plenty of ways of passing out money while keeping secret the sources from which the money has come.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia?: Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 26

I remember another attempt to penetrate the Comintern in about 1927, when Otto introducted me to a Hungarian communist named Thomsen: he made a good impression, spoke fluent German, and seemed a highly promising addition to Otto’s staff. But, less than a week later, he was arrested, as his photograph and details were found recorded in a list of anti-Communist agents drawn up by the German Party. Naturally he was executed.
Kuusinen, Aino. The Rings of Destiny. New York: Morrow, 1974, p. 75

…there is nothing unusual, strange, fantastic, in the revelations of the Rajk and Kostov trials. The use of agents to penetrate the working-class movement and disrupt it from within is as old as capitalism itself. The methods of espionage and provocation exposed at the trials, far from being “un-British” or “un-American,” were methods that were first developed on a wide scale by British capitalism and have been developed to their fullest extent by the stoolpigeon state of America.
Between the First and Second World Wars, it became the regular habit of the Intelligence Services of the great capitalist powers to infiltrate spies, not only into the working-class and progressive movements of their own countries, but also into those of the smaller capitalist states. The secret services of the weaker capitalist states, including the states of Eastern Europe, were trained by, and often came under the indirect supervision of, the Intelligence of the great powers. Now M.I.5, now the Gestapo, now American intelligence, and now the French Deuxieme Bureau, would issue its orders and receive its reports. Some of the stoolpigeons and even police chiefs of the smaller powers would often take orders (and money) from several great powers at the same time. In any case, whilst all the great powers were busy spying on each other, they all had an equal interest in perfecting the machinery to disrupt and spy on the working-class and progressive movements of all countries.
And if they were ready to play their part in spying on and disrupting the working-class and progressive movement of the world when it was fighting in opposition to capitalism and reaction, how much more did the Intelligence services of the great powers endeavor to penetrate and disrupt the working-class movement in the country where the workers ruled–the USSR! From October 1917 to spy on the Soviet Union became the central task of every capitalist Intelligence service throughout the world–to penetrate into the CPSU its highest aim. Hundreds of White Russians were employed by political and military Intelligence in Britain, France, Germany, America. Anti-Soviet hatred became the motor force of capitalist Intelligence.
It was from this that flowed the immense interest of all the capitalist Intelligence services in the Trotskyist and other factional currents in the world Communist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Wherever groups could be discovered in Communist Parties that were secretly covering up their existence, that were deviating from Marxism-Leninism, that were nursing personal grudges and grievances and hiding them from the party, imperialist Intelligence became interested.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 73

Thus the imperialists’ Intelligence services went all out to recruit the Trotskyites and other secret groupings like Bukharinites and Zinovievites into their ranks, swelled these factions with their own specially trained agents, and above all in the ’30s Trotskyism became a type of police Marxism, a platform for agents in the labor movement. In Germany and Poland, as well as in the West, police agents specializing in the labor movement were given special courses in Trotskyism.
The contradictions of capitalism, deepening between the wars, did not allow the dreams of the imperialists, the dreams of a world-wide united capitalist crusade against the Soviet Union, to come to fruition. The Second World War was not the war they had dreamed of. The Intelligence services of Germany, Britain, France, and America found themselves technically at war with each other. But Western Intelligence, trained on anti-Sovietism, could not lightly give up its aims. Though British and American Intelligence personnel were technically at war with the Gestapo, with the Abwehr, for the most part the real enemy remained the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties, the working-class and progressive movements of all countries.
Annabelle Bucar, who worked for a time for the OSS, wrote in The Truth about American Diplomats:
“Working in the OSS, I very soon discovered that the main Intelligence activities of the organization were directed not only against Germany but also against the Soviet Union…. The anti-Soviet direction of the activities of the American Intelligence organizations is confirmed by the fact that during the war which the United States fought in alliance with the Soviet Union against fascist Germany, the Russian subdivision was the largest in the OSS.”
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 75-76

Ever since the October Revolution of 1917, the great imperialist powers have worked more and more ruthlessly to develop a system of spies and provocateurs, not only in their own countries, not only in their own countries, not only in their colonial or dependent territories, not only in other weaker capitalist states, but especially to penetrate the USSR, the country where the working people led by the working-class first assumed power.
The great imperialist states worked between the wars to develop a system of spies and agents as a fifth column against the first socialist state. In the Soviet Union the great conspiracy of the imperialists which began with Kolchak and Denikin continued with Trotsky & Bukharin.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 78

But here is the Socialist Courier, published in Paris on March 25, 1937: ” There is no question that the Germans have managed to have their agents in the USSR penetrate the most responsible positions.”
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 446

SOME KOMSOMOL MEMBERS FREELY AND OPENLY EXPRESS ANTI-SOVIET VIEWS

In the Komsomol, for example, there was surprisingly frank resistance to Stalinism as late as 1935. The Secret Archive from Smolensk province reveals the extent of this feeling. In a Komsomol discussion on the Kirov assassination, one member is quoted as saying, “When Kirov was killed they allowed free trade in bread; when Stalin is killed, all the kolkhozes will be divided up.”… Another teacher accused Stalin of having transformed the party into a gendarmerie over the people. A nine-year-old Pioneer was reported to have shouted, “Down with Soviet Power! When I grow up, I’m going to kill Stalin.” An eleven year old schoolboy was overheard saying, “Under Lenin we lived well, but under Stalin we live badly.” And a 16 year old student was said to have declared, “They killed Kirov ; now let them kill Stalin.” There were even occasional expressions of sympathy for the opposition.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 51

As we have seen, openly seditious remarks were noted in their (the youngest generation of Communists) ranks by the NKVD. More threatening still, the Kirov murder inspired various groups to talk of, and even to plan, in an amateurish fashion which was no match for the police of the new regime, the killing of Stalin.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 78

SOME PEOPLE HAD TO BE CONVINCED TO WITHDRAW THEIR CAPITAL CONFESSIONS

Sylakov and his fellow accused were re-interrogated with the view to getting them to withdraw their confessions. Some of them, fearing a trick, refused, and had…to force them to withdraw false confessions involving them in crimes carrying the death penalty! Sylakov himself was finally sentenced to three years imprisonment for denunciation only.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 254

TROTSKY WILLING TO SACRIFICE HIS PROJECTS TO GAIN YOUNG PEOPLE OPPOSING STALIN

Both Davidovitch [Trotsky] and Abramovich [Yoffe] gave the impression of men so obsessed with their party feud with Koba that they would swallow anything, even be willing to sacrifice important projects they themselves had advocated simply in order to win the political support of the younger Communists….
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 25

MIKOYAN SUPPORTS ARRESTS OF HIS STAFF WORKING WITH THE OPPOSITION

Arrests are being carried out among members of the Commissariat for Foreign Trade. Mikoyan doesn’t stand up for his staff. His logic is simple: any supporter of the Opposition is a “son of a bitch.”
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 144

SEDOV SAYS SMIRNOV WORKED WITH GROUPS TO FORM AN ANTI-STALIN BLOC

While working on the portion of Trotsky’s archive which opened in 1980, the American historian J. Arch Getty and the French historian Broue, independently of each other, discovered documents which indicate that Trotsky and Sedov entered into contact with participants in an anti-Stalinist bloc which was being formed. Thus, in a report to the International Secretariat of the Left Opposition written in 1934, Sedov stated that members of Smirnov’s group, who had broken in 1929 with the Left Opposition, three years later had once again rejoined it and conducted negotiations with members of other former opposition groups about creating and anti-Stalinist bloc.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 62

STALIN SAYS CONSPIRATORS DON’T LEAVE DOCUMENTS AND WRITTEN STATEMENTS

The writer [Feuchtwanger] recalled that he told Stalin “about the poor impression which was made abroad, even on people favorably disposed to the USSR, by the overly simple devices in the Zinoviev trial. Stalin laughed a bit at those who, before agreeing to believe in a conspiracy, demand to see a large number of written documents; experienced conspirators, he noted, rarely are accustomed to keeping their documents in an open place.” Stalin aroused particular trust in Feuchtwanger by the fact that he spoke “with sorrow and consternation” about his friendly attitude toward Radek, who nevertheless had betrayed him.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 129

ELIMINATION OF SPIES AND TRAITORS HELPED THE NATION RATHER THAN DEMORALIZED IT

[Report to the 18th Congress on March 10, 1939]
Certain foreign pressmen have been talking drivel to the effect that the purging of Soviet organizations of spies, assassins and wreckers like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengoltz, Bukharin and other fiends has “shaken” the Soviet system and caused its “demoralisation.” All this cheap drivel deserves is laughter and scorn. How can the purging of Soviet organizations of noxious and hostile elements shake and demoralize the Soviet system? This Trotsky-Bukharin bunch of spies, assassins, and wreckers, who kowtowed to the foreign world, who were possessed by a slavish instinct to growel before every foreign bigwig and were ready to serve him as spies–this handful of people who did not understand that the humblest Soviet citizen, being free from the fetters of capital, stands head and shoulders above any high-placed foreign bigwig whose neck wears the yoke of capitalist slavery–who needs this miserable band of venal slaves, of what value can they be to the people, and whom can they “demoralize”? In 1937 Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevitch and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the supreme Soviet of the USSR were held. In these selections, 98.6 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power. At the beginning of 1938 Rosengoltz, Rykov, Bukharin and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics were held. In these elections 99.4 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet power. Where are the symptoms of “demoralisation,” we would like to know, and why was this “demoralisation” not reflected in the results of the elections?
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 368

FROM REVOLUTION ONWARD THE SU WAS ALWAYS AT WAR AND HAD TO RESTRICT FREEDOM

(Sinclair’s comments only)
From my point of view, the Russians have been at war during the past 20 years. It has been not merely a war of blockade, of intrigue and sabotage and spying and wholesale lying, it has also been a preparation against military attack, a mere lull between battles. I have known for 20 years that the Russians were going to be attacked again whenever reaction felt that it had the power. I have told them that on every occasion, and have never blamed them for defending themselves and preparing for further defense. Their political liberties in the meantime have been and could be only such as are possible for a people at war; and if you remember the years 1917 to 1920 in our own country, you know that they are not the ideal civil liberties such as we all hope to enjoy in the co-operative commonwealth of the future.
And now have come Mussolini, and then Hitler, and then the Mikado. I used to be asked, during our EPIC campaign, to define Fascism, and my answer was, “Fascism is capitalism plus murder.” A year or more ago, addressing the Western Writers Congress, I made the statement that “Al Capone is a scholar, a statesman, and a gentleman compared with the men who are running Italy and Germany today.” The events which have come to our unhappy world since that time cause me to add Franco and the Japanese gangsters to that list.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia?: Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 22

[A GPU official, Denisov, said to Ciliga] “Our responsibility is too great for us to afford the luxury of the broad democracy of which you dream. Abroad your criticism of the Soviet regime would not benefit the proletariat but only the bourgeois and fascist counter-revolution. If the Revolution of 1918 had spread to Germany and the rest of Europe then, of course, with the support of the more highly developed West, our regime would be better, more ideal, life would have been easier, criticism more free, democracy less restricted. But we have remained alone in the most difficult circumstances.”
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 489

[Denisov, a GPU official, also said] “You are a strange person, Ciliga. Why is it that you don’t want to understand hard reality, the painful truth: one can’t build socialism with kid gloves.”
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 495

EVEN FOREIGNERS AGREE WITH THE SU SUPPRESSING A POSSIBLE RETURN TO CAPITALISM

(Sinclair’s comments only)
I have had much to say in books and magazines and newspaper statements widely published in the Soviet Union. I have told them that no physical and moral enslavement they can suffer under their own collectivist system is to be compared to the physical and moral enslavement they will suffer if the predatory capitalist powers are able to overcome them in war, or to seduce them by propaganda and intrigue. I have told them to preserve their unity, and to consider themselves in a state of siege, and to prepare to resist the onslaughts of the capitalist world–which they are diligently doing, as you know.
Just how capitalist attack will come, and what nations will take part in it, I do not attempt to guess. Hitler has all ready stated his intention to seize the Ukraine with its treasures. Japan has made perfectly plain its intention to cut off Siberia at Lake Baikal. We now see that Hitler is going to have the help of Austria, and will probably make a deal with Poland and divide the Baltic states with that country, so as to have the help of all these. It seems likely that he will swallow and digest Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and maybe Rumania, before he feels “the day” has come.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia?: Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 55

(Sinclair’s comments only)
The capitalist-Fascist war against the Soviet Union seems to me as certain as anything in human affairs can be. And this, which to me is the one “terrific immediacy,” is to you merely a “rationalization.” I can only repeat that in my view the Soviet Union is today a city under siege, and its people enjoy only such liberties as are possible under those circumstances. Whether such limitation of liberty is right or wrong is a subject which ethical theorists may debate, but the universal experience of mankind is that the people in besieged cities are simply not permitted to intrigue, or even to agitate, against the regime which is defending the city. When they confess to having performed actions of conspiracy and sabotage, they are treated as spies and traitors. As you know, we hanged Major Andre, and you can hardly doubt that we should have hanged Benedict Arnold if we had been able to catch him.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia?: Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 57

TROTSKY CRITICIZES PYATAKOV

The military oppositionists included, for example, Pyatakov, the present director of the State Bank. He usually joined every opposition, only to wind up as a government official. Three or four years ago, when Pyatakov belonged to the same group as I did, I prophesied in jest that in the event of a Bonapartist coup d’etat, Pyatakov would go to the office the next day with his brief-case. Now I can add more earnestly that if this fails to come about, it will only be through lack of a Bonapartist coup d’etat and not through any fault of Pyatakov’s. In the Ukraine, he enjoyed considerable influence, not by accident but because he is a fairly well-educated Marxist, especially in the realm of economics, and is undoubtedly a good administrator, with a reserve of will. In the early years, Pyatakov showed revolutionary energy, but it later changed to a bureaucratic conservatism. In fighting his semi-anarchist views, I resorted to giving him an important post from the very outset, so that he would have to change from words to deeds. This method is not new, but often is very efficacious. His administrative sense soon prompted him to apply the very methods against which he had been waging his war of words.
Trotsky, Leon. My Life. Gloucester, Massachusetts: P. Smith, 1970, p. 439

RUSSIAN EMIGRES DID EVERYTHING TO OVERTHROW THE SOVIET GOVT

The Russian emigre organizations did, after all, engage in political warfare against the USSR and disseminated all kinds of disinformation.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 86

HARD FOR SPIES TO SPY ON A CENTRALLY PLANNED SYSTEM LIKE IN THE SU

[From Kurt Tippelskirch. History of World War II. Foreign Literature Publishing House, Moscow, 1956]
“Espionage, which in other countries was conducted under the guise of harmless private business activity, was, in fact, useless in the Soviet Union’s conditions of the centrally planned economic management….”
Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 302

SEDOV BEGAN REVOLUTIONARY WORK AT A VERY YOUNG AGE

Thus, at 17 [in 1922] he [Trotsky’s son Sedov] began the life of a fully conscious revolutionist. He quickly grasped the art of conspiratorial work, illegal meetings, and the secret issuing and distribution of Opposition documents. The Komsomol rapidly developed its own cadres of Opposition leaders.
Trotsky, Leon. Leon Sedoff. New York City: Young People’s Socialist League, (Fourth Internationalists), 1938, p. 8

During the first years of emigration he [Sedov] engaged in a vast correspondence with Oppositionists in the USSR. But by 1932 the GPU destroyed virtually all our connections. It became necessary to seek fresh information through devious channels. Leon Sedov was always on the lookout, avidly searching for connecting threads with Russia, hunting up returning tourists, soviet students assigned abroad, or sympathetic functionaries in the foreign representations.
Trotsky, Leon. Leon Sedoff. New York City: Young People’s Socialist League, (Fourth Internationalists), 1938, p. 15

DISRUPTION OF PARTY ACTIVITIES TOOK MANY FORMS

During a large Central Committee meeting, over the heads of the presidium from the ceiling, there flew a piece of cement from the rafters–landing right on the presidium table. The security did not dare cause a commotion, but in the evening, they went to investigate where this could have come from. Sure enough, someone put it there and with the movement in the meeting hall, opening and closing of doors, this piece of cement was meant to land and cause a furor.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 28

IMPERIALISTS NEVER STOPPED TRYING TO OVERTHROW THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT

The plots and conspiracies of imperialism against countries of socialism or People’s Democracy are not simple and do not follow a single line. The imperialists work through all possible channels– disposessed landlords or big industrialists, former leaders of the Army, police or secret police, through kulaks, nationalists, degenerate elements, drug addicts, former common criminals, through renegade Communists or right-wing labor leaders, through agents and provocateurs inserted into revolutionary organizations. They try to keep all possible contacts, all possible counter-revolutionary elements on their string at the same time….
This was shown clearly enough in the successive imperialist attempts to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, and to restore a Russian capitalism subservient to the West. First they tried through the open war of intervention to base themselves on the Tsarist White Guards, on the Russian landlords and capitalists, the old officers and police. When this failed, for a long period they tried to base their counter-revolutionary conspiracies on the kulaks, and when the kulaks were finally eliminated as a class, it was the secret agents of imperialism inside the Communist Party, the Trotskyite and other parallel “opposition” groups hitherto a reserve, who became in the middle thirties their main hope, their main weapon, for the overthrow of socialism and the reversal of history.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 45-46

[As Stalin stated to a meeting of Activists of the Moscow Committee of the CPSU on April 13, 1928]: It would be stupid to imagine that international capital will leave us in peace. No, comrades, this is not so. Classes exist, international capital exists and it cannot calmly view the development of the country building Socialism. (Stalin Collected Works, VOL. 11, pp. 54-55)
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 55

…if the whole history of the Soviet Union, encircled and isolated in its age-old poverty and backwardness, had not been an almost uninterrupted sequence of calamities, emergencies, and crises threatening the nation’s very existence. Almost every emergency and crisis posed all major issues of national policy on the knife’s edge, set the Bolshevik factions and groupings at loggerheads,….
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 464

FASCISTS SUPPRESS ALL LEFTIST WRITINGS EXCEPT THOSE OF TROTSKY

In Mussolini’s Italy of the 1930s, when it meant long terms of imprisonment, and perhaps torture or even death, to be in any way connected with the Communist Party, and when not only all the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, but the works of all Italian and foreign democrats and progressives were strictly banned from Italian libraries and bookshops, the works of Trotsky, on the “new kind of communism” were “freely” and widely translated and distributed. I remember vividly how in 1938, passing through Italy on the way to meet the anti-fascist and Communist students of Belgrade University, and spending a few hours in Mussolini’s Milan, the word “communism” caught my eye on a number of books prominently displayed in a bookshop window. They were newly translated works of Trotsky.
In Hitler’s Germany, when to be a Communist or Socialist or militant trade unionist or liberal or democrat meant arrest, the concentration camp, and often death and torture, when there was instituted one of the most thoroughgoing “purges” of literature and burning of books that the world has ever known, when Schiller’s Don Carlos, the poems of Heine, and the novels of Thomas Mann were banned or burned as “subversive,” the writings of Trotsky were widely translated and distributed.
Trotsky’s writings and those of his followers were freely published in the middle and late 30s by the Hearst Press in America. His works on his “new kind of communism” were published by the Franco Press at Salamanca and Burgos. The secret police of the Polish dictatorship were specially educated in Trotskyism in order to facilitate their work of espionage and disruption inside the Polish working-class movement.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 81-82

A LOT OF POST WWII SUBVERSIVE AND TRAITOROUS ACTIONS BY HIGH OFFICIALS

[Report by the Secretary of the Central Committee, Kuznetsov, regarding the Terms of Reference for Elections of the “Honor Courts”–Sept. 29, 1947]

Our Central Committee has uncovered the slavish attitude and cooperation with and detrimental dealings with foreign powers by the former director of the HydroMeteorological Complex–Fedorov. Let me just say the following: that all of our materials which we utilize in the sphere of HydroMeteorological work, in this sphere also top-secret inventions and research documents, found themselves in the hands of the British and Americans; besides this, English and American agents were permitted to work and direct their activities without hindrance, as if they were in their own home. Only the following facts show the extent of the activity of these agents: I’m just giving a sketchy analysis of what transpired between this Director and the American Military Attache and the Naval Attache–the director and these attaches met 88 times, the Director of the hydroelectrical and meteorological enterprises from the USA met with the Director–55 times; employees of the British and American embassies met with the Director 41 times.
This came to such a point that the Director of our Ministry had built a special secure office, where these foreign spies behaved as if this Ministry and enterprise belonged to them and besides this, they found out all of our secrets. On top of this, the American and British spies were given documents which were marked by the military as “TOP SECRET,” only for the “Research Staff.” Systematically, there followed letters, schematic detailed drawings, analyses of projects, plus the secret directives and plans of the Central Committee regarding future self-defense projects. By the decision of the Central Committee and Soviet of Ministers, Fedorov was dismissed from his post and his rank as General was taken away from him and he will be tried by the ” Honor Court.”
In the Ministry of Agriculture, the Director of the All Union Institute of plant-growing research, Shlykov sent to a foreign agricultural expert–at that time in Moscow–a couple of years old research samples of alfalfa. In his letter to this American, he promised to send…him the researched seeds of great value to the Soviet State. In this, he was not successful; he was caught beforehand.
In the Ministry of Transport (railways), Professor Popov, trying to make an impression in foreign countries, published in an American journal an article on the “Theory of Orthopedic Focus.” The article has a very important analysis for our country in doing designs for transportation railway cars on our railways system. In this article, all the research that our state paid for was given free of charge to the Americans.
I will not go into details about what we found in the Ministry of Oil and Gas, in the Forest Ministry, in the Academy of Sciences, in many Ministries and establishments of the research and technical spheres.
I will also not dwell on the details of this “slavish bending of the knee” in front of foreign powers by some sections of our intelligentsia. They were outlined in detail in the Secret Letter that you received from the Central Committee of the party.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 80-82

Let us take another example. Not too long ago, the Ministry of State Control uncovered actions by the Northern Research Institute which is responsible for studying the northern regions around the North Pole. Secret research materials were sold to the Americans. Americans received over 2000 books, brochures, data and research materials with concrete results of our research in the last 25 years of our labor and expense. And you know now how the Americans are studying and showing keen interest in the northern regions of our country, just across the North Pole. All that we accumulated by our scientists about the North in the last 25 years–all this research material was given to Americans.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 86

We do have such people in our Central Committee, we must keep in mind the fact that foreign secret services are always trying to get to the heart of our party–to get their agents both internal and external–into the Central Committee. If the foreign secret services cannot get into their net a worker of the Central Committee, then they try through their family or friends.
Here are some examples. In these examples, I will name families. I will not judge them here now, but they were in the employ of our Central Committee and are now expelled.
At the beginning of this year, a [young female] student studying foreign languages, Kharlamova, who was tied in with foreign secret agents,….got acquainted with an American spy, Tokarev, [who was] working in the Central Committee of the party. Later it became known that Tokarev drank with this spy and talked. He did not report this to the Central Committee. Why did the [female] foreign secret service [agent] get interested? Because he was a nice looking man, it would be a pleasure to get to know him? No. It was necessary through this worker to find out what was happening in the Central Committee.
Another example. In the Central Committee apparatus, there worked a certain Kalinin, who, through his sister, was acquainted with a woman who was in the employ of the American secret service. This Kalinin met with this spy regularly, even sharing the same living quarters. Can we allow an employee, a Communist in the service of the Central Committee to work in the Central Committee any longer? He was removed,…
In our Central Committee, there worked a certain Chervintsev. He had contact, not with a low ranking British spy, but with the top Secretary of the British Embassy, while hiding this fact from the Central Committee.
Not too long ago, arrested after being uncovered as an agent of American secret services, director of foreign language publishing house, before that he had held the rank of Director of Ministry of Propaganda–Suchkov. His anti-Soviet feelings were somehow overlooked and he then boldly got in touch with an American spy agency and was taken on as a spy. Traveling to America and back while working in the USSR Embassy in Washington, he was giving secrets to the Americans over many years.
I would like to have an answer from Comrade Alexandrov and Comrade Shcherbakov. How was a person of this caliber raised and promoted into the Central Committee in a very responsible position?
Because he knew some foreign languages, is that the only criteria to have him employed in the Central Committee? He was hired as a specialist. Comrade Alexandrov often uses this word “specialist” when we ask him at the Politburo of the Central Committee. He defends his work by arguing that in “My department, there are 250 specialists.”
I ask, since when do we hire communists for the Central Committee apparatus who call themselves “specialists” and not Communists-Bolsheviks?
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 91-93

Voroshilov admitted also that: “I, as a People’s Commissar…must admit that I not only did not see or realize what these elements were preparing for our country, but even when our state security organs showed me irrefutable proof of people such as Gorbachev, Feldman, and others… [Gorbachev was a family relative of the late 1980s leader of the Soviet Union] I did not want to believe that these people, working with us could be capable of performing such terrible criminality. I am to blame in this very much…. I repeat again, that no one signaled to me or to the Central Committee about what these elements were preparing, that inside our Command, we have this counter-revolutionary conspiracy!”
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 102

STALIN EXPLAINS HOW SPYING GOT GOING AND HOW IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED

[In a June 1937 speech Stalin said], We can ask ourselves the question: How is it possible that these people yesterday were communists, and now have become deadly weapons against us? Why? Because they were compromised. Today, the Germans demand from them–give more information. If you will not give, we already have your passport and your papers, that you are now our employee, we shall publish them. Under the terror of being exposed, they give and gather information. Tomorrow, the German master’s demand: No, this is not enough, obtain more information and you will receive money, give us your papers and passport. After that, they demand–start spreading lies, start disrupting the work of the Central Committee. At the beginning, start arguments, diversions. If you will show that you are on our side, things will improve. If you do not comply, we shall expose you, tomorrow we shall give all this information to Soviet agents and your heads will roll. These people start diversions. After that, the Germans say– No, somehow you must start something in the Kremlin itself or in the Moscow Army Garrison and try to get [all] the top army-command posts you can. These newly recruited spies start to do whatever they can to fulfill the German commands so that they would not be exposed. Further, this also becomes too small and too little for the Germans. They demand something more concrete, more noteworthy. They comply by assassinating Kirov. Well, you will get paid, you did an excellent job. They are urged to go further, can’t you make certain that the whole government will be overthrown?
The spies then start organizing through Enukidze, through Gorbachev, Egorov, who was then the Commander of the Army School for Officers, which was situated in the Kremlin. They are told to organize a group who will then proceed to arrest the Government. News flashes back to the German High Command that there is such a group, we shall do everything, we shall arrest and go further. But according to the German Masters, this is not enough, to arrest and to kill a few dozens of responsible leaders–what about the people, the Army? Well, these spies reply that they have such a post, such a command in their hands and we ourselves, they state, are in command now, here we have Tukhachevsky, here we have Uborevitch, and here is Yakir.
…This is a military-political espionage, make no mistake [about it]. I feel that these people are marionettes and dolls in the hands of Reich intelligence. The German fascists wanted there to be a plot and these people started this conspiracy. The Reich wants these people to give them systematically military secrets and these elements started to gather the secrets and passed them on to their masters. The Reich wanted to change the government of the USSR, these traitors undertook this job as well, but they did not succeed. The Reich intelligence wanted that in case of war, everything would be ready for their success, that the Red Army would automatically go over to the German side, that our army would not be ready to defend our Motherland. This was wanted by the Reich and this is what these elements tried to accomplish. This “Agentura” was composed of 10 spies and three experienced leaders–13 spies that are traitors to our country. This conspiracy was not only an internal matter for our country–it became also an external policy of Germany and the political aims of the Reichstag intelligence agency. These people tried to make out of the USSR another Spain, by finding among us traitors, then they compromised them to do their bidding. This is the situation that we are facing now.
Tukhachevsky in particular, who played the role of a noble man, was not involved in small details. We considered him as a capable military figure. I asked him personally: “How could you, in the course of three months, allow the decimation of a division of soldiers to only 7000? What is this? This is an ignoramous, not a military leader. What kind of division is this [composed] of only 7000 soldiers? This is only a division without artillery, or a division with artillery but without escorts. In reality, this is not a division–this is shameful. How can you have allowed this to happen?” I asked Tukhachevsky: “How can you, a person who calls himself an expert in army matters, how can you demand that we comply with your wishes and make all of our divisions to be composed of only 7000 soldiers? Not only that, that our divisions have only 40-60 howitzers and 20 cannons. There could be only one of two things: either you eliminate all the equipment to the devil and only have cannons or eliminate the cannons and have just the other equipment! What is it going to be?” He tells me: “Comrade Stalin, you are exaggerating.” This is not exaggeration at all–this is sabotage being carried out by the German High Command.
There, you have this core and what it represents? Did these elements ever vote with Trotsky? Rudzutak never voted for Trotsky, but became a sleuth. Enukidze also never voted with Trotsky, but also became a spy. Well, here is your argument: who voted for whom?
What about the question of whether these enemies came from a landowner family? I do not know who is left of these people on trial, aside from Tukhachevsky. Class composition from where these elements come from has no significance. In every case, we must judge by the deeds, not family. For many years, these people had contact with German intelligence agencies and were performing espionage. Of course, most of them were vacillating and did not perform their work of espionage well. I believe that very few of them performed their spying from beginning to the logical end…. The German Reichswehr, as an enormous power, ensnared for itself dissatisfied elements, weak people, and weak people must do the bidding of their masters. A slave is always a slave if he so wishes. This is what is meant by falling into the trap of espionage. If you fall on this wheel, whether you want to or not, it will keep on turning on the road to the end. This is the basis. Not because of their politics, no one asked them about their politics. These are just people who do favors and get ensnared.
…They were in the service of German intelligence. The Germans commanded, gave orders, and these villains carried out the orders. These idiots thought that we are so blind, that we do not see anything. These villains wanted to arrest the Soviet government in the Kremlin. But it shows that we saw what was happening. They wanted to have in the Moscow Army Garrison their own people and to start an uprising in the army. They thought that no one will be able to detect their plans, that our country is helpless, that it is the Sahara, there are no people, but there is a working-class, farmers, an intelligentsia… a government and a party. It showed that we knew more than they thought possible….
Second question– Why was it possible for their masters to ensnare these people? We arrested around 300-400 people in the military. Among them are good people. How could they have been ensnared by Germany?
I cannot say that these people are capable, talented. How many times did these same people fight openly against Lenin, against the party of Lenin and after Lenin, and always, they were defeated. Now, they opened up a bigger campaign and they lost this battle also. You therefore cannot say that they were talented, starting in 1921 and ending up in 1937. Not very talented and not very genial people at all.
But, how was it possible for Germany to agitate and ensnare these people? This is a very serious question. I think that these German fascists were successful by this method! A person who is not satisfied, with whatever, not happy that he, a former highly placed Trotskyite or Zinovievite, and he is not being promoted as quickly as others, or not satisfied that he is not as capable as some of his peers, or he is not capable of performing the task that the party gave him, and consequently, he is being demoted according to his abilities, but he feels himself capable. It is sometimes very hard for a person to understand and accept his capabilities and his or her weaknesses. Some of these people felt that they are geniuses and when this genius is not recognized, he is dissatisfied and ready for any means to prove himself.
These people started from small, from an ideological grouping, then they proceeded further. They talked and argued like this: See my friends…the GPU [State Security] is now under our control, Yagoda is ours… the Kremlin is in our hands, so is Peterson with us, the Moscow military district is ours, Kork, Gorbachev are ours also. Everything is in our hands. Either we rise up now, or tomorrow, when we come to power, it might be too late. And many, who were weak, not rational people, [said], to hell with everything, this will be our chance. The plan is good, during that time we shall arrest the present government, we shall take over the Moscow Army Garrison and everything else will fall into place, and if I remain on the sidelines, I might be in the dust bin.
This attempt was not realistic. But these weak people thought along these lines: to hell with it, I cannot remain behind. Let me, as quickly as possible, involve myself in this adventure–otherwise, I might be left behind.
Of course, in this way, you can only agitate a small number of people. Of course, each character is different. Still, how was it possible to get these traitors involved in espionage? The enemy hypnotized them with glowing promises: tomorrow, everything will be in your hands, we are with you. The Kremlin is yours, you will work internally and we externally. This is the method of promises and rewards for the future.
Third question– why did we overlook such dangers for so long? There were sufficient signals. In February, there was the Plenum of the Central Committee. This question was on the agenda, but somehow we muddled and went through the session without taking any action… we did not raise the question of these elements working in the Red Army. Why was this not done? Maybe we are not very well organized people, or were we altogether blind? There is a different encompassing reason. Of course, the Army is not divorced from the people, from the party. As you well know in the party, we saw successes in all spheres of our country–this somehow made our heads spin from the economic, political and other successes that our country was achieving, day in, day out… life was becoming easier, political life was not bad, international prestige is growing for our country in the world, the army from top to bottom is in technological and military sciences growing, everything is going ahead at a fast pace, our strength is colossal, weaknesses are being overcome–this caused our vigilance to be lax, people then began to think, what else do we need? What is still lacking? Can there be any possibility of a counter-revolution brewing amongst us? There were such thoughts in our minds. We did not know at the beginning that this “seed” was already planted by the German Reichswehr. These agents knew that they must fulfill the German plans or they would be exposed and lose their heads.
As I mentioned, these successes made us complacent. This was exactly the moment that these agents thought that they would succeed.
…In all sections, we smashed the bourgeoisie, only in the sphere of intelligence service did we proceed like little boys, like children, trusting that everyone in this important service for the country was a dedicated party person and patriot. This was our weakness. Our intelligence in the military sphere is weak, it is full of spies and elements that do harm to our country. Our internal intelligence service was headed by a spy, Gai, while in the internal security, we discovered a nest of these spies working for Germany and Japan, for Poland, but not for us. Intelligence–this is the only sphere of our work that in the first 20 years we suffered a great defeat.
Now, the question remains before us to put this matter back on its feet. This agency is our eyes and ears. We must understand that the USSR has become an attraction for spies. A great country, great railway system, navy is growing, agriculture is on an incline of production, collective and state farms are being more and more mechanized and effective, industrial potential is great. This is such an inviting bit of sweetcake for the imperialists, that they’ll do everything to get their hands on this delicacy. History always proved that enemies will always covet a country such as ours… in this respect, we became a bit too complacent. Germany is trying to grab our riches. Japan has always sending their spies into our country–it has its constant nest within our midst. They want to grab our Pacific region, the others want to grab Leningrad. We overlooked this, we did not want to understand. As we proceeded to enrich our country, our life, we became a sweet piece of fruit that our enemies dearly wanted.
In their quest, the enemies were able to get our traitors involved in their plans, because they will not be satisfied as long as our country is intact. We overlooked this question. That is why our security system is not adequate and is ill-prepared for this onslaught. We were beaten in this sphere as children by a bully.
But this is not all, that our internal security system is bad. Fine! We now know this. But this is not all. We talked today that there were signals about this question. Yes, there were, but very haphazard. But the signals were weak, not enough of them…. WE DEPEND ON THE PARTY COMRADES TO BE THE EYES AND EARS OF OUR COUNTRY. WE, AT THE CENTER, ARE NOT ALWAYS AWARE OF THESE PROBLEMS. PEOPLE HAVE A TENDENCY TO THINK THAT THE CENTER KNOWS EVERYTHING, SEES EVERYTHING. NO, THE CENTER IS NOT ALWAYS ABLE TO SEE AND HEAR AND KNOW EVERYTHING. THE CENTER SEES AND KNOWS ONLY A PART, THE REST SHOULD BE SEEN BY THE PEOPLE THAT ARE IN EVERY CORNER OF OUR COUNTRY.
WE SEND PEOPLE, BUT WE DO NOT KNOW THESE PEOPLE 100%–YOU MUST SEE WHO THEY ARE. THERE IS ONE SURE SIGN OF KNOWING WHOM WE SEND TO WORK IN YOUR DISTRICT… HOW THEY FULFIL THEIR WORK, THEIR ATTITUDES AND RESULTS. THEY CAN ONLY BE DONE BY PEOPLE IN THE LOCALITIES, NOT BY THE CENTER IN MOSCOW.
An example of what Comrade Gorbachev told us about one aspect of this sabotage [concerns] what was proposed innocently regarding the quality of our army rifles which in all respects are still manufactured according to designs approved by these elements in a position to make decisions–our army rifles are practically a sports rifle….
… the groove and bore of the rifle were changed; thus making the mainspring weak and not as effective as it should be. This is not a small matter, comrades. Our soldiers’ lives depend on their rifles! I received a letter from a rank-and-file Red Army soldier complaining that this should be looked into. Some defend Vasilenko who is responsible for this section, others condemn him. In the long run, it was proved that it was he who is to blame for this. We did not know that this was done purposely on instruction from his German bosses. After investigation, who was this Vasilenko? We found out that he was actually a spy. He himself admitted this. From what year, Comrade Yezhov?
YEZHOV: From 1926.
STALIN: Of course, he calls himself a Trotskyite, where else could Trotskyites go other than to spying.
You comrades are not vigilant enough, you do not give us signals about some of the problems. You have people who are not altogether 100% reliable. At the Center, we haven’t enough such people to fill all the needs of the whole country. Your task is to see who these people are, how they work on the job that they were assigned. Every member of the party, every non-party citizen of the USSR not only has the right, but an obligation to let us know about the problems. [Even] if only 5% of the people reported the problems, the sabotage, or anti-Soviet performance by the people we send out to their respective posts, this would be a step forward. The people should send these complaints to their local authorities and a copy to the Central Committee CPSU. Whoever said that these letters should only be written to the local authorities? That is not correct.
…They should write to everyone with complaints–if no results are obtained, they should write to the Central Committee as often as need be!
If this correct road would be followed, and this is Lenin’s truth–you will not find any person in the Central Committee CPSU that would have a bad word to save regarding this method–if you would follow this road, we at the Center would have been able to solve many of the problems that are confronting us now.
This is in regard to receiving signals from below.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 115-127

[In a June 1937 speech Stalin said], We depend from time to time on having input from below–we do not always see the whole picture. We cannot know what is going on all over the country. This is impossible. We depend on people there, on the spot.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 176

STALIN EXPLAINS TO BLUKER HOW HE SHOULD TELL THE MILITARY ABOUT FINDING TRAITORS

[In a June 1937 speech STALIN said]: If I were in your [Blukher] place, the commander of OKDVA, I would approach this matter in this way: I would gather the top commanders and explain in detail about our discussions. Then I would gather the lower rank commanders and with you present, I would explain to them in less detail–but it should be done very correctly, that the Army personnel should know that we have among us certain elements that have begun to sell their country to the enemy, that these arrested commanders and highly placed personnel are just as much our enemies as are the German and Japanese fascists. We’re going to cleanse our Army from these elements, do not panic, they will all be found out, sentenced. This is the way I would go about this difficult task.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 135

STALIN SAYS ENTANGLED SPIES MUST BE ENCOURAGED TO COME FORWARD AND CONFESS

[In a June 1937 speech Stalin said], Since army regulations do not allow criticism in the ranks, let us come up here with our plan of action, pick five comrades from the Military who will launch this criticism….
We must be certain that those we pick are reliable and not hidden agents of the arrested ones.
…This is not an idle question. I think that among our people, among commanders, among political cadres, there are also such comrades who are without knowing it involved in this conspiracy. He might have been told something, they wanted to agitate him to join, threatened him, compromised him. We must save these people, after they tell us the truth. Are there such people in the command?
VOICES: Of course. Absolutely!
STALIN: These traitors worked five years, they must have had some success. If among them someone realizes that this whole plot has become known, they would recant, tell all. These people should be saved.
… We should absolve the beguiled ones. We should forgive, we must give them our solemn promise!
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 137-138

STALIN SAYS CAPITALISTS SURROUND THE SU & ALWAYS READY TO ATTACK OR STRANGLE

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated]…Facts from the reports at this Plenum prove beyond doubt that the lack of vigilance exists and we are paying a price for this by seeing more and more sabotage being done by these enemies. How can we explain this lack of attention? How do we explain the fact that our comrades, schooled as they are in fighting our political enemies, have obviously ignored our pleas and suggestions?
Maybe our party comrades became worse than they were before, became less attentive and disciplined? No, this is not the case! Maybe our comrades were starting to be re-born into unbelievers in socialism? Again, this is not so! Then what is the problem? Where did this blindness and non-vigilance come from?
The answer is closer to these facts: party comrades, overburdened with the economic and agricultural work, dealing with colossal victories, unfortunately forgot a about some very relevant facts that all Bolsheviks have no right to forget. They forgot that the Soviet Union finds itself surrounded by capitalist states. We like to talk about capitalism and its surrounding us around our country, but these comrades do not seriously understand what this encirclement means to us. We are only one country building socialism, but all the other countries are capitalist, just waiting for our weak points to appear and pounce on us, if not liquidating us as a whole, they try to weaken us, dismember us, plus find weak people who would do this job for them.
Our comrades forgot these facts in their excitement over our victories. Naive people could only think that there should be or are good relations between us and them. The truth is that even among the capitalist states there is disunity. These capitalist states also send spies into each other’s territory.
It is far from the truth that capitalist states have “good relations” between themselves. This is a fact–markets, conquest, and competition for markets that brings these countries sometimes to war with each other. It was like this before, and it is like this now. Spies are in each other’s country–in England, U.S.A., France, Germany, Japan, and other developed countries.
Why should the capitalist countries treat us less cruelly than they treat each other, some may ask? It is exactly the opposite. Why should they send into our country fewer spies than they do into each other’s? Where is this fallacy among some of our comrades coming from? It is a fact, as Marxists, we should know that as long as there is capitalism, they will keep sending into our midst spies, assassins, saboteurs, and provocateurs.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 230-231

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], We must never forget the fact of the encirclement of the Soviet Union by capitalist states. This is a fact of life, that we cannot afford to forget or let our guard down. We must also impress on the people the fact, that as long as there are capitalist states surrounding us, there will be spies, sabotage, diversionists, terrorists, all sent into the Soviet Union by our class enemies. We must struggle with those comrades who still do not believe the dangers that are facing the USSR. Explain to them that no matter what colossal achievements we might make, this will not stop these enemies from trying to subvert our people, our policies, and our defenses.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 238

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], …There is no longer the need for discussions and debates, trying to win them over to our side–we must use the methods of unmasking and of liquidating these enemies.
We must explain that our previous enemies were technically superior to us, and thus we were forced to rely on their services. The modern enemies have a party card in their hands, and wave it for all to see how “patriotic” they are, it’s easy for these enemies to fool our people, to fool them on political grounds, since people trust the communists –in this then, lies the danger.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 239

They could have no idea, he [British Cabinet Minister Anderson] told Radek, of how bitterly all other countries hated the Soviet Union, how determined they were to crush her at the first opportunity. Radek was so impressed that he not only reported to Stalin at once, but insisted on a special directive to all foreign communist parties. If Henderson, the ‘arch-opportunist’, thought it necessary to give this private warning, how acute the danger must be!
Berger, Joseph. Nothing but the Truth. New York, John Day Co. 1971, p. 86

TROT TRAITORS ARE MUCH BETTER DISGUISED THAN THE OPENLY BOURGEOIS AGENTS

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], This is the tactic of modern Trotskyites–hide everything even from the leadership–except 3-5 people at the top.
Contemporary Trotskyism is not a political idea–they are without principles, diversionists, spies, agents, killers, a band of die-hard enemies of socialism and of the working class, working for the secret services of foreign countries. This is the kind of evolution in the last 7-8 years of Trotskyism.
If you remember, [the defendants in the Shakhty trial] were foreign to us–they were former businessmen, landowners, former company directors, former stock exchange directors, former bourgeois specialists, who were openly our political enemies. None of our people could be taken in by these enemies. They openly showed their hatred of us. But this, we cannot say, applies to modern Trotskyites. The modern enemies, such as Trotskyites, were all former communist party members. These people were not looked upon as foreigners. If the older enemies were going against the masses openly, the modern traitors use flattery, bow before the other communists, go to all ends to praise socialism and our leaders, in order that we will accept them as our own. There is a difference, you see!
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 234

STALIN WARNS ABOUT SUCCESSES PRODUCING COMPLACENCY

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], Victories are great, our growth of socialism is the admiration of the working-class of the world. But… successes have their negative side also. Successes in most people produced dullness in vigilance, self-satisfaction in outlook, just pure consumerism happiness, oblivious to other factors that are working at the same time. Here, I must remind our comrades of the danger of successes.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 236

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], We must discard the theory that is being perpetuated by enemies, that with every successful step we take, with every new step forward towards socialism, our class enemy becomes weaker and slowly but surely will evolve into a communist and support socialism. This is not only a wrong theory, but it is extremely dangerous because it makes our people unaware of the danger and takes them away from being vigilant towards the class enemy.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 240

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], The situation is the other way around, as more and more successes pile up in our building of socialism. The enemies will more and more become bold, ruthless, more sharper struggles will occur, the more sabotage these elements will perpetrate on the Soviet Union–they will go over towards more and more terroristic attacks against the state and its leaders.
It is imperative to defeat and discard another theory that is being promoted, stating that, an enemy cannot be an enemy unless he is constantly deriding socialism, or, how can he be an enemy if he is fulfilling his given task and also over-fulfilling it? This strange theory reveals the naivete of its authors. Not every enemy will always criticize and do harm to socialism; otherwise, he would be unmasked in no time. The opposite is true–the hidden enemy works even harder than maybe a dedicated Bolshevik–but at any given opportunity, he will sabotage, if he can. I think that this question is very clear and we do not have to dwell on it.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 241

STALIN SAYS IT TAKES MANY TO BUILT BUT ONLY A FEW TO DESTROY

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], What about the well-known horde of journalists-writers in America headed by a well-known crook, Eastman, all these crooks of the pen, who live there and heap lies upon us and the working-class of the USSR–are they not a reserve for Trotskyism?
To build a steel, iron bridge, it needs thousands of people, from raw materials to builders to operators, but to destroy the bridge, you need only a couple of saboteurs.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 244

THE SOVIET LEADERS HAD GOOD REASONS TO FEAR IMMINENT ATTACKS

…Throughout the 1920s there were regular war scares, often based on the most trivial pretext–in 1923 when the Frenchman Marshal Foch visited Warsaw, in 1925 after the signing of the Treaty of Locarno (“preparation for war against the USSR,” as the Soviet newspaper Pravda put it), in 1927 following the British decision to break off diplomatic relations. It is customary to see these fears as a product of domestic politics, a device to focus popular attention on the external enemy and to unify the Party, but Russia’s recent history, which included invasion by Germany and the Hapsburg empire in 1914, intervention by 14 states in the Civil War and invasion by Poland in 1920, was enough in itself to encourage a constant vigilance and helps to explain the almost paranoid fear of attack or subversion that distinguished the [Soviet leadership]….
Overy, R. J. Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow. New York: TV Books, c1997, p. 23

The antagonism between the workers’ first state and world capitalism was unabated, even though it did not show itself in any clash of arms.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 377

DEUTSCHER WAS EXPELLED FROM THE POLISH CP FOR ANT-SOVIET ACTS

From the middle 1920s I was active in the Polish Communist party which stood closer to Bolshevism than did any other party; soon thereafter I was leading spokesman of an inner -party opposition strongly influenced by Trotsky’s ideas; in 1932 I had the somewhat curious distinction of being the first member ever to be expelled from the Polish party for his anti-Stalinism.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. xi

TROTSKY PROPOSES COMPROMISES WITH LIBERALS AND ENTERING BOURGEOIS GOVTS

… Trotsky came to the fore as the chief expounder of the International’s strategy and tactics. He advocated once again the united front. He went a step farther and urged the Communist parties to support, on conditions, Social Democratic governments and even, under special circumstances, in pre-revolutionary situations, when such coalitions could pave the way for proletarian dictatorship, to participate in them.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 65

HEALTH PROBLEMS OF TROTSKY’S FAMILY ARE AGGRAVATED BY EXILING SON IN LAW

In the middle of all this political excitement tragedy visited Trotsky’s family. Both his daughters, Zina and Nina, had been ill with consumption. The health of Nina, the younger of the two–she was 26– broke down after the imprisonmen and deportation of Nevelson, her husband.
Finally, he [Trotsky] learned that Nina had died on 9 June….
Messages of condolence from many deportees were still arriving at Alma Ata when another blow caused Trotsky much sorrow and grief. After Nina’s death Zina had intended to go to Alma Ata. Her husband too had been deported and she had strained her health in nursing her sister. From week to week she delayed the journey until news reached Alma Ata that she was dangerously ill and unable to travel. Her malady was aggravated by a severe and protracted nervous disorder; and she was not to rejoin her father before his banishment from Russia.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 428-429

TROTSKY URGED HIS FOLLOWERS TO STAY IN GOVT POSITIONS WHEN THEY WANTED TO LEAVE

He [Blumkin] put before Trotsky his own cas de conscience and spoke of his wish to resign from the GPU. Trotsky firmly dissuaded him. Difficult as his situation was, Trotsky said, he must go on working loyally for the GPU. The Opposition was committed to defend the workers’ state; and no Oppositionist should withdraw from any official post in which he acted in the broad interest of the state and not in that of the Stalinist faction.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 86

TROTSKY NEGLECTED THE ILLS OF HIS CHILDREN VERSUS THOSE OF THE WORLD

“To Papa,” she [Zina] often repeated, “I am a good-for-nothing.” More resentment, more reproach and self-reproach, more gloom, and more and graver mental disturbance made everyone feel worse. In the summer she left home, and in a nearby sanatorium underwent the operations on her lungs. She returned, her physical health somewhat restored, but her misery unrelieved.
Distressed and shaken with pity, Trotsky was a prey to guilt and helplessness. How much easier it was to see in what way the great ills of society should be fought against than to relieve the sufferings of an incurable daughter! How much easier to diagnose the turmoil in the collective mind of the German petty bourgeoisie than to penetrate into the pain-laden recesses of Zina’s personality!
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 150

She [Zina’s mother, Alexandra] quoted what Zina had written her only a few weeks earlier: “It is sad that I can no longer return to Papa. You know how I have adored and worshipped him from my earliest days. And now we are in utter discord. This has been at the bottom of my illness.” Zina had complained about his coolness towards her…. She had yearned for political activity and she needed scope, for she had taken after her father; and–“you, her father, you could have saved her.”
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 197

CAPITALISTS WOULD NEVER ALLOW SOCIALISM TO DEVELOP IN PEACE

History, it might be said, did not leave the Soviet Union alone long enough to allow a laboratory experiment with socialism in a single country to be carried into any advanced stage, let alone to be completed.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 516

TRAITORS IN THE GOVT IS PROVEN BY THE LARGE NUMBER OF STALIN SUPPORTERS IN JAIL

This analysis sheds light on the question of why so many Stalinists fell victim in 1936-38. Whereas those arrested between Kirov’s murder and mid-1936 usually had some large or small oppositional blot on their records, very many among the huge numbers repressed in the rampant phase of the Terror were not only free of past oppositional leanings but had been stout supporters of Stalin’s General Line and enthusiasts of the piatiletka; some were prominent in the party’s Stalin faction. Why did they come to grief?…
On the other hand, the mass denunciations of persons in low to middle ranks of administrative authority inevitably victimized quite a few of the promotees in the early 1930s, who were true believers in Stalin as a genius-leader and who, on turning up in the camps as prisoners, went on professing their loyalty and believing that, while other prisoners were being properly punished as traitors, mistakes had been made in their own cases.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 538

STALIN ADVOCATES USING FOREIGN SPECIALISTS WHO SPY RATHER THAN EXPELLING THEM

[In a letter to Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Molotov on 7 August 1932 Stalin stated] I would not advise you to simply and “politely” send Barlow packing from the USSR. All foreign bourgeois specialists are or may be intelligence agents. But that does not necessarily mean that they should be “politely” sent packing. No, it doesn’t! I advise you not to cut off ties with Barlow, to be considerate of him, toss him some money, take his drawings, but don’t show him our achievements (you can say that we are backward people and are ready to learn from Barlow, on a paid basis, of course–of course!).
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 178

STALIN COMPLAINS THAT THE UKRAINE HAS TOO MANY SUBVERSIVE ELEMENTS

[in a letter to Kaganovich on 11 August 1932 Stalin stated] Unless we begin to straighten out the situation in the Ukraine, we may lose the Ukraine. Keep in mind that Pilsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in the Ukraine are many times stronger than Redens or Kosior thinks. Keep in mind, too, that the Ukraine Communist Party (500,000 members, ha-ha) has quite a lot (yes, quite a lot!) of rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliura adherents, and, finally, direct agents of Pilsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements will waste no time opening a front inside (and outside) the party, against the party. The worst aspect is that the Ukraine leadership does not see these dangers.
Things cannot go on this way.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 180

KAGANOVICH WRITES LETTER TO NORWAY DEMANDING IT EXPEL TROTSKY FOR TERRORISM

[In a letter to Stalin on 27 August 1936 Kaganovich stated] I am transmitting to you the draft of a message to the Norwegian government. Please give me your instructions.
On the instructions of my government, I have the honor of stating the following: on 1 December 1934 Kirov, secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party and a member of the presidium of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets was assassinated in Leningrad. A court investigation determined that the assassination was committed by a member of a terrorist organization that had set the objective of perpetrating acts of terrorism against members of the Soviet government and other leaders. This was admitted in court by Kirov’s assassin himself, as well as his accomplices. An additional investigation, as well as a court inquiry on 19-23 August of this year, further determined that the aforesaid terrorist organization was established at the initiative of Trotsky, currently a resident of Norway, who issued detailed instructions to his accomplices in the USSR for the assassination of Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, and other members of the government and local organizations. To this end Trotsky sent special agents from abroad. All of the above facts were confirmed at an open court inquiry by all of Trotsky’s accomplices and agents, who were on trial.
…Therefore it may be regarded as proven that Trotsky, a resident of Norway, is the organizer and leader, and inspirer, of acts of terrorism aimed at assassinating members of the Soviet government and the leaders of the Soviet people.
In bringing the foregoing to the notice of the Norwegian government, the Soviet government believes that continuing to afford asylum to Trotsky, an organizer of acts of terrorism, may cause damage to the friendly relations between the USSR and Norway and would run counter to modern concepts of the norms of international relations. It may be recalled on this occasion that, in regard to the assassination of the Yugoslav king Alexander and the French foreign minister Barthou, the attitude of governments toward the preparation within their territory of acts of terrorism against other governments was a subject of discussion in the Council of the League of Nations on 10 December 1934, when the obligation of members of the League to assist one another in the fight against terrorism was established and it was even deemed desirable that an international convention for this purpose be concluded.
The Soviet government firmly expects that the Norwegian government will not fail to take appropriate measures to deprive Trotsky of a continued right of asylum in Norwegian territory.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 340

STALIN FAVORS SENDING A NOTE TO NORWAY/GERMANY DEMANDING THEY EXPEL LEON/SEDOV

[In a letter to Kaganovich on 27 August 1936 Stalin stated] I think we can agree with Litvinov on delivering our note to the Norwegian government orally rather than in writing, but with the idea that a report on this will be issued in the press. I think the same note should be sent orally to the German government about Sedov, Trotsky’s son.
Simultaneously with the delivery of the note to the Norwegian government we must go on the attack against the leadership of the Norwegian Labor Party. This leadership is apparently privy to all of Trotsky’s secrets, and as a result it vigorously defends Trotsky in its newspaper. We should openly fling in the face of these Norwegian vermin the accusation that they are backing Trotsky’s criminal, terrorist schemes.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 342

STALIN COULD SEE TRAITORS HIDE THEIR FACE UNTIL THEY SEE AN OPPORTUNITY TO ACT

To be sure, they [higher commanders of the Red Army] appeared loyal. But he [Stalin] himself had developed the brilliant insight that the most dangerous traitor is the one who seems in fact most of the time to be perfectly loyal, awaiting the opportunity to reveal his “two-faced” character.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 450

TROTSKY AND HIS SON UNITE WITH OTHERS & CALL FOR AN OVERTHROW WHILE IN EXILE

Despite arrests, deportations, and executions, the secret committees of the opposition continued their activities. The program of the younger malcontents was becoming ardently revolutionary. They no longer demanded “a coup d’etat inside the Party”; they issued appeals to the peasants and workers and officials, calling upon them to overthrow “the ignoble regime of oppression installed by Stalin.” Trotsky, from his exile in Barbizon, sent more and more definite instructions. His son, Lev Sedov, wrote openly: “One need not be scrupulous as to the tactics and methods to be employed in the struggle against Stalin. A tyrant deserves to be fought as a tyrant.”
…This was the appeal to the knife.
Delbars, Yves. The Real Stalin. London, Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 173

THE MOST DANGEROUS ENEMIES ARE SUBVERSIVES WITHIN THE STATE

The easiest way to capture a fortress is from within. To attain victory, the Party of the working class, its directing staff, its advanced fortress, must first be purged of capitulators, deserters, scabs, and traitors.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 360

HALLGREN RESIGNED FROM THE TROTSKY COMMITTEE BECAUSE IT WAS AN ANTI-STALIN FARCE

To: Mr. Felix Morrow, Acting Secretary,
American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky
Room 511, 22 E. 17th St.,
New York, New York

From: Mauritz Hallgren
Glenwood, Maryland, January 27, 1937.

Dear Sir:
It has become necessary for me to clarify my position with respect to the Moscow trials and particularly with respect to Trotsky’s relation thereto.
Since joining your committee I have given deep and earnest thought to the whole problem here involved. I have examined, so far as they have been made available in this country, all of the documents bearing upon the case. I have followed closely all of the news reports. I have consulted some of the reports made by non-Communists who attended the first trial. I have carefully studied the published arguments of the partisans on both sides. And I have just as carefully restudied the writings of Trotsky concerning his case against Stalinism and his theory of the permanent revolution, that is, such of his writings on these
questions as have been published to date.
I believed when I joined your committee, and I still believe, in the right of asylum for persons exiled because of their political or other beliefs. Trotsky has been granted asylum in Mexico and this part of the committee’s task would seem, therefore, to have been brought to a close…
Second, there was in my mind at that time sufficient doubt concerning certain aspects of the Zinoviev-Kamenev trial to lead me to suppose that the trial was not entirely genuine. This doubt hinged upon the possibility that, while Zinoviev and his associates had been taken in conspiracy (for I have never seen any good reason to doubt their own guilt), they had been promised mitigation of their sentences in return for a public confession that would implicate Trotsky as well in their crimes. In view of this doubt I was glad to join with the committee in endeavoring to provide Trotsky with an opportunity to answer the charges brought against him. This was not because of any desire to be “just” or “liberal” in the meaningless sense that those terms are usually employed by American liberals, but simply because I would have regarded it as hardly less reprehensible and dangerous to the future of socialism for Stalin and his colleagues to be perverting Soviet justice to their own personal ends as for Trotsky to be plotting to overthrow the government of the only socialist republic in the world.
Very soon after the first trial, Zinoviev and his associates were executed. It has been asserted that they had been promised lenient treatment if they would for their part publicly accuse Trotsky of having conspired with them to overthrow Stalin and the Soviet government. In truth, it was largely upon this supposition that rested the contention that the first trial was a “frame up.” But now that the men were put to death Trotsky and his adherents declared that they, the defendants, had been “double-crossed.” To the Trotskyites this was further proof of their contention that the first trial had been “framed.” To the disinterested student, however, it might just as easily have proven the contrary. After all, it is one of the simplest rules of logic that one cannot use a premise to prove a thesis and then use the denial of that premise to prove the same thesis. Logically, therefore, one should have looked elsewhere for an explanation of the executions, and the only other possible explanation was that the men were actually put to death in the regular course of justice and for the single reason that they were guilty of the crimes charged against them. Still it was possible, despite the rise of this counter-doubt, that they had been “double-crossed.”
Now we have come to the second trial [the Jan 1937 Pyatakov trial]. What is the situation? The men now on trial cannot possibly be under any delusion as to their fate. They must know and they do know that they will be put to death. Despite this they do not hesitate to confess their crimes. Why? The only conceivable answer is that they are guilty. Surely it cannot and will not be argued this time as well that there has been a “deal,” for men like Radek are obviously not so stupid as to believe that they are going to save their lives in that manner after what happened to Kamenev and Zinoviev. It has been said that they have been tortured into confessing. But what greater and more effective torture can there be than knowledge of certain death? In any case, the men in the courtroom have shown not the slightest evidence of having been tortured or of being under duress. It is said by some that they have been hypnotized into confessing, or that the prosecution, working upon its knowledge of Slav psychology, has somehow trapped these men into confessing deeds of which they are not guilty. For example, the unanimity with which the men have been confessing is taken as proof that the confessions are false and have been obtained by some mysterious means. Yet these assertions rest upon no tangible or logical proof whatever. The idea that some inexplicable form of oriental mesmerism has been used is one that sound reason must reject as utterly fantastic. The very unanimity of the defendants, far from proving that this trial is also a “frame-up,” appears to me to prove directly the contrary. For if these men are innocent, then certainly at least one of the three dozen, knowing that he faced death in any case, would have blurted out the truth. It is inconceivable that out of this great number of defendants, all should lie when lies would not do one of them any good. But why look beyond the obvious for the truth, why seek in mysticism or in dark magic for facts that are before one’s very nose? Why not accept the plain fact that the men are guilty? And this fact, if accepted with regard to the men now on trial, must also be accepted with regard to the men who were executed after the first trial.
I now see no valid reason for believing that the defendants in the first trial were unfairly dealt with. Certainly it cannot now be maintained that they were “double-crossed,” for that contention falls of its own weight when we stop for a moment to consider the fact that the Soviet government has brought a second group of men to trial on the same charges. Since the government could not hope to induce the second group to confess under the pressure of false promises, it is reasonable to suppose that it did not rely upon false promises in the first case. Moreover, I am now completely convinced that the defendants in the first trial were given every opportunity to clear themselves, that they were denied none of the rights of impartial justice. It is significant that those who contend that this was not the case have offered no evidence at all, apart from their own unsupported allegations and suspicions, in substantiation of their contention. On the other side we have not only the court record, but also the unsolicited reports of non-Communist observers who were present at the trial.
One such statement has been presented by D. N, Pritt, English lawyer and a Labor Party representative in the House of Commons. Mr. Pritt can by no means be accused of sympathy with the Communists or with Stalin. He has, indeed, stood with the Right wing of the Labor Party. But he has also been trained in law, while, moreover, unlike Walter Citrine and others who have charged that there was a gross miscarriage of justice, he was present in person at the trial in Moscow. He reported later that he was “completely satisfied” that the trial was “properly conducted” and that the accused were “fairly and judicially treated.” He added that their appearance and demeanor were such as to indicate the “absence of any ill-treatment or fear.” He declared that there was “no ground for insinuating any unfairness in form or substance.” His view has been confirmed by all other non-Communist observers at the trial whose reports I have consulted. To be sure, Trotsky has now taken to denouncing Pritt for having rendered this “service” to “Stalinism.” But Trotsky has produced no evidence at all to show that Pritt was in any way prejudiced in favor of the Stalin government. Indeed, if I may repeat, while the evidence that the men were fairly tried appears both substantial and convincing, the counter-charge that they were not fairly tried is backed up by no evidence of any kind, convincing or otherwise. The same can be said for the conduct of the second trial so far as that has been reported to date.
It is a curious fact, which seems to have escaped liberals both in this country and in England, that the Soviet government is hurting itself far more than it could possibly help itself by holding these trials, especially at this time. The very fact that the liberals and Socialists have been aroused by this event, the very fact that this defense committee has been formed, reveal the great extent to which the Soviet Union is being harmed. What has Stalin to gain by taking action that is tending to alienate these elements? Is obvious that he has nothing whatever to gain. On the contrary, he stands to lose a good deal. At the moment there is grave danger of intervention. The Soviet government needs all the support it can get from workers and liberals and democrats in other countries. Without such support the rising tide of fascism might soon engulf Soviet Russia–whereupon, of course, Stalin and his government would inevitably disappear.
Shall we suppose, then, that Stalin has stupidly thrown all caution to the wind merely to wreck vengeance upon his personal enemies? Shall we suppose that he is anxious to have popular fronts erected to guard the Soviet Union against an external danger and at the same time is so blind as to take action that might destroy these popular fronts in order to satisfy some purely personal whim or ambition? Shall we suppose that he is so thick-headed as not to appreciate the gravity of this external danger not only to the Soviet Union but to himself as well? Now, no one will say that Stalin is stupid. Even the Trotskyites complain that the menace of “Stalinism” lies not in stupidity but in diabolical cleverness. It must follow, since the Stalin government is apparently risking a good deal by holding these trials that it has detected an internal danger hardly less grave than the external danger. In short, it must follow that the government has uncovered a conspiracy against itself, the evidence of which is so abundant and the peril from which is so apparent that it dare not withhold its hand, even though in destroying the conspiracy it may alienate its democratic support abroad and so increase the external danger.
Until now we have considered only the conspirators in Moscow. Little has been said of Leon Trotsky. Is he guilty, too? The conspirators say that he is. He denies it most emphatically (and brings other charges of equal gravity against Stalin). We have the Moscow evidence. Where is Trotsky’s evidence? One may grant that he has not had his day in court. And one may grant that toward the end of his stay in Norway he was literally held incommunicado. Yet he has been out of Norway now for several weeks, and still no tangible proof of his contentions has come from him, no documents, not even anything in the way of circumstantial statements. He has issued nothing but negative denials. Even some of those denials are of a questionable sort. His gratuitous attack upon D. N. Pritt, offered without any supporting facts, certainly did not help him. His statement that he had never heard of Vladimir Romm, a leading Soviet journalist and for years a stellar correspondent for Tass and later for Izvestia, is simply incredible and goes far, indeed, toward discrediting Trotsky. But this is the sort of “proof” he has been cabling to The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and the Manchester Guardian.
If Trotsky is innocent and has the documentary proof of his innocence that he says he has, why does he not produce it? The Hearst press would be only to glad to publish it and pay Trotsky fabulously well for his documents. The New York Times, the London Times, and other bourgeois journals would likewise be only too happy to give space to his documents. The Manchester Guardian has stood by him through thick and thin in the last several months; it would not desert him now. It has been said that he intends to put his proof into the new book he is writing on Stalinism. And it might also be argued that it would be better for him to put his proof before the projected international commission that is to give him a hearing. But consider the absurdity, the astounding cynicism, of such an attitude. Here are men awaiting death on charges that Trotsky says are utterly false and here is Trotsky who contends that he can prove that they are false–and yet he withholds this indispensable proof for the sake of a book, or for the sake of an international inquiry not yet arranged! And here are countless liberals and Socialists who earnestly believe that justice is being destroyed at the command of Stalin, but who have not a shred of evidence to support this belief apart from their own fears and suspicions, and here is Trotsky who has the essential evidence–and yet he fails to produce it when it is most needed.
Consider one thing further. Trotsky has in recent years written many books and pamphlets expounding his doctrine of the permanent revolution and purporting to expose Stalin and Stalinism. He contends, not once but again and again, that Stalin must be overthrown if the revolution is to be saved. Now either Trotsky’s arguments and exhortations are wholly passive and academic, in which case they might well be forgotten, or else he means that they should be acted upon. It is obvious, however, that Trotsky is playing no passive role, that he is consciously the agitator, and that he regards himself as the acting leader of the movement against Stalin. That stands out from every line he has written on the problem and it is apparent from all his activities. But how is Stalin to be overthrown? It is clear, even to Trotsky’s followers, that there can be no hope of provoking a popular uprising within the Soviet Union. It can only be done by foreign intervention, or by a conspiracy within the Soviet government, or by a combination of the two. Through whom might such a conspiracy be undertaken? Obviously, through persons within the government who have had experience in such work in the past. Even more obviously, by old conspirators who believe, or once believed, in Trotsky’s doctrine. And what have the Moscow trials revealed? They have revealed precisely this kind of conspiracy. They have revealed the very sort of plot against the Soviet government that Trotsky’s teachings call for!
To be sure, this in itself does not prove that Trotsky has conspired with the Moscow defendants. Yet the reasonable man is compelled to agree that, given Trotsky’s known disposition to action and his forceful presentation of his own case against Stalin, the circumstantial evidence against him is very strong indeed. It might well be said, and it cannot be denied, that the Soviet government’s case against Trotsky is not perfect. It has made mistakes. It has made assertions that are apparently contrary to fact. But then, there has never been a controversy in which the facts on one side have been all black and those on the other side pure white. One must judge these matters, not by any rigid or absolute standards, but by weighing the evidence. And in the present instance the preponderance of evidence is on the side of the Soviet government and clearly against Trotsky.
I readily agree that Stalin has his faults. I am far from agreeing with everything that the Soviet government and Comintern have done or are doing. Yet every fair-minded person must concede that under its present leadership the Soviet Union has made remarkable progress toward establishing socialism. It is only among the Nazis and fascists and reactionaries in other countries, among the few groups within the Second International, and among the Trotskyites that it is contended that the Soviet Union under Stalin and his associates is moving, not toward socialism, but toward capitalism or Bonapartism or something called “Red fascism.” Persons acquainted with the facts must and do consider these allegations preposterous. One who has an understanding of economics can readily see that it is socialism and nothing else that is being developed in Soviet Russia. To make any statement to the contrary is, in view of the established facts, mere wish-thinking–or deliberate distortion. This being so, any attack upon the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union, imperfect though that leadership might be, that has for its purpose the overthrow of the Soviet government must be regarded as a deliberate and malicious attack upon socialism itself. This does not mean that I regard the Soviet government as being above criticism. Far from it. But it does mean that I regard dishonest criticism or any effort to go beyond criticism (for example, an effort to destroy rather than to aid in the development of socialism in the Soviet Union) as a betrayal of socialism. And that, quite apart from the outcry against the Moscow trials, is the objective purpose of Trotsky’s writings and agitational activities. If one is inclined to doubt this, one has only to compare Trotsky’s writings on “Stalinism” with the Webb’s study of socialism in the Soviet Union.
Let us now sum up the situation. On the one hand we have the confessions of the Moscow defendants, the court record, the statements of disinterested observers at the first trial, and reports on the second trial of such reputable journalists as Walter Duranty. These provide us with an abundance of evidence tending to prove that the defendants were fairly tried and that their guilt in conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government has been established. They also tend to prove that Trotsky participated in the conspiracy, or that he at least had guilty knowledge of it, though the direct proof of his part in the crime is not so substantial as that involving the men on trial. However, we also had his writings and they tend greatly to strengthen the presumption, if not of actual guilt, at least of moral responsibility. On the other hand, we have nothing concrete with which to offset the charge of conspiracy. We have only the unsupported allegations of Trotsky and the unverified fears and suspicions of numerous liberals and Socialists.
Possibly Trotsky can support his allegations. He should certainly not be denied the opportunity to produce the proof he says he has. But his reluctance or inability to produce his proof when it is most needed must count against him. Moreover, and this is a point of extreme importance, it has to be borne in mind that Trotsky is not a disinterested party. He does not come into court with clean hands. He is a sworn adversary of the Stalin government. It must be presumed, therefore, that he is at least equally as much interested, and in all probability for more interested, in carrying on his campaign to destroy the Stalin government as he is in obtaining abstract justice for himself. Let him state that it is justice alone that he desires, and then let him publicly promise that, in the event he fails to substantiate his allegations against the Soviet government, he will promptly cease his efforts to destroy that government. If he refuses to bind himself in this particular, the reasonable man must conclude that he is using his demand for justice solely as a means of enlisting additional support for his campaign against socialism in the Soviet Union. Chronologically, indeed, the evidence on this point is already against him. The outcry against the Moscow trials first came from the Trotskyites. It was they who first raised the charge that Soviet justice was being hamstrung by Stalin. It was not until later that certain disinterested liberals took up the cry. There can be no question that the Trotskyites knew, when they shouted “persecution,” that they would win the sympathy and perhaps the active aid of these liberals. And there can be little question that this, rather than justice, was their true objective. Surely if they really believed, as they asserted, that the Stalin government knew no law and no justice, then they could not have expected the liberals to help obtain justice from the Stalin government for them. And as they still maintain this position, it is only logical to suppose that their real purpose in appealing to the liberals was not to win justice for themselves, but to win liberal support for Trotskyism, that is, for Trotsky’s campaign against socialism in the Soviet Union, and to do so in the name of that holy but meaningless liberal principle known as abstract justice.
In any case, at least until Trotsky comes into court with his own hands clean, I shall remain convinced that the present liberal movement to win justice for him is nothing more than a Trotskyite maneuver against the Soviet Union and against socialism. I am equally convinced, as I must be under the circumstances, that the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky has, perhaps unwittingly, become an instrument of the Trotskyites for political intervention against the Soviet Union. Indeed, apart from the considerations cited above, it is abundantly plain that the whole approach and phraseology of the committee has been radically altered since the committee was formed. For example, those who were invited to join were asked to do so in order to provide Trotsky with “the fullest opportunity to state his case.” But now the committee’s literature talks of “working for a complete and impartial investigation of the Moscow trials.” The implications of this change in attitude are too obvious to need emphasizing here. It is the liberal who would give Trotsky an opportunity to be heard, but it is only the Trotskyite (or someone else with an ax to grind where the Communist Party is concerned) who would demand the sort of political intervention that would be required to undertake “a complete and impartial investigation of the Moscow trials.” This is nothing but propaganda. It shows all too plainly that the Trotskyites have captured the committee.
Perhaps the liberal members are not aware of the real nature of the committee. But that cannot be true of the political members, of the Trotskyites and others, who have but one purpose and that is to use the committee as a springboard for new attacks upon the Soviet Union. I do not intend under any circumstances to allow myself to become a party to any arrangement that has for its objective purpose (whatever might be its subjective justification) the impairment or destruction of the socialist system now being built in Soviet Russia. You will, therefore, withdraw my name as a member of the committee.
It may be unnecessary to point out that I speak for no party and no faction. I do not now belong and have never belonged to any political party or political organization. I speak for myself alone.
It is, however, necessary to add that I am putting copies of this letter at the disposal of certain individuals and groups who no doubt will be interested in its contents.
Respectfully, Mauritz Hallgren
Hallgren, Mauritz. Why I Resigned from the Trotsky Defense Committee. New York: International Publishers, 1937, p. 3-14

CONSPIRING BY THE CONSPIRATORS IS EASY TO SEE BECAUSE OF THEIR LONG HISTORY IN IT

It is not without significance that it was in the dark days of 1931-1933, when the fate of the collective farms seemed to many to be trembling in the balance, that the conspiracies unveiled in the trials of 1937 are stated, by Radek and others, to have taken shape. It was only to be expected that those who thought the government policy wrong and disastrous to the country should take to underground conspiracy to resist it and to upset the government which had adopted it. If some of these conspirators took in their stride both wrecking and assassination, this was exactly what Stalin and others of them had been doing, with a good conscience, most of their lives prior to 1917. If it is true that they called in aid of their conspiracy hostile governments, this is just what the patriotic and high-minded English and Scottish nobility, statesmen and ministers of religion did three centuries ago in calling in alternately the Dutch and the French.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 930

CAPITALISTS SPY ON ONE ANOTHER SO CLEARLY THEY WOULD SPY ON THE SU

France and England at the present day are swarming with German spies and diversionists and, on the other hand, Anglo-French spies and diversionists in turn are at work in Germany. America is swarming with Japanese spies and diversionists, and Japan with American.
Such is the law of relations between bourgeois states.
The question must be put: why should the bourgeois countries be gentler and more neighborly to the soviet socialist government than they are to bourgeois states of their own type? Why should they send fewer spies, wrecker’s, diversionists, and murderers behind the frontiers of the Soviet Union than they send behind the frontiers of bourgeois countries which are akin to them?… Will it not be truer, from the point of view of Marxism, to suppose that the bourgeois states must be sending twice or three times as many wreckers, spies, diversionists and murderers behind the lines of the Soviet Union than behind those of any bourgeois state?
Stalin, Joseph. Mastering Bolshevism. San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1972, p. 8

STALIN WARNS PARTY LEADERS AGAINST BECOMING CONCEITED

…we leaders must not become conceited; and we must understand that if we are members of the Central Committee or are People’s Commissars, this does not mean that we possess all the knowledge necessary for giving correct leadership.
Stalin, Joseph. Mastering Bolshevism. San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1972, p. 41

THERE WAS EVIDENCE OF A CONSPIRACY

After weighing all the available evidence, I have come to the conclusion that there had indeed been a conspiracy, but that the conspirators were justified in attempting to replace Stalin by a saner leadership…. When they failed to replace him, they realized that the Soviet Union would have to face the impending storm under Stalin’s leadership and that they would weaken their country by discrediting him. In this respect they may well have been right: without the almost religious faith in Stalin, morale might well have collapsed in the Soviet Union under the terrible blows of the Nazi invasion, as it did in France.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 175

SUBVERSIVES CONCOCT GOOD REPORTS WHILE DESTROYING FROM WITHIN

Even successes in production should be treated with caution since, according to the report, they were not necessarily proof of the political integrity of their creators; after all, “saboteurs” had to shelter behind excellent results and economic plans regularly set targets that were all too easy to attain.
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 122

SEPT 1937 LAW GETS TOUGHER ON WRECKERS AND SUBVERSION

…It became increasingly clear that confusion did not spare even the top of the apparatus. One of the first obvious indications of this came from the growing inconsistency in penal legislation. It seems that the courts had been hesitating to apply the extraordinary legislation that allowed an accelerated procedure for executing “terrorists” and “conspirators,” since on 14 September 1937 a decree of the Central Executive Committee extended its field of applicability. As amended, the law became applicable to all cases of “wrecking and counter-revolutionary subversion.” It provided for the filing of charges on the day before the trial, abolished the right of appeal against conviction, and ordered that “the execution of capital punishment is to be carried out immediately after the refusal of the appeals for clemency.”
Not three weeks had gone by when another decree on the same topic was issued by the same supreme authority, this time in some slight contradiction to the stringent measures of the “law of September 14.” Its promoters seem to have thought it was very important, since it was even published in the daily papers, appearing on the same day that the Party cell at the Western Regional Court “unmasked” a “spy” in its ranks. The new decree was dated October 2, and it amended current legislation by allowing those guilty of spying, sabotage, or subversion to be condemned either to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment, or to death. Under the new provision, sentences of up to 25 years could be imposed in the “further struggle against crimes of this nature, and also to grant the court the possibility not only to choose capital punishment, but also imprisonment for more prolonged terms in such cases….” Since a decree of 1936 already permitted imprisonment “of those convicted of the most dangerous crimes,” the passing of this new “law of October 2” was probably hurried through, at least in part, because some courts were being over-zealous in applying the order of September 14th so as to avoid any possible accusation of “petty-bourgeois sentimentality” or “lack of intransigence.”
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 165-166

SPIES ARE ALL THROUGH SOVIET SOCIETY

There were no doubt spies in the USSR in the 1930s. What modern state has ever been free of them? The USSR had enormous and somewhat porous borders. It was a haven for political emigres fleeing oppression and the object of antipathy of many governments. Soviet security officials were convinced that German, Polish, Japanese, and other intelligence agencies engaged in disinformation and other activities designed to destabilize the USSR. To believe that there were no spies is naïve.
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 8.

In seeking to understand the origins of the Soviet leadership’s distrust of foreigners, it would be prudent not to dismiss out of hand the possibility that foreign intelligence agencies had sent spies into the USSR and that Soviet intelligence agencies had learned of their existence. The Soviet government and the Comintern support a wide espionage network abroad and believed that other countries did the same within the USSR. To believe that there were no spies in the USSR would be as naive as it is mad to believe that all foreigners were potential spies.
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 412.

SOME PEOPLE ADMIT TRYING TO OVERTHROW THE SOVIET GOVT

[At the closed joint meeting of the ECCI party organization and the ECCI Komsomol organization on 28 December 1934]
KNORIN: One of the accused admits: “We watched for some sort of contradictions in the party leadership. We relied on any opening to help us come to the leadership, to come to power. That is why we preserved our cadres, why we established connections with everyone who was against the party leadership, who had an oppositional sentiment. Until the very last moment, we cherished hopes that in this way, through some disagreements, through some difficulties, we would be able to rise to [positions of] leadership and turn the country onto another road, onto our road.”
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 79.

ECCI LEADERS CONDEMN TROTSKY’S ALLIANCE WITH HEARST

[23 January 1936 telegram from the ECCI Secretariat of Dimitrov, Manuilsky, and Moskvin to communist parties regarding Trotsky’s bloc with Hearst]
Trotsky is carrying on a libelous campaign against the Soviet Union and Stalin in the Hearst press. On 19 January, Trotsky began to publish in the “New York American” a series of articles in which he accuses the Soviet government of imprisoning and torturing “innocent” Trotskyists and asserts that Stalin and the Comintern aided Hitler’s rise to power. You should use this fact of a bloc between Trotsky and Hearst, the vilest anti-Soviet instigator, the supporter of Hitler, and the local coordinator of American fascism, to further expose the counterrevolutionary role of Trotsky, who is the accomplice of fascism in the struggle against the proletarian revolution and the Soviet Union. At the same time you should hasten the separation of all honest elements from Trotskyist groups. During this [campaign] condemning Trotsky’s bloc with Hearst, determine who still exhibits sympathies with Trotsky.
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 127.

STALIN PROMOTED BUKHARIN UP THROUGH THE RANKS

Nine years younger than Stalin, Bukharin had made his reputation mainly as a theoretician and publicist. Although he had had serious differences with Lenin, especially in opposing the peace treaty with Germany in 1918, his talents were appreciated by the founder. They also were appreciated by Stalin, who must have supported Bukharin’s promotion to full member of the Politburo shortly after Lenin’s death and rewarded him for loyalty in the factional struggle of the mid-1920s by making him Zinoviev’s successor as head of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1926. Bukharin was one of the men Stalin cultivated, and for a time they were on very friendly terms.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 117

NEW EVIDENCE PROVES THERE WAS AN UNDERGROUND BLOC LED BY TROTSKY

It seems to have been just a little later that Stalin obtained some evidence that was considerably more authentic and potent. The timing suggests that it came from an agent named Mark Zborowski, who around 1935 succeeded better than any predecessor in becoming the confidant of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, who operated the small secretariat of the Trotskyist movement, first in Berlin, then in Paris. What Zborowski, if it was he, learned was that in 1932 Trotsky, communicating through Sedov, had formed what they called a ‘bloc’ with dissident elements in the Soviet Union. There a Trotskyist named I Smirnov had proposed to form a coalition of underground opposition to Stalin. Only after a previously closed section of the Trotsky archive at Harvard University was opened in 1980 was it demonstrated that this bloc, although feeble, actually had existed. The evidence is incomplete because somebody, quite possibly Trotsky himself, had removed from the file the letters that he had attempted to send to Sokolnikov, Preobrazhensky, Radek, Kollontai and Litvinov. Nor is there a direct evidence in the archive that Stalin came into possession of this material, but the resemblance between the account of the formation of this bloc, as it appears in the Trotsky papers and as it emerged in the show trial of August 1936, makes it reasonably clear that the trial was based on this evidence. This implies significant revision of the previous interpretation of the trial of 1936 by non-Stalinists, for it shows that the confessions were not totally fabricated by the police. It also demonstrates, by the way, that Trotsky did not tell the precise truth to the ‘Dewey Commission’, a counter-trial that he arranged in 1937 to exculpate him of Stalin’s charges, before which he testified that he had not been organizing an underground.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 184

CONSPIRATORS DESTROY LETTERS AND KEEP MEETINGS SECRET

In conspiratorial life, compromising letters were destroyed; personal contacts with people abroad were rare,…
Trotsky, Leon, Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 133

ANDREYEV AND MALENKOV WERE SECRET TROTSKYITES AND RADEK KNEW IT

Radek’s appearance in the dock created a sensation…. With which Trotskyists did he maintain contact? asked Vyshinsky–and out came the list they wanted: Mrachkovsky, Smirnov, Dreitzer, Gayevsky, Pyatakov, Preobrazhensky, Smilga, Serebryakov…but of course, never a mention of such real Trotskyists as, for instance, Andreyev-or Malenkov.

Not that Malenkov has ever been a very precise ideologist…. However, in 1924 he became secretary of the Party branch of the Moscow Technical Institute, then one of Trotsky’s bastions. In those days Malenkov signed many an anti-Stalin, Trotskyist resolution: not by deep conviction, but rather by sheer inertia. Of all the living members of the Soviet Olympus, Andreyev and he had been the most outstanding supporters of Trotsky. This Radek knew quite well, yet never a hint did he give at the trial.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 67

ILLEGAL UNDERGROUND TROTSKYIST GROUP DISCOVERED

February 1, 1929–authorities recently discovered that an active Trotskyist organization in Moscow was carrying on a vigorous propaganda in Moscow and other urban centers by means of hand bills and other methods, particularly among Communist youth and the Army. The organization had arranged for an “underground railroad” for the transmission of letters to and from the exiled leaders and to sympathetic newspapers in Berlin, Riga, and elsewhere abroad.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 163

Despite the clearly counter revolutionary character of their aims and methods, the offenders were treated with comparative leniency and deported to Siberia instead of being brought to trial on a capital charge.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 163

STALIN INCENSED OVER ORDZHONIKIDZE’S DEATH

…I was at a dinner with Stalin and some of the other comrades and just happened to bring up the subject of Sergo Ordzhonikidze:
“Sergo! Now there was a real man. What a pity he died before his time. What a loss!”
There was an embarrassed silence. I sensed that I had said something wrong. I asked Malenkov as we were leaving after dinner, “What did I say that I shouldn’t have said?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“You mean you thought Sergo died a natural death? You didn’t know he shot himself? Stalin won’t forgive him for that….”
After Stalin’s death Mikoyan, who had been very close to Sergo, told me he had had a talk with him on the very eve of his suicide. On a Saturday evening they had gone for a walk together around the Kremlin. Sergo told Mikoyan that he couldn’t go on living.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 85

YENUKIDZE TRIES TO ACT INNOCENT OF INTENTIONAL CRIMES

[June 6, 1935 speech of Yenukidze to the Central Committee plenum]
…In my attitude to the apparat and in my trust in it, I failed to guarantee the security of the Kremlin and therefore it was necessary to remove me….
What was the most criminal thing I did? Confident of the reliability of the apparat, I did not, for instance, immediately draw the appropriate conclusion from the report given to me by the commandant of the Kremlin to the effect that a certain cleaning woman was engaged in counter-revolutionary conversations and, in particular, conversations directed against Comrade Stalin. Instead of immediately arresting the cleaning woman and handing her over to the NKVD, I said to Peterson [the commandant]: “Look into it once again.”
Of course, such a situation ought not to have been tolerated. Surely, immediate action ought to have been taken. These instructions of mind to the commandant of the Kremlin fell into the hands of the NKVD and then into the hands of Comrade Stalin. Comrade Stalin was the first to call attention to this, saying that this was no mere idle chatter, that it concealed very grave counter-revolutionary activity. And in fact, that is the way it turned out….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 169

Yenukidze: It’s all true. Now I am even more indignant about it than you. It’s all true, comrades. I handed out a lot of money. Perhaps there were swindlers, cheats among them.
…Measures ought to be taken in my case that will serve as a lesson in the future for every Communist occupying this or that post in order to really strengthen our vigilance….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 171

In 1937, together with Colonel General Gay, Yenukidze fled from Moscow to Transcaucasia, where he proposed to establish an independent Soviet Republic. However, he was captured near Baku by security officers and shot.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 248

SPEAKER AFTER SPEAKER DENOUNCED YENUKIDZE

Speaker after speaker denounced Yenukidze’s sins in a ritual display of nomenklatura unity and anger.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 176

[In a letter to Kaganovich on 8 September 1935 Stalin stated] I am sending you Agranov’s memorandum on Yenukidze’s group of “old Bolsheviks” (“old farts” in Lenin’s phrase). Yenukidze is a person who is alien to us.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 307

STALIN ADVOCATES GOING EASY ON YENUKIDZE

There is some reason to suspect that in the end Yenukidze was punished rather more harshly than Stalin had originally intended. At the first plausible opportunity, two plenums later in June 1936, Stalin personally proposed that Yenukidze be permitted to rejoin the party. At that time, Stalin explained that this was the earliest moment Yenukidze’s readmission could take place: “It would have turned out then that he had been expelled at one plenum and reinstated at the next.”
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 178

…Yenukidze’s rehabilitation by Stalin in June 1936.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 179

…Stalin and his team seem rather to have been unprepared for this escalation of the attack on Yenukidze. For his part, Stalin’s comments on the speeches were limited to criticizing Yenukidze’s use of state funds to aid exiles, noting that Yenukidze could have innocently used his own money for this without censure. His interjections never touched on the political side of the accusations, never supported Yezhov’s terrorist characterization (or Yagoda’s strong remedies), and were, in general, not particularly hostile. Kaganovich then recounted to the plenum the Politburo’s deliberations on proper punishment for Yenukidze. He noted that at first Stalin had suggested only removing him from the national Central Executive Committee and sending him to run the Central Executive Committee of the Transcaucasus. Then, when the matter seemed more serious (possibly after another Yezhov report to the Politburo), Stalin had agreed to remove Yenukidze from the Central Executive Committee system altogether and to send him to run a resort in Kislovodsk, concluding that expulsion from the Central Committee was in fact warranted “to make an example.”
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 52

But, oddly enough, Yenukidze’s surprise expulsion from the party was not the end of the story. Exactly one year later, at the June 1936 Plenum of the Central Committee, the Yenukidze affair resurfaced. Molotov, who was chairing the meeting, said that at the beginning of 1936, Yenukidze had applied for readmission to the party. That had been too soon for consideration (Stalin interjected: “That would have been to expel him at one plenum and except him at the next.”). After Molotov observed that readmitting him would make Yenukidze very happy, and after Stalin spoke in favor, the plenum voted to approve his readmission.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 53

But there was no campaign by Stalin against Enukidze before his troubles began, and he was at liberty long after his expulsion. Enukidze’s story is too full of twists, turns, and contradictions to suggest a plan to destroy him.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 43

STALIN ATTACKS POSTYSHEV & KOSIOR FOR COVERING FOR TROTS IN THE GOVT

[Jan. 13, 1937 telegram by Stalin removing Postyshev from Kiev]
On the unsatisfactory party leadership of the Kiev Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine and on deficiencies in the work of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine.
Occupying the majority of leading posts in the apparat of the regional committee, these Trotskyists selected for the apparat either their own people, traitors just like themselves, or else people who, keeping silent, wouldn’t dare to say anything bad about their bosses. Whenever an official from the lower ranks of the party organization complained about Radkov or any of the other members of the Trotskyist group, he was transferred to another job.
…Comrades Postyshev and Ilin, leaders of the regional committee, trusted Radkov with such blindness that they turned over to him the verification of declarations entered into the record against Trotskyists, while he in turn investigated them in such a manner that it was those who submitted the declarations who turned out to be guilty.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 353

[Stalin continues]
First, Comrade Kosior, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, is to be admonished for lack of vigilance, for slackened attention paid to party work, and for failure to take measures against contamination of the apparat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine….
Second, Comrade Postyshev, first secretary of the Kiev Regional Committee, is to be reprimanded and furthermore is to be warned that in case such slackening of party vigilance and failure to pay attention to party work or repeated, harsher penalties will be taken against him.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 355

[Feb. 17-20, 1938 Central That decision “On Comrade Postyshev”]
During his tenure in Kuibyshev, Postyshev in essence not only did not unmask any enemies of the people but, on the contrary, made it difficult, by his antiparty actions, for party organizations and the NKVD to unmask such enemies. Declaring that “he was surrounded everywhere by enemies,” he struck a blow against honest Communists loyal to the Party.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 514

STALIN STIFLES RESOLUTION CONDEMNING SHEBOLDAEV AND POSTYSHEV

The Politburo was at pains to show that Sheboldaev and Postyshev were not to be considered enemies themselves; they had simply been negligent, even though Sheboldaev’s personal secretary and most of Postyshev’s lieutenants in Kiev had been arrested as Trotskyists…. Significantly, both secretaries were transferred to lesser but important posts: Postyshev became first secretary of Kuibyshev oblast, and Sheboldaev was sent to head the Kursk party organization. Andreev, who had led the sacking of Sheboldaev, had prepared a resolution for the February-March plenum linking Sheboldaev and Postyshev and denouncing them in rather strong language. Apparently, though, Stalin decided not to allow such a strong statement, and a resolution was never introduced.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 360

Although Postyshev was to be sacked from his Kuibyshev position, he was not expelled from the party, nor was he denounced as an enemy.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 502

CCCP DISMISSES SHARANGOVICH FOR SABOTAGE AND SENDS HIS CASE TO THE NKVD

[Politburo resolution “On the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia”]
More than two months ago, the Central Committee of the Communist Party instructed the new leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia (Sharangovich) to liquidate the effects of sabotage committed by Polish spies–namely, Cherviakov, Goloded, Benek, and their fascist-espionage gang.
In particular, the Central Committee of the Communist Party instructed the new leadership to liquidate the sovkhozy created by the wreckers on peasant lands at the order of Polish intelligence and to grant to the kolkhoz members the personal plots due to them by law.
Sharangovich, first Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia; Deniskevich, second secretary; and Nizovtsev, people’s commissar for agriculture of Byelorussia, not only failed to carry out this assignment of the Central Committee of the Communist Party but did not even set out to do so. Furthermore, by their acts of sabotage, Sharangovich and Deniskevich artificially created breadlines throughout Byelorussia. Instead of turning to the Central Committee of the Communist Party for help, they concealed this fact from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, even though the Central Committee of the Communist Party had never refused such help to Belorussia in the past.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party considers the actions of Sharangovich, Deniskevich, and Nizovtsev as sabotage, as hostile acts toward Soviet power and the people of Byelorussia. The Central committee hereby decrees:
1. That Sharangovich, first Secretary of the Central Committee of the Congress Party of Byelorussia, be dismissed from his post as an enemy of the people and that his case, like that of Deniskevich and Nizovtsev, [also] enemies of the people, be referred to the NKVD.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 453

STALIN AND POSTYSHEV WERE NOT ENEMIES

The documents show that Postyshev had enemies and critics in the party for years…. But it is hard to avoid the impression that Stalin was not among Postyshev’s longtime enemies.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 513

ORDJONIKIDZE WANTS LOMINADZE SHOT WHICH STALIN OPPOSES

In another case, Ordjonikidze had tried to shield another client, the former dissident Lominadze, from arrest, by promising Stalin to bring Lominadze around to a loyal position. But when Ordjonikidze became convinced that Lominadze was a lost cause, he proposed having him shot, a solution that was at the time too radical even for Stalin.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 284

ORDJONIKIDZE WAS UNSTABLE, SPINELESS AND OPPOSED THE PARTY LINE

You can find a range of opinions about Ordjonikidze. But I think the intellectuals praised him too highly. By his last act he proved that ultimately he was unstable. He had opposed Stalin, of course, and the party line. Yes, the party line.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 114

Ordjonikidze was a good Bolshevik but spineless, especially in matters of principle.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 115

ORDJONIKIDZE’S FAMILY BLAMES STALIN FOR HIS SUICIDE

CHUEV: Ordjonikidze’s family considers Stalin responsible for his death.
MOLOTOV: They will always say that. If the final push toward his suicide was the repression of his brother, they can say this. They can heap blame on Stalin. But if my brother was to conduct anti-Soviet agitation, what could I say if he was arrested? I can say nothing.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 114

KRIVITSKY KILLED HIMSELF AND THE SECRET POLICE DID NOT DO IT

Walter Krivitsky, an intelligence officer who defected in 1937 and emerged in America in 1939, wrote a book, In Stalin’s Secret Service, and in February 1941 was found dead in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.. It was assumed that he was assassinated by the NKVD, although the police verdict was that his death was a suicide. There was an NKVD order issued to look for Krivitsky, but this was routine for all defectors. We were not sorry to see him go, but it was not through our efforts that he died. We believed he shot himself in despair as a result of a nervous breakdown.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 49

YENUKIDZE HAD PLANNED TO DESTROY STALINISM ROOT AND BRANCH

… a few words must be said about the program of Yenukidze and his group. I myself was never a supporter of Yenukidze’s program, nor was I in his conspiracy. Yet his proposals are of considerable interest, as representing the conception of a reformed USSR…. The plan was outlined to me by one of Yenukidze’s closest associates, Sheboldayev, who said that they aimed at destroying Stalinism ‘root and branch’….

Yenukidze was not at once imprisoned, but was put under house arrest in a small building, standing by itself on the outskirts of Moscow, and surrounded by N. K. V. D. guards. Though every precaution was taken against his escape, one day the heavily guarded house was found to be empty. The prisoner had vanished.

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 20-21

ORDJONIKIDZE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MURDERED BY AN ASSASSIN

His [Ordjonikidze] wife [Gavrilovna] was extremely worried and phoned her sister, asking her to come over. February days are short, and as it began to grow dark, just after five, Gavrilovna decided to go into her husband’s room, but while she was on her way, turning on the light in the living room, a shot exploded in his bedroom. Running in, she saw her husband lying on the bed, dead, the bedclothes stained with blood.

According to Gavrilovna, the apartment had a side entrance, which everyone used, and a main entrance that was always closed, with bookshelves against it. Moreover, the main entrance led into the living room, where Gavrilovna was at the moment the shot was fired; so it could not have been used by an assassin.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 401

The arrest of various subordinates of Ordjonikidze’s before and after his death does not prove that Stalin was conducting a campaign against him, for the same thing occurred around men like Kaganovich and Shvernik, the national trade union leader, whom Stalin continued to trust and employ. Just before Ordjonikidze killed himself, he had several long conversations with Stalin. Why the Vozhd would have devoted so much time to someone he planned to destroy is curious; perhaps Stalin recognized his old friend’s disturbed state of mind and tried to calm him down. In any event, the suicide had to be hushed up. But the available evidence is not convincing that Stalin planned to liquidate someone who had served him loyally, had not been in the opposition, and still held key assignments.

Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 42

MERCADER SAYS HE KILLED TROTSKY BECAUSE HE CONCLUDED HE WAS A CAPITALIST AGENT

Mercader left a letter in which he claimed that he had been originally a devoted follower of Trotsky’s, “ready to shed his last drop of blood for him.” But once in Mexico, he had realized that the beloved leader was merely a criminal counter-revolutionary in the service of (unnamed) capitalist governments. Then, and only then, did he decide to liberate the world from this monster.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 56

ENGINEER AND SPECIALIST SABOTAGE

The Russian revolution, however, had produced like all revolutions numbers of bitter, discontented, people who hated the government in power. The first two years of the five-year plan, for instance, were marked by an epidemic of sabotage in the higher engineering staff, many of whom had formerly worked for the foreign capitalist owners of large properties now nationalized by the Revolution. Any American who worked in Soviet industry in the years of the first five-year plan can give you dozens of examples of sabotage by engineers.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 122

Russia in 1920 was only half socialist. Most of industry was socially owned but farming was in the hands of peasant proprietors, the stronger of whom were petty capitalists, struggling not only to survive but to grow. Class strife went on between these emerging rural capitalists and impoverished farmhands….
It was a bitter fight, carried through against the upper sections of the peasantry and part of the middle class. An epidemic of sabotage broke out in the industries among the higher engineering staff, who had consciously or half-consciously expected to advance towards privilege and wealth.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 52

With this as background we consider Russia…. The first two years of the Five-Year Plan saw an “epidemic of sabotage” by the higher engineering staff, many of whom had contacts with former foreign owners of industries now nationalized. Let us glance at this sabotage; any American who in those years worked in Soviet industry can give you examples.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 58

Many Americans told me of sabotage they found in industry.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 60

As more Russians learned the technical side of industry, sabotage lessened for it was more easily detected…. The “epidemic of sabotage” thus passed but the deeper sabotage inspired by foreign agents remained. This, when it reached the courts, was treated with increasing leniency in 1931-34. The economy was advancing; the few saboteurs were not greatly feared. Earlier “wreckers,” most of whom had been sentenced to work in their own profession on some construction under the GPU, reappeared in normal occupations, sometimes with the Order of Lenin, which they had won while working under duress.
The GPU still justified itself by turning up plots, but sentences lessened. The 52 engineers and technicians in the Shakhty case, convicted in 1928 of wrecking coal mines, were given death sentences, and five were actually executed. A similar conviction two years later, in the Industrial Party case, brought automatic death sentences but these were commuted “in view of repentance.” Those convicted soon had good jobs again. The Mensheviks convicted in 1931 of “inspiring peasant uprisings in connivance with foreign powers; were only given prison terms; it was stated that they were no longer dangerous enough to be executed.
This growing leniency was due to the country’s growing confidence…. As the first Five-Year Plan passed into the second, the good feeling we noted in the previous chapter grew. Especially after the 1933 harvest, the Soviet people felt confident in their growing strength.
The assassination of Kirov, on December first, 1934, smashed this dream of security.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 61

Some specialists, however, actually became involved in anti-Soviet activity, including conspiratorial work. In the early 30s several counter-revolutionary organizations and groups sprang up inside the Soviet Union as well as abroad…. The overwhelming majority continued to work honestly trying to help the party leaders in charge of the various economic organizations. Many of the specialists were genuinely inspired by the tremendous scope of the first five-year plans.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 257

…Worst of all, thousands of tons of high-grade ore had been irretrievably lost by the introduction into two mines of methods which I had specifically warned against during my previous visit.
We American engineers had evolved for some of the mines at Kalata a more productive system of working the stopes, and had managed to introduce it….
But I now learned that almost immediately after the American engineers were sent home, the same Russian engineers whom I had warned about the danger, had applied this [destructive] method in the remaining mines, with the result that the mines caved in and much ore was lost beyond recovery.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 97

Men high in the canning industry put broken glass, animal hair and fish tails into food destined for industrial workers. A township veterinarian who hated collectivization inoculated 6000 horses with the plague. An irrigation engineer tried to discourage the policy of settling nomad races on the land by using 30-year-old surveys that he knew were incorrect and that would not deliver the water. All of these and thousands more confessed.
What were the causes? Resentment of the highly aristocratic Russian engineer against workers’ rule; resentment of new technique that made their knowledge out of date; actual bribes by foreign firms; anger at the final drive against capitalism embodied in the Five-Year Plan. This led in 1928-30 to what Stalin called “an epidemic of sabotage” among the higher engineering staff.
Scapegoats for failure were not needed, for the Five-Year Plan did not fail. The energy and sacrifice of loyal workers and technicians carried it through. Its success won over many earlier saboteurs, so that by 1931 Stalin was able to report that “these intellectuals are turning towards the Soviet government,” and should be met “by a policy of conciliation.” Thereafter sabotage cases rapidly diminished both in number and seriousness.
Strong, Anna Louise. “Searching Out the Soviets.” New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 358

TREATMENT OF WRECKERS

A township veterinarian who hated collectivization innoculated 6000 horses with plague.
All these cases, and thousands more like them, can be found in confessions of men who later repented, or in the tales of American engineers experienced in Soviet industry.
If a man made the same “mistake” more than once, and had enough engineering knowledge to “know better,” they called him a wrecker and put him where he could do no harm. This does not mean that they shot him; they usually sent him to work on a construction job in his own profession, but under the direct control of the GPU. As more Russians learned the technical side of industry, sabotage became more difficult, for it was more easily detected.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 125

Even such sabotage, when a came to light in Soviet courts, was treated with increasing leniency in the years from 1931 to 1934. The condition of the country was improving, and the occasional saboteurs were not considered especially dangerous.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 126

In the famous Shakhty case in 1928, for instance, 52 engineers and technicians were convicted of wrecking coal mines in the interest of foreign powers, chiefly Germany; 11 were sentenced to death, and five were actually executed. Two years later in the “Industrial Party” case, a group of engineers admitted conspiracy to wreck state industry in order to put a sort of technocratic party of engineers in control. They were sentenced to death as the law required, but were then immediately given a computation of sentence “in view of their repentance”; shortly after this they were holding good jobs again.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 126

Similarly, a group of Mensheviks convicted in 1931 of inspiring peasant uprisings in connivance with foreign powers were given prison sentences for the announced reason that they were no longer dangerous enough to be executed. In the Metro-Vickers case in 1933, a group of Russian engineers and one Englishman admitted several minor acts of sabotage in power plants which were intended to get their hand in for a widespread wrecking of power plants in case of war. I sat less than 10 feet away from the defendants and watched their faces; it was clear that most of the Russians expected the death sentence. Most of them got only nominal sentences, while the three principal offenders were given ten years.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 127

The increasing leniency in all these cases was due to the lessened tension in the country. As the first five-year plan passed into the second, as Soviet workers became more skilled, an era of good feeling seemed to dawn.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 127

BOLSHEVIKS CLAIM SYSTEM HAS PROVEN SUPERIORITY WHEN THERE IS NO SABOTAGE

The Bolsheviks contend, apparently with justice, that where the new system has received proper trial without sabotage it has already amply proved its superiority and has greatly increased both food production and the actual happiness of the peasant producers.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 308

SCOTT SAYS WRECKING WAS DEFINITELY GOING ON

While the activities of Glazer, Shevchenko, and others above described probably do not coincide with most Westerners’ ideas of wrecking, there unquestionably was wrecking going on in Magnitogorsk.
Scott, John. Behind the Urals, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942, p. 182

Unquestionably some genuine sabotage went on in Magnitogorsk. Here are two examples which I knew of personally:
A certain foreman in the blowing house of the blast-furnace department was rather outspoken in his criticism of the Soviet power. He was a heavy drinker, and under the influence of vodka his tongue would sometimes run away with him. Once he boasted openly in the presence of several foreigners that he would ‘wreck the works.’ One day not long afterward a heavy stilson wrench was found in the mashed blades of one of the imported German gas turbines. The frame of the machine was cracked and the whole thing ruined, involving a loss of several tens of thousands of rubles and a good deal of labor. Several days later the foreman was arrested and confessed that he had done the job. He got eight years.
Another case I ran into personally which would be termed sabotage in any country, was the following:
The second part of the power house in Magnitogorsk was under construction, and two large (24,000 kW) turbines were being installed. The reinforced concrete work–foundations, walls, and grouted roofs–was done by ex-kulak labor. As on many Soviet construction jobs, the erection of the equipment started before the building was completely finished. Consequently, when the big turbine was already in place and the mechanics working on it, the ex-kulaks were still around pouring concrete.
One morning the mechanics found the main bearings and some of the minor grease cups of the big turbine filled with ground glass. This substance will ruin a bearing very rapidly. Investigations were made immediately, and several pails of the glass were found near the shack where the ex-kulaks reported when they came to work in the morning. It was there for the electric welders, who used it, mixed with chalk and water, to coat their electrodes.
Obviously one of the embittered, illiterate, dekulakized laborers had taken a pocketful of the glass and put it into the bearings. Unnoticed, this act would have caused great loss. The action was clearly deliberate and malicious wrecking, and the motivations of the wrecker were easily understood.
During the late twenties and early thirties the rich peasants, or kulaks, were liquidated. Their property was confiscated and given to the collective farms. They were shipped out to some construction jobs for five years or so, to be re-educated. Some of the young ones, like my friend Shabkov, lent themselves to this re-education; but most of the old ones were bitter and hopeless. They were ready to do anything, in their blind hatred, to strike back at the Soviet power.
But the Soviet power was not around to strike. There were only workers and engineers and other ex-kulaks building a steel mill. But the machines were symbolic of the new power, of the force which had confiscated their property and sent them out onto the steppe to pour concrete. And they struck at the machines.
Scott, John. Behind the Urals, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942, p. 186-187

WRITER SAYS HE SAW DOCUMENTS PROVING SABOTAGE

What remained of the Trotsky-Zinoviev movement had consistently fought against the reforms and policies proposed by Stalin and approved by the Party. The Rykov group violently opposed collectivization of agriculture. Sabotage in industry and in mining began to break out. Henri Barbusse, the well-known French writer, who visited Russia at this time, made the following observations, “What subterranean maneuvers; what scheming and plotting! I am still bewildered by all the photographs of documents which I have seen personally. For years one could search in any corner of the Union and one would infallibly discover the English, French, Polish, or Romanian microbe of spying and foul play mixed with the virus of the ‘white’ plague. A certain amount of it still remains. The same people who blew up the bridges and whatever public works still remained in liberated Russia, gasping for breath, who threw emery into the machines and put the few remaining railway engines out of action–these same people put powdered glass into cooperative food supplies in 1933.”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 28

The sabotage of budding industry, which the USSR made super human efforts to revive, has been raised to the level of an international institution, in which important personages, military officers, technical experts, political agents and the diplomacy and police of the Great Powers have all taken part. What subterranean maneuvers, what scheming and plotting! I am still bewildered by all the photographs of documents which I have seen personally. For years one could search in any corner of the Union and one would infallibly discover the English, French, Polish, or Rumanian microbe of spying and foul play, mixed with the virus of the White plague. A certain amount of it still remains. The same people who blew up the bridges and whatever public works still remained in liberated Russia, gasping for breath, who threw emery into the machines and put the few remaining railway engines out of action–these same people put powdered glass into cooperative food supplies in 1933, and in December 1934 appointed one of their number to blow out Kirov’s brains from behind, in the middle of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. They unearthed nests of vipers and found that assassins and terrorists have been streaming into the country from Finland, Poland, and Lithuania where they swarm,…
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 114

EXPLOSIONS IN MINES LED TO DEBATE OVER USING BOURGEOIS SPECIALISTS

On September 23, 1936 a wave of explosions hit the Siberian mines, the second in nine months. There were 12 dead. Three days later, Yagoda became Commissar of Communications and Yezhov chief of the NKVD. At least until that time, Stalin had sustained the more or less liberal policies of Yagoda.
Investigations in Siberia led to the arrest of Pyatakov, an old Trotskyist, assistant to Ordzhonikidze, Commissar of Heavy Industry since 1932. Close to Stalin, Ordzhonikidze had followed a policy of using and re-educating bourgeois specialists. Hence, in February 1936, he had amnestied nine `bourgeois engineers’, condemned in 1930 during a major trial on sabotage.
On the question of industry, there had been for several years debates and divisions within the Party. Radicals, led by Molotov, opposed most of the bourgeois specialists, in whom they had little political trust. They had long called for a purge. Ordzhonikidze, on the other hand, said that they were needed and that their specialties had to be used.
This recurring debate about old specialists with a suspect past resurfaced with the sabotage in the Siberian mines. Inquiries revealed that Pyatakov, Ordzhonikidze’s assistant, had widely used bourgeois specialists to sabotage the mines.
In January 1937, the trial of Pyatakov, Radek and other old Trotskyists was held; they admitted their clandestine activities. For Ordzhonikidze, the blow was so hard that he committed suicide.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 141 [p. 125 on the NET]

LITTLEPAGE SHOWED THE SABOTAGE CHARGES WERE VALID & NOT ANTI-0PPONENT EXCUSES

Of course, several bourgeois authors have claimed that the accusations of systematic sabotage were completely invented, that these were frameups whose sole r™le was to eliminate political opponents. But there was a U.S. engineer who worked between 1928 and 1937 as a leading cadre in the mines of Ural and Siberia, many of which had been sabotaged. The testimony of this apolitical technician John Littlepage is interesting on many counts.
Littlepage described how, as soon as he arrived in the Soviet mines in 1928, he became aware of the scope of industrial sabotage, the method of struggle preferred by enemies of the Soviet regime. There was therefore a large base fighting against the Bolshevik leadership, and if some well-placed Party cadres were encouraging or simply protecting the saboteurs, they could seriously weaken the regime. Here is Littlepage’s description.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 141 [p. 125 on the NET]

[a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor stated the following]
… the Soviet Government started a series of conspiracy trials in August, 1936, with prominent Communists as defendants,…
Littlepage did not come to Moscow during this trial, and emerged from a long stay in the Soviet Far East only after the second trial, in January, 1937, when important Communists confessed that they had “wrecked” several Soviet industrial enterprises in order to discredit Stalin.
I asked Littlepage: “What do you think? Was the trial a frame-up or not?”
He replied: “I don’t know anything about politics. But I know quite a lot about Soviet industry. And I know that a large part of Soviet industry has been deliberately wrecked, and that would hardly be possible without the help of highly placed Communists. Someone wrecked those industries, and the Communists hold all the high positions in industry. Therefore, I figure Communists helped to wreck those industries.”
No theories for Littlepage. But he believed what he saw…. He was unique among foreigners, so far as I knew, in the fact that he had worked intimately on close terms with Soviet organizations and at the same time had never departed, by a hair’s breath, from his original American outlook…. Littlepage had been inside the system for many years, and still remained as dispassionate as when he started.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. xi

He watched what went on, and was not much surprised by anything he saw. These people had their own peculiar ways of doing things, he said, and it wasn’t his business to judge them. They had hired him to do a job of work, producing as much gold as possible for them, and he was doing it as well as he could. He got along with them very well, because he didn’t mix up in their intrigues, and didn’t try to stick his nose into matters which weren’t connected with mining and smelting gold.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. xii

Of course, there is plenty of need for close police supervision in Soviet industry. In the gold industry the police guard shipments of gold, which don’t take up much space, and might easily be diverted. But they are kept even busier looking out for sabotage.
…I knew there were people who sometimes tried to wreck plant or machinery in the United States, but I didn’t know just how or why they operated. However, I hadn’t worked many weeks in Russia before I encountered questionable instances of deliberate and malicious wrecking.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 198

One day in 1928, I went into a power station at the Kochkar gold mines. I just happened to drop my hand on one of the main bearings of a large Diesel engine as I walked by, and felt something gritty in the oil. I had the engine stopped immediately, and we removed from the oil reservoir about a quart of quartz sand, which could have been placed there only by design. On several other occasions, in the new milling plants at Kochkar, we found sand inside such equipment as speed reducers, which are entirely enclosed, and can be reached only by removing the hand-hold covers.
Such petty industrial sabotage was, and still is, so common in all branches of Soviet industry that Russian engineers can do little about it and were surprised at my own concern when I first encountered it. There was, and still is, so much of this sort of thing that the police have had to create a whole army of professional and amateur spies to cut the amount down. In fact, so many people in Soviet institutions are busy watching producers to see that they behave properly that I suspect there are more watchers than producers.
Why, I have been asked, is sabotage of this description so common in Soviet Russia, and so rare in most other countries? Do Russians have a peculiar bent for industrial wrecking?
PEOPLE WHO ASK SUCH QUESTIONS APPARENTLY HAVEN’T REALIZED THAT THE AUTHORITIES IN RUSSIA HAVE BEEN, AND STILL ARE, FIGHTING A WHOLE SERIES OF OPEN OR DISGUISED CIVIL WARS. In the beginning, they fought and dispossessed the old aristocracy, the bankers and landowners and merchants of the Tsarist regime. I have described how they later fought and dispossessed the little independent farmers and the little retail merchants and the nomad herders in Asia.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 199

Of course, it’s all for their own good, say the Communists. But many of these people can’t see things that way, and remain bitter enemies of the Communists and their ideas, even after they have been put back to work in state industries. From these groups have come a considerable number of disgruntled workers who dislike Communists so much that they would gladly damage any of their enterprises if they could.
For this reason, the police have records of every industrial worker, and have traced back their careers to the time of the Revolution, so far as possible. Those who belong to any group which has been dispossessed are given a black mark, and kept under constant watch. When anything serious happens, such as a fire or a cave-in a mine, the police round up such people before they do anything else. And in the case of any big political crime, such as the Kirov assassination, the round up becomes nationwide.
However, the police assigned to Soviet industrial enterprises do not confine themselves to watching potential wreckers. I know from my own observation that they also organize a network of labor spies. It is a fact that any trouble-maker among the workmen, who grumbles excessively or shows any tendency to criticize the Government, is likely to disappear quietly. The police handle such cases with great skill, and seldom raise a rumpus. I don’t mean to suggest that such workers are treated violently; they’re probably shipped off to out-of-the-way enterprises, perhaps to some of those operated by the police themselves.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 200

The federal police were a great deal less in evidence when I arrived in Russia in 1928 than when I left that country in 1937. It seems to me that their functions have accumulated something like a snowball. So far as their number was concerned, it seemed to expand and contract in sympathy with the political atmosphere. After the enormous police activity at the time of the Kirov assassination, there was a period of comparative quiet through 1935 and the early part of 1936. Then, with the discovery of the “wrecking” conspiracy among higher Communists in 1936, and the removal of the police chief, Yagoda, the activity of the federal police became more frenzied than at any other time in my experience, and was at its height when I left.
…Both Soviet workers and officials often are so green, industrially speaking, that it takes a very wise man indeed to determine between so-called wrecking and plain ignorance. There has been plenty of real wrecking in Soviet industry, as my experience has shown me.
…I can understand why a certain amount of police supervision is necessary in Russian industry, whereas it would not be in Alaska, for example. There are still a lot of people in Russia who do not like the regime, and would be glad to damage it by sabotaging industry which it operates.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 203-204

The Ridder lead and zinc mines in southern Kazakhstan, I was informed, were in a critical state, and I was instructed to hurry down and see what I could do about it. I have already told how I reorganized these mines in 1932, and what I discovered there when I returned on this occasion, in 1937. Undoubted sabotage had occurred in high quarters, and this mine, which is one of the most valuable in the world, was very nearly lost. The business of rescuing it occupied me for several months, and was the final task of my Russian experience.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 265

In some ways it was unfortunate that my last months in Russia should be spent working for the Copper-Lead Trust, some of whose managers I had never trusted, and who, in my opinion, were deliberate wreckers.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 266

STALIN SAYS THEY MUST NOT AUTOMATICALLY ASSUME EVERY EXPERT IS GUILTY

But from this it follows that we must change our policy towards the old technical intelligentsia. If, during the height of the wrecking movement, we adopted smashing tactics toward the old technical intelligentsia, now, when these intellectuals are turning toward the Soviet government, our policy toward them must be one of conciliation and solicitude. It would be wrong and dialectically incorrect to continue our former policy when conditions have changed. It would be foolish and unwise to regard almost every expert and engineer of the old school as an undetected criminal and wrecker. “Expert-baiting” always was, and still is regarded by us as a noxious and disgraceful phenomenon.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 139

INCOMPETENCE RATHER THAN WRECKING WAS OFTEN THE PROBLEM

But gradually a real “wrecker” psychosis has grown up amongst the people. They have come to interpret everything that goes wrong as sabotage, whilst most certainly a great part of the defects are traceable to incompetence pure and simple.

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 38

THERE WAS NO WORKER URGE TO REVOLT IN THE EARLY 1930’S

The writers of a majority of books about Russia are either tourists, who almost never write anything worth more than entertainment, or they are what the Russians would call specialists. These latter people are very fond of studying documents and figures given to them by the Soviet authorities. It is not surprising to me that such observers, sitting in Moscow, reading the excited articles in the Moscow newspapers, and seeing that the country actually was experiencing a food shortage, should get the idea that industrial workers were on the verge of revolting against the authorities.
But I spent this period down among the rank-and-file of the industrial army, sweating and straining like the workers around me to meet increasing demands for production. And I never got any feeling that the workers were on the verge of revolt.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 83

LITTLEPAGE HATES PEOPLE WHO SABOTAGE

I must say that while I took no sides in the Communist internal political disputes, I never had any sympathy for people who talk about “betrayals” in Russia. My experience there was almost entirely in industry, and in one branch of industry, mining. But, as a completely disinterested engineer, my indignation was aroused chiefly against those who deliberately wrecked mines and destroyed valuable machinery and ore bodies. Whatever their motive may have been, their actions were inexcusable.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 161

SPECULATORS ENGAGE IN CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

We have already mentioned a few of the new-style criminals in Russia, the kulaks, and others who resisted collectivization and were given several years of forced labor under police supervision. Another vast new class of criminals are those known as “speculators.” A workman’s wife, for example, stands in line at a state-owned drygoods store, and buys a dozen yards of cloth, which is all the store will sell at one time. She stands in line several times, waiting several hours each time, and finally gets together 50 or 100 yards of cloth. If she sells this cloth, and takes any profit at all for her pains, she becomes a speculator. The Soviet newspapers often report prison sentences, sometimes even the maximum of ten years, for women who have bought articles in Government stores, and sold them for what we would consider a very modest profit, in view of the trouble they had taken.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 201

CRACKDOWN BECAME MUCH STIFFER AFTER THE PLOT TO KILL STALIN WAS REVEALED IN 1936

But when the great anti-Stalin conspiracy was discovered in 1936, a greater reign of terror started than any which preceded it, and industry was particularly affected, because the conspirators confessed that they had concentrated on wrecking several industries.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 214

LITTLEPAGE GIVES A GOOD SUMMARY OF WHY SUBVERSION DEVELOPED FROM 1924 TO 1939

To keep things in their own hands, the Communist General staff appoint members of their own party to all key positions. Technical experts were always subject to orders from Communists. Having attained an iron hold on everything in the country, the Communists have arranged to keep it forever by forbidding the organization of any other political party, or even the expression of any other political views. A large police force has been built up to suppress actual or potential political opponents.
This is about the slickest device ever conceived to keep one group permanently in power. However, there proved to be one catch: the Communist leaders could not agree among themselves. These hard-boiled revolutionaries had risked their lives more than once in pre-Revolutionary Russia for the sake of their ideas. The same men now held key positions in the Communist Government. But they couldn’t think exactly alike, and when they had disagreements, these strong-willed men couldn’t surrender their own ideas simply because they had been voted down by a majority of the Party.
The disputes inside the party became so serious that they threatened to break up the whole system. Unless the system was to be modified, something must be done to restore discipline inside the Communist Party. So Joseph Stalin, an Asiatic with Asiatic conceptions of enforcing discipline, and at the same time one of the shrewdest political manipulators imaginable, got hold of of the Party machine and began to enforce discipline by suppressing, exiling, imprisoning leaders of opposition Communist groups.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 293

From 1927, or thereabouts, a new policy was instituted. Before that time, political opposition had been forbidden outside of the Communist Party. From this time onward political opposition was also forbidden inside the Party. The Party took a vote on any dispute; and if 51 percent of the members voted for one side, the other 49 percent could no longer argue for their opinions or expressed any critical views.
Some of the strong-minded revolutionaries inside the Party could not adapt themselves to any such system. They were especially disgruntled because Stalin proved to be a much more clever political manipulator than they were, and could always get a party majority for any project he favored.
From 1929 onward, Stalin began to introduce the whole flock of new policies and projects. This was the period of the Five Year Plans, of the Second Communist Revolution, of all sorts of changes and shifts in the Soviet system and in Communist theory and practice. Through the political machinery he had worked out and established, Stalin directed all these changes entirely to suit his own ideas, and the other old revolutionaries, unless they agreed with Stalin, were left out in the cold.
With human nature being what it is, this situation naturally created many powerful enemies for Stalin, especially among the veteran revolutionaries who had been willing to die for their ideas in the past, and still were. They tried to start underground political agitation as they had done under the Tsars. But the political system which they had helped to create was something much more powerful and subtle than the system they had helped to overthrow. Stalin and the directors of his political police knew all the tricks of underground agitation.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 294

If I have figured it out correctly, the great conspiracy which has almost wrecked the Soviet system in recent years, and hasn’t yet been cleared up, is the natural consequence of the unnatural political scheme which forbids strong men to express their opinions openly and freely. Such a system is bound to produce underground conspirators.
Stalin and his associates apparently didn’t foresee this. After defeating political rivals inside the Communist Party in the period 1927-30, they exiled them for a few months or years, and then brought them back and gave them responsible positions in politics and industry. They seemed to think these veteran revolutionaries would now buckle down and faithfully follow the course laid out for them by Stalin and the lesser men he had promoted to the highest positions because they had always agreed with him.
My own experience in the Copper and Lead Trust provides a good example of Stalin’s treatment of defeated rivals among the veteran revolutionaries, and of the consequences. When I started to work for this Trust in 1931, the men chiefly responsible for its work and that of other allied industrial enterprises, was Pyatakov, a veteran Revolutionary who had disputed with Stalin about several Communist projects, and had been sent into exile for a time, and then brought back, had publicly apologized for his past actions, been “forgiven,” and assigned to this responsible position.
There were dozens of men all through Soviet industry, in key positions, who had gone through a similar experience. Yet they were expected to entertain no hard feelings, to agree with Stalin about everything in the future, and to work with all their energy and enthusiasm to increase his prestige at home and abroad. Among their other duties, they were expected to get up almost every day and make speeches praising Stalin to the skies.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 295

Well, to my mind it is incredible how any man as smart as Stalin could think subordinates of this sort would work loyally in support of himself and his ideas, especially when he knew from past experience how stubbornly they had stuck to their own ideas, and what sacrifices they were willing to make for them. But these former enemies were certainly given a lot of responsibility, and were in a position to cause tremendous damage to Soviet industry if they were so minded.
The testimony in the 1938 trial has done much to explain why Stalin was thrown off his guard. He placed a great deal of reliance, as any man in his position would have to do, upon the chief of the political police. This man, Yagoda, stood high in Stalin’s favor, and was the most feared and hated man in the country. He had the power to arrest and imprison any Soviet citizen indefinitely without trial, or to send him to a concentration camp or into exile without even announcing that he had been arrested.
Yet this man, who was arrested in 1937, testified at his trial in 1938 that he had been conspiring against Stalin for years, and that he and his associates were slowly preparing a coup d’etat which would replace Stalin with the group of those same former rivals whom Stalin had brought back and given responsible positions, even though they had much less prestige and power than before they broke with Stalin.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 296

If this man’s story is true, and I don’t see why it couldn’t be true, the chief of the police force, which is the central instrument of power for a dictator like Stalin, was on the side of Stalin’s enemies, and was only awaiting a favorable opportunity to seize the Government. So many important Communists were on the other side that it was easy to cover up industrial sabotage or anything else.
I never followed the subtleties of political ideas and maneuvers in Russia, except when I couldn’t get away from them; but I had to study what went on in Soviet industry in order to get through my work satisfactorily. AND I AM FIRMLY CONVINCED THAT STALIN AND HIS ASSOCIATES WERE A LONG TIME GETTING AROUND TO THE DISCOVERY THAT DISGRUNTLED COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARIES WERE THE MOST DANGEROUS ENEMIES THEY HAD. It naturally wasn’t my business to warn my Communist employers against their fellow Party members, but some Russians can bear witness that I mentioned my suspicions to them as early as 1932, after I had worked for some months in the Ural copper mines.
During the past two or three years, the Soviet government has shot more people for industrial sabotage than any other government has ever done, so far as I can discover. A large proportion of those shot were Communists who had previously disagreed with Stalin and then been brought back and given less important but responsible jobs in industry. Some Americans seem to find it hard to believe that Communists would try to wreck industries in a country where other Communists are in control. But anyone who knows Communists can understand that they will fight each other more fiercely than they fight so-called capitalists, when they disagree over some of their hair-splitting ideas.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 297

Sabotage is a familiar Communist weapon in every country…. It is hardly surprising that some Communists should use this same weapon in Russia, once they have decided that the existing regime does not satisfy their own peculiar notions.
It hardly seems necessary to study Dostoevsky’s novels or to dig deep into Russian history to find a complicated explanation for what has happened in Soviet Russia since 1936, as some more subtle minds than mine have preferred to do. MY EXPERIENCE CONFIRMS THE OFFICIAL EXPLANATION WHICH, WHEN IT IS STRIPPED OF A LOT OF HIGH-FLOWN AND OUTLANDISH VERBIAGE, COMES DOWN TO THE SIMPLE ASSERTION THAT “OUTS” AMONG THE COMMUNISTS CONSPIRED TO OVERTHROW THE “INS,” AND RESORTED TO UNDERGROUND CONSPIRACY AND INDUSTRIAL SABOTAGE because the Soviet system has stifled all legitimate means for waging a political struggle.
This Communist feud developed into such a big affair that many non-Communists were dragged into it, and had to pick one side or the other. Those who could avoid making a decision stood to one side; they didn’t want to get caught, whichever way the battle went. Disgruntled persons of all kinds were in a mood to support any kind of underground opposition movement, simply because they were discontented with things as they stood. I saw what this conspiracy did to some of the mines, and I can well believe that it was equally destructive to other branches of Soviet industry, as the official reports say it was.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 298

SUBVERSIVES INFILTRATED COLLECTIVES’ LEADERSHIP AND DID SABOTAGE

Industry and agriculture in the Soviet Union are Socialist, but this does not exclude the existence within this Socialist structure of virulent enemies of the new Socialist order. Leaving aside the recent Trotskyist activities for subsequent examination, we can illustrate this proposition by a reference to the wholesale sabotage carried out in the collective farms in the years 1931-33. In the North Caucasus, for example, it was found that amongst the leaders of collective farms were ex-officers who had served with Kolchak and Denikin, and a number of sons of rich peasants. These elements had not only penetrated the collective farms but also occupied important posts in the Communist Party in that area. A similar state of affairs was discovered in the Ukraine. Now obviously these people were utterly incapable of developing a successful movement for the overthrow of the Soviet Government, but they were capable of disorganizing the work of the collectives and, on this foundation, rousing intense opposition amongst the peasantry to the whole policy of co-operation.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 144

[Letter from Bochkaryov, Middle Volga Krai, on Specialists in 1930]
We poor peasants haven’t retreated from our post but have fought to the last drop. We finally took power into our own hands, as expected of us we switched to normal work, but then, however, the Tsarist hangers-on saw at once what the deal was. They saw that our government paid for our toil as much as was needed to make a living. Then they began to enter our ranks to help us as specialists, and then snuck into our party as well. Now this is really the way all Tsarist hangers-on infiltrated the Soviet Union. The last year I was in the service, I kept a strict eye on this. They were infiltrating our lives by joining some of our trade unions, for example, our communication services union. In this union there was some specialist-bureaucrat who works in this business, at first as a specialist, and then he sneaks his way into the party, and then he’s in charge of us. He immediately sees those who stand on the side of soviet power and immediately has those dismissed from the union. This is away all specialists of this sort work their way into the party…. When we went to repair the lines, I saw these types of specialists when we began to screw the hooks into the telephone poles, and what happens? I screw in three hooks, and he screws in one. I hold two poles, and he one, and all his work is that way, but just the same they’ve made him into my boss because he’s the old specialist. Finally he dismissed all of us poor peasants from the union and put in his own types, those he wanted. Here’s an example for you of how they climbed into our party. Now our party as begun to worry about purging its ranks.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 72

[1939 essay on life in Voronezh Oblast village sent by rural correspondent Grebennikov to Krest’ianskaia Gazeta]
But some people began to find the kolkhoz farmers’ labor offensive and harmful. People who wormed their way into the leading raion organizations, now exposed as enemies of the people, the Polish spy Sandlir, the enemy of the people Shapkin, Riabinina, and Zhuzhalov, who did their foul deeds and stooped to the worst acts of nastiness they could think of. Making sure it was in the middle of the coldest frost, they summoned 200 carts to the raion under court order, supposedly for essential matters of national importance. Without preparing any shelter, they left people and horses out in the open air around the clock, and for two years these tricks deprived the Kalinin kolkhoz of draft animals.
But in May 1938 the glorious Soviet intelligence agents exposed the people who were perpetrating these outrages and they must bear their proper punishment. And only in 1938 did the people of Kazinka, after heaving a sigh of relief, freely set about their work, proving that labor is valor in heroism.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 299

[September 19, 1937 Letter of rural correspondent Alekseev to Krest’ianskaia Gazeta on violations of law in Northern Oblast kolkhozes]
The kolkhozes of Lesha Raion in Northern Oblast this year are getting a very abundant harvest, that even our grandfathers do not remember such an abundance of produce, but the enemies of the people, seeing that the kolkhozes are growing stronger, the kolkhoz farmers are becoming well-off and are becoming even more devoted to the party and its leader Comrade Stalin, at the same time are trying to muck things up, prevent the harvest from being gathered and stir up the masses on the kolkhoz. Take [for example] at our machine-tractor stations the enemies of the people Trotskyists Bukharinists have put machines out of commission, machines as decisive in the harvest as the 17 VNIL-5 flax pullers. Flax has been harvested from only 35 hectares for the season. Combines are not being used, they are standing in the fields and the manager is doing nothing. MTS contracts with kolkhozes are not being honored and MTS leaders have yet to give a single accounting to kolkhoz farmers, fearful that their wrecking work will be exposed to the masses.
…But in spite of all this the masses of kolkhoz farmers themselves are struggling with all their might to preserve the abundant crop and the harvest is going through to completion. Then the enemies of the people took another method of struggle to irritate the masses. They are setting fire to villages, the biggest and most packed [densely settled], so that they burn more, like the village of Otemetenikovo recently burned down, a fire was set in a nonresidential structure, today Sept. 19, 1937 the village of Ramenovo burned down, the fire was set in a nonresidential structure, it burned down in the village of Antipino, the same thing on the same night a threshing barn with grain on a kolkhoz was set afire. And what is no secret is that there used to be SR [Socialist-Revolutionary] groups in these villages, and apparently their offspring are the ones that are operating.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 305

[May 1938 appeal from Chairman of the Kolkhoz Board in Ivanovo Oblast, Khalistov, sent to Krest’ianskaia Gazet]
In 1937 the worst sort of wrecking flourish at our Gorskaia MTS and the Il’insky Raion Executive Committee. Based on an alarm sent to the newspaper Pravda the wreckers were unmasked and incurred the punishment they deserved from two to five years in prison and were ousted from their jobs. The population was able to breathe freely, the wreckers were gone, but the spring of 1938 brought them back. They have felled trees, heaps of suckers have come out of the roots, there are more wreckers and they are worse than in 1937. The stock of tractors was left in the fields in the local villages, and they just stood there all winter, and some of the machines got all rusted. The same wreckers filched and pilfered them….
On the basis of the foregoing we request that you urgently untangle this mess with the wreckers at the Gorskaia MTS and Il’insky Raion, which are covering up and hushing up all the acts of wrecking and laying waste to the kolkhoz stock of horses. They are wearing out the horses which are already weak as it is with overwork, dragging out the sowing indefinitely. They have ruined all the plans for spring work. Is this abomination going to continue much longer, the kolkhoz boards and kolkhoz farmers are outraged and demand an investigation.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 307

[November 3, 1938 Letter from ex-kolkhoznik Rogudilin to Krest’ianskaia Gazeta on abuses on Karl Marx kolkhoz, Orel Oblast]
In 1936 I was forced to leave, or otherwise the enemies wanted to lock me up for the fact that I was unmasking enemies. But even so I feel sorry for my beloved kolkhoz where the enemies are ruining it and want to ruin it like in the spring of 1937. Didn’t I write you that the people at Karl Marx Kolkhoz of the Kalabinsky Village Soviet in Zadonsk Raion, Orel oblast, with criminal intent sowed ordinary wheat instead of high-quality. Also I receive more than one letter from home where they write me that the kolkhoz chairman on our kolkhoz swapped all the chaff for drink.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 310

t was then “revealed” that “saboteurs…were groundlessly putting on trial and sentencing a significant number of grassroots activists in the soviets and collective farms. This was done with a definite aim: to stir up animosity among working people.”
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 254

SPIES AND WRECKERS WERE SENT TO THE SU AS TECHNICIANS AND ENGINEERS

During the first and second Five Year Plans thousands of technicians and tens of thousands of skilled workers were brought into the country by the Soviet government, in order to assist in the construction of new industries. What could be easier than for the enemies of the Soviet Union to send in groups of spies and wreckers in the guise of technicians?
Thousands of Germans entered the country in flight from the Fascist terror in Germany. While the overwhelming majority of them were devoted revolutionaries, it was possible for the Fascists to incorporate in their ranks groups of agents and spies who, on arrival in the country, cooperated with the organizations of Rights and Trotskyists. And just as the Fascist agents in Britain are under the protection of certain aristocratic groups, so the agents of Fascism in the Soviet Union were under the protection of the Right Wing Chief of the political police, Yagoda.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 232

SABOTAGE IN THE EARLY 30’S ON THE RAILROADS

[1932 Party Verification of Railroad Employees]
Renewed activity by the Class Enemy and the Fight against It
We possess a substantial number of facts pointing to renewed activity by class-alien, counter-revolutionary, kulak, SR, and Trotskyist factions that is manifested in deteriorating work discipline, declining work quality, and various incidents of sabotage and wholesale theft (on the Moscow-Kazan RR, SR factions in Ruzaevka, Penza, and Yudin; on the Moscow-Kursk RR, in Plekhanovo and Tula SR and Trotskyist terrorist groups with two “Communist” collaborators; on the North Caucasus RR, at Krasnodar Station a counter-revolutionary organization of men from former “haves”: a priest, a Tsarist military officer, a kulak, and a military bureaucrat, and others; on the Western RR, a counter-revolutionary bandit organization headed by bureaucrats from Tsarist times with connections abroad, and a “shock worker” and his band of 25).
Proof of sabotage: at the Maloiaroslavets repair shops repeated arson in the cabs of competing locomotives. In the October RR’s Moscow shops competing engineers have been systematically harassed, sand poured into the axle boxes of their locomotives, and tools looted. Timetables on the Yekaterinsk RR were designed to sabotage, and the Siberian, Far East, and other lines have sabotage organizations.
In December on the Moscow-Kazan railroad communication lines were damaged 14 times, rendering the lines useless for a total of more than 10 hours.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 122

Recently, Party organizers and cell members have significantly intensified their fight against the class enemy. For example, class enemies holding Party cards have been exposed and expelled: six “Communists” from the cell at the Golutvino Shops of the Moscow-Kazan RR, a secret tie between the secretary of the party collective at Kurgan station and kulaks. In Zlatoust the secretary of the Komsomol cell and head of the technical propaganda office were exposed as kulak agents. The secretary of the party cell of workers also had a secret tie [with class enemies]. Secret enemies were exposed who had shielded themselves with party membership along the North Caucasian and Trans-Siberian Railroads, at the Krasnodar, Novocherkassk, Tikhoretsk, Baku, Nantlug, and other stations.
However, to put it bluntly, the fight against the class enemy is still far from being sufficiently intense in day-to-day work….
In view of the facts cited here, we think the purge of the party on the railroads should have the highest priority, that new, broad, and thorough verifications should be carried out in conjunction with the GPU, and that class-alien and kulak elements should be chased out of the transportation industry.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 123

In 1934 there were 62,000 “mishaps,” some of them serious wrecks, on the Soviet railway system.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 539

MOLOTOV SAYS THERE IS GREAT WRECKING IN INDUSTRY LED BY PYATAKOV & TRAITORS

Molotov gave a major report on wrecking in industry. He said that Piatakov was the chief organizer of wrecking in heavy industry. Because he held so high a post, wreckers and spies had every opportunity to place their people in the chief administrations, trusts, and enterprises. Then Molotov made it clear that the purge in heavy industry was already far along: ” Not just a single hundred industrial leaders with party cards, but also ‘nonparty” engineers and technicians who had key posts in institutions of the Heavy Industry Commissariat and for years carried on criminal wrecking work there have now been exposed.” Drawing heavily on materials of the January trial, he drew a picture of an economy infested with wrecking by “Japanese-German-Trotskyist agents” plus–now that this was settled–Bukharinist and Rykovist wreckers of the Right.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 423

SUBVERSIVES HEAVILY INFILTRATED INDUSTRY AND WHILE UNDERMINING PROTECTED OTHERS

In industry too, there is no doubt that the circle of “secret agents” to be traced and punished was a fairly large one, which would have had to include, among others, such “subversive elements” as authors of false reports on the completion of unfinished projects, skeptics on reorganization and reforms, producers of regularly substandard goods, those who wasted raw materials, and all kinds of incompetent and corrupt officials. Within the Party apparatus too there were cadres to be found everywhere who might be suspected of “hostile activities.” There, “enemies of the people” constituted formidable cliques. They protected other “saboteurs,” took vengeance on those who tried to denounce them, outwitted the vigilance of control agencies, neglected important duties, and systematically communicated false information up to the central authorities, where in any case a good many of them manifestly benefited from the connivance of highly-placed protectors.
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 252

SOME WORKING GROUPS ADMIT SABOTAGE

During walks I had the opportunity to meet a group of workers from the Navy dockyards, who were lodged in another ward. They were accused of having sabotaged the loan for the Five-Year Plan in certain workshops of the Dockyard. They were accused of Trotskyism; some, indeed, were tainted with it, but most of them were plain non-Party workers. They assured me that the Dockyard workers had sabotaged the loan without anybody’s prompting in order to protest against the continual worsening of their material conditions.
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 168

FAMINE DID NOT OCCUR

For two years farming was dislocated, not, as often claimed, by Moscow’s enforcement of collectivization but by the fact that local people eager to be first at the promised tractors, organized collective farms three times as fast as the plan called for, setting up large-scale farming without machines even without bookkeepers. In 1932-33 the whole land went hungry; all food everywhere was rigidly rationed. (It has been often called a famine which killed millions of people, but I visited the hungriest parts of the country and while I found a wide-spread suffering, I did not find, either in individual villages or in the total Soviet census, evidence of the serious depopulation which famine implies.)
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 69

As far back as late August, 1933, the New Republic declared:
“… the present harvest is undoubtedly the best in many years–some peasants report a heavier yield of grain than any of their forefathers had known”since 1834. Grain deliveries to the government are proceeding at a very satisfactory rate and the price of bread has fallen sharply in the industrial towns of the Ukraine. In view these facts, the appeal of the Cardinal Archbishop [Innitzer] of Vienna for assistance for Russian famine victims seems to be a political maneuver against the Soviets.”
And, contrary to wild stories told by Ukrainian Nationalist exiles about “Russians” eating plentifully while deliberately starving “millions” of Ukrainians to death, the New Republic notes that while bread prices in Ukraine were falling, “bread prices in Moscow have risen.”…
It is a matter of some significance that Cardinal Innitzer’s allegations of famine-genocide were widely promoted throughout the 1930s, not only by Hitler’s chief propagandist Goebbels, but also by American Fascists as well. It will be recalled that Hearst kicked off his famine campaign with a radio broadcast based mainly on material from Cardinal Innitzer’s “aid committee.” In Organized Anti-Semitism in America, the 1941 book exposing Nazi groups and activities in the pre-war United States, Donald Strong notes that American fascist leader Father Coughlin used Nazi propaganda material extensively. This included Nazi charges of “atrocities by Jew Communists” and verbatim portions of a Goebbels speech referring to Innitzer’s “appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 49-51

…Sir John Maynard, a former high school… official in the Indian government was a renowned expert on famines and relief measures. On the basis of his experience in Ukraine, he stated that the idea of 3 or 4 million dead “has passed into legend. Any suggestion of a calamity comparable with the famine of 1921-1922 is, in the opinion of the present writer, who traveled through Ukraine and North Caucasus in June and July 1933, unfounded.” Even as conservative a scholar as Warren Walsh wrote in defense of Maynard, his “professional competence and personal integrity were beyond reasonable challenge.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 52

Cold War confrontation, rather than historical truth and understanding, has motivated and characterized the famine-genocide campaign. Elements of fraud, anti-semitism, degenerate Nationalism, fascism, and pseudo- scholarship revealed in this critical examination of certain key evidence presented in the campaign…and historical background of the campaign’s promoters underline this conclusion.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 133

QUESTION: Is it true that during 1932-33 several million people were allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and North Caucasus because they were politically hostile to the Soviets?
ANSWER: Not true. I visited several places in those regions during that period. There was a serious grain shortage in the 1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines. To this was added sabotage by dispossessed kulaks, the leaving of the farms by 11 million workers who went to new industries, the cumulative effect of the world crisis in depressing the value of Soviet farm exports, and a drought in five basic grain regions in 1931. The harvest of 1932 was better than that of 1931 but was not all gathered; on account of overoptimistic promises from rural districts, Moscow discovered the actual situation only in December when a considerable amount of grain was under snow.
Strong, Anna Louise. “Searching Out the Soviets.” New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 356

Opposing the tendency of many Communists to blame the peasants, Stalin said: “We Communists are to blame”–for not foreseeing and preventing the difficulties. Several organizational measures were at once put into action to meet the immediate emergency and prevent its reoccurrence. Firm pressure on defaulting farms to make good the contracts they had made to sell 1/4 their crop to the state in return for machines the state had given them (the means of production contributed by the state was more than all the peasants’ previous means) was combined with appeals to loyal, efficient farms to increase their deliveries voluntarily. Saboteurs who destroyed grain or buried it in the earth were punished. The resultant grain reserves in state hands were rationed to bring the country through the shortage with a minimum loss of productive efficiency. The whole country went on a decreased diet, which affected most seriously those farms that had failed to harvest their grain. Even these, however, were given state food and seed loans for sowing.
Simultaneously, a nationwide campaign was launched to organize the farms efficiently; 20,000 of the country’s best experts in all fields were sent as permanent organizers to the rural districts. The campaign was fully successful and resulted in a 1933 grain crop nearly 10 million tons larger than was ever gathered from the same territory before.

QUESTION: Is there a chance of another famine this year, as Cardinal Innitzer asserts?
ANSWER: Everyone in the Soviet Union to whom I mentioned this question just laughs.
Reasons for the laughter are:
Two bumper crops in 1933 and 1934.
A billion bushels of grain in state hands, enough to feed the cities and non-grain farmers for two years.
A grain surplus in farmers’ hands that has sufficed to increase calves 94% and pigs 118 percent in a single year.
The abolition of bread rationing because of surplus in grain.
The abolition of nearly half a billion rubles of peasant debts incurred for equipment during the organizing of collective farms–this as the result of an actual budget surplus in the government.
Tales of continued famine are Nazi propaganda on which to base a future invasion of the Ukraine [which did occur by the way].
Strong, Anna Louise. “Searching Out the Soviets.” New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 357

DURANTY SEES NO FAMINE IN 1933

Kharkov, September 1933–I have just completed a 200 mile auto trip through the heart of the Ukraine and can say positively that the harvest is splendid and all talk of famine now is ridiculous…. The population, from the babies to the old folks, looks healthy and well nourished.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 318

STALIN’S VIEW OF CAUSE OF UKRAINIAN CROP FAILURES

[Footnote] In Stalin’s view, Ukrainian crop failures were caused by enemy resistance and by the poor leadership of Ukrainian officials.
Naumov, Lih, and Khlevniuk, Eds. Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1995, p. 230

COLLECTIVE HARVESTS WERE NOT GOOD PRIOR TO 1933

One harvest was not enough to stabilize collectivization. In 1930, it was put over by poorly organized, ill-equipped peasants through force of desire. In the next two years, the difficulties of organization caught up with them. Where to find good managers? Bookkeepers? Men to handle machines? In 1931, the harvest fell off from drought in five basic grain areas. In 1932, the crop was better but poorly gathered. Farm presidents, unwilling to admit failure, claimed they were getting it in. When Moscow awoke to the situation, a large amount of grain lay under the snow.
Causes were many. Fourteen million small farms had been merged into 200,000 big ones, without experienced managers or enough machines. Eleven million workers had left the farms for the new industries. The backwardness of peasants, sabotage by kulaks, stupidities of officials, all played a part. By January 1933 it was clear that the country faced a serious food shortage, two years after it had victoriously “conquered wheat.”
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 41

1933 HARVEST WAS THE BEST SINCE 1930 WHICH WAS A RECORD

From one end of the land to the other, there was shortage and hunger–and a general increase in mortality from this. But the hunger was distributed–nowhere was there the panic chaos that is implied by the word “famine.”
The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization.
Victory was consolidated the following year by the great fight the collective farmers made against a drought that affected all the southern half of Europe…. In each area where winter wheat failed, scientists determined what second crops were best; these were publicized and the government shot in the seed by fast freight. This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933. Even in the worst regions, most farms came through with food for man and beast with strengthened organization.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 44-45

FAMINE WAS NOT CAUSED BY THE COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP

CHUEV: Among writers, some say the famine of 1933 was deliberately organized by Stalin and the whole of your leadership.
MOLOTOV: Enemies of communism say that! They are enemies of communism! People who are not politically aware, who are politically blind.
…If life does not improve, that’s not socialism. But even if the life of the people improves year to year over a long period but the foundations of socialism are not strengthened, a crack-up will be inevitable.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 243

This destruction of the productive forces had, of course, disastrous consequences: in 1932, there was a great famine, caused in part by the sabotage and destruction done by the kulaks. But anti-Communists blame Stalin and the `forced collectivization’ for the deaths caused by the criminal actions of the kulaks.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 79 [p. 66 on the NET]

In 1931 and 1932, the Soviet Union was in the depth of the crisis, due to socio-economic upheavals, to desperate kulak resistance, to the little support that could be given to peasants in these crucial years of industrial investment, to the slow introduction of machines and to drought.
Charles Bettelheim. L’Economie soviEtique (Paris: ƒditions Recueil Sirey, 1950), p. 82
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 93 [p. 78 on the NET]

Recent evidence has indicated that part of the cause of the famine was an exceptionally low harvest in 1932, much lower than incorrect Soviet methods of calculation had suggested. The documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of the Ukraine.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 401

In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the (“special files,” the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Komzag at that time. We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that this very a high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain, which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.
Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933 by R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S.G. Wheatcroft.Slavic Review, Volume 54, Issue 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657.

This is in response to Ms. Chernihivaka’s note about the book of German letters and the reference to what she termed the “Ukrainian Famine” of the early 1930s.
I would just like to point out that I and a number of other scholars have shown conclusively that the famine of 1931-1933 was by no means limited to Ukraine, was not a “man-made” or artificial famine in the sense that she and other devotees of the Ukrainian famine argument assert, and was not a genocide in any conventional sense of the term. We have likewise shown that Mr. Conquest’s book on the famine is replete with errors and inconsistencies and does not deserve to be considered a classic, but rather another expression of the Cold War.
I would recommend to Ms. Chernihivaka the following publications regarding the 1931-1933 famine and some other famines as well. I will begin with my own because I believe that these most directly relate to her question. “The 1932 Harvest and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933,” and the “Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933.” These two articles show that the famine resulted directly from a famine harvest, a harvest that was much smaller than officially acknowledged, that this small harvest was in turn, the result of a complex of natural disasters that [with one small exception] no previous scholars have ever discussed or even mentioned. The footnotes in the Carl Beck paper contain extensive citations from primary sources as well as Western and Soviet secondary sources, among others by Penner, Wheatcroft and Davies that further substantiate these points, and I urge interested readers to examine these works as well.
Ukrainian Famine by Mark Tauger. E-mail sent on April 16, 2002

I am not a specialist on the Ukrainian famine but I am familiar with the recent research by several scholars on the matter, and think rather a lot of the deep and broad research that Mark Tauger has conducted over many years.
That familiarity leads me to believe that there are no simple answers to this. A “man-made” famine is not the same as a deliberate or “terror-famine”. A famine originally caused by crop failure and aggravated by poor policies is “man aggravated” but only partially “man-made”. Why in this field do we always insist on absolutes, especially categorical, binary and polemical ones? True/false. Good/evil. Crop failure/Man made.
Many questions have ambiguous answers.

1. Why was the Ukraine sealed off by the Soviet authorities?

Not necessarily to punish Ukrainians. It was also done to prevent starving people from flocking into non-famine areas, putting pressure on scarce food supplies there, and thereby turning a regional disaster into a universal one. This was also the original reason for the internal passport system, which was adopted in the first instance to prevent the movement of hungry and desperate people and, with them, the spread of famine.

2. Why were foreign journalists, even Stalin apologists like Duranty, refused access to the famine areas?

For the same reason that US journalists are no longer allowed into US combat zones (Gulf War, Afghanistan) since Vietnam. No regime is anxious to take the chance on bad press if they can control the situation otherwise.

3. Why was aid from other countries refused?

Obviously to deny the “imperialists” a chance to trumpet the failure of socialism. Certainly politics triumphed over humanitarianism. Moreover, in the growing paranoia of the times (and based on experience in the Civil War) the regime believed that spies came along with relief administration.

4. Why do I read and hear stories of families who tried to take supplies from other regions to help their extended families through the period having all foodstuffs confiscated as they crossed back into the famine regions?

The regime believed, reasonably I think, that speculators were trying to take advantage of the disaster by buying up food in non-famine (but nevertheless food-short) regions, moving it to Ukraine, and reselling it at a higher price. In true Bolshevik fashion, there was no nuanced approach to this, no distinguishing between families and speculators, and everybody was stopped. As with point 1 above, regimes facing famine typically try to contain the disaster geographically. This is not the same as intending to punish the victims.

5. If it was a harvest failure, why was the burden of that failure not simply shared across the Soviet Union?

It was. No region had a lot of food in 1932-33. Food was short and expensive everywhere. Everybody was hungry.

With the above suggestions, I do not mean to make excuses or apologies for the Stalinists. Their conduct in this was erratic, incompetent, and cruel and millions of people suffered unimaginably and died as a result. But it is too simple to explain everything with a “Bolsheviks were just evil people” explanation more suitable to children than scholars. It was more complex than that. Although the situation was aggravated in some ways by Bolshevik mistakes, their attempts to contain the famine, once it started, were not entirely stupid, nor were they necessarily gratuitously cruel. The Stalinists did, by the way, eventually cut grain exports and did, by the way, send food relief to Ukraine and other areas. It was too little too late, but there is no evidence (aside from constantly repeated assertions by some writers) that this was a deliberately inflicted “terror-famine.”

6. To deny the Jewish genocide quite rightly brings opprobrium. Surely to deny the terror famine of 1932-33 ought to provoke the same response.

This is a position that I personally find grotesque, insulting and at least shallow. Nobody is denying the famine or the huge scale of suffering, (as holocaust-deniers do), least of all Tauger and other researchers who have spent much of their careers trying to bring this tragedy to light and give us a factual account of it. Admittedly, what he and other scholars do is different from the work of journalists and polemicists who indiscriminately collect horror stories and layer them between repetitive statements about evil, piling it all up and calling it history. A factual, careful account of horror in no way makes it less horrible.
Ukrainian Famine by J. Arch Getty, E-mail sent on May 7, 2002

“There is no evidence, it [1932-33 famine] was intentionally directed against Ukrainians,” said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. “That would be totally out of keeping with what we know–it makes no sense.”

“I absolutely reject it,” said Lynne Viola of SUNY– Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow’s Central State archive on collectivization. “Why in god’s name, would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?”

“He’s [Conquest] terrible at doing research,” said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College. “He misuses sources, he twists everything.”

Which leaves us with a puzzle: Wouldn’t one or two or 3.5 million famine-related deaths be enough to make an anti-Stalinist argument? Why seize a wildly inflated figure that can’t possibly be supported? The answer tells much about the Ukrainian nationalist cause, and about those who abet it.
“They’re always looking to come up with a number bigger than 6 million,” observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. “It makes the reader think: ‘My God, it’s worse than the Holocaust’.”
IN SEARCH OF A SOVIET HOLOCAUST [A 55 Year Old Famine Feeds the Right] by Jeff Coplon. Village Voice, New York City, January 12, 1988

The severity and geographical extent of the famine, the sharp decline in exports in 1932-1933, seed requirements, and the chaos in the Soviet Union in these years, all lead to the conclusion that even a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.
…The data presented here provide a more precise measure of the consequences of collectivization and forced industrialization than has previously been available; if anything, these data show that the effects of those policies were worse than has been assumed. They also, however, indicate that the famine was real, the result of failure of economic policy, of the “revolution from above,” rather than of a “successful” nationality policy against the Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.
Tauger, Mark. “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” Slavic Review, Volume 50, Issue 1 (Spring, 1991), 70-89.

Conquest replies,
Perhaps I might add that my own analyses and descriptions of the terror-famine first appeared in the USSR in Moscow in Russian journals such as Voprosy Istorii and Novyi Mir, and that the long chapter printed in the latter was specifically about the famine in Ukraine and hence relied importantly on Ukrainian sources.

Tauger replies,
Mr. Conquest does not deal with these arguments. He most nearly approaches in his assertion that in Ukraine and certain other areas “the entire crop was removed.” Since the regime procured 4.7 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, much less than in any previous or subsequent year in the 1930’s, this would imply that the harvest in Ukraine was only on that order of magnitude or even less than my low estimate! Obviously this could not have been the case or the death toll in Ukraine would have been not four million or five million but more than 20 million because the entire rural population would have been left without grain….
I have yet to see any actual central directive ordering a blockade of Ukraine or the confiscation of food at the border. The sources available are still too incomplete to reach any conclusion about this.
Tauger, Mark & Robert Conquest. Slavic Review, Volume 51, Issue 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 192-194.

Tauger replies further,
Robert Conquest’s second reply to my article does not settle in his favor the controversy between us over the causes of the 1933 famine. On his initial points, I noted that the famine was worse in Ukraine and Kuban than elsewhere, in great part because those regions’ harvests were much smaller than previously known. I rejected his evidence not because it was not “official” but because my research showed that it was incorrect.
Conquest cites the Stalin decree of January 1933 in an attempt to validate Ukrainian memoir accounts, to discredit the archival sources I cited and to prove that the Soviet leadership focused the famine on Ukraine and Kuban. The decree’s sanctions, however, do not match memoir accounts, none of which described peasants being returned to their villages by OGPU forces. The experiences described in those accounts instead reflect enforcement of a September 1932 secret OGPU directive ordering confiscations of grain and flour to stop illegal trade. Since this was applied throughout the country, the Ukrainian memoir accounts reflect general policy and not a focus on the Ukraine.
Several new studies confirm my point that hundreds of thousands of peasants fled famine not only in Ukraine and Kuban, but also in Siberia, the Urals, the Volga basin, and elsewhere in 1932-1933. Regional authorities tried to stop them and in November 1932 the Politburo began to prepare the passport system that soon imposed constraints on mobility nationwide. The January decree was thus one of several measures taken at this time to control labor mobility, in this case to retain labor in the grain regions lest the 1933 harvest be even worse. Its reference to northern regions suggests that it may even have been used to send peasants from those areas south to provide labor. Neither the decree itself nor the scale of its enforcement are sufficient to prove that the famine was artificially imposed on Ukraine.
…Ukrainian eyewitness accounts, on the other hand, are misleading because very few peasants from other regions had the opportunity to escape from the USSR after World War II. The Russian historian Kondrashin interviewed 617 famine survivors in the Volga region and explicitly refuted Conquest’s argument regarding the famine’s nationality focus. According to these eyewitnesses, the famine was most severe in wheat and rye regions, in other words, in part a result of the small harvest.
…Both Russian and western scholars such as Kondrashin…and Alec Nove…now acknowledge that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than assumed and was an important factor in the famine.
Tauger, Mark. Slavic Review, Volume 53, Issue 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 318-320.

FIGURES ON FAMINE DEATHS ARE ABSURD AND FAR TOO HIGH

CHUEV: But nearly 12 million perished of hunger in 1933….
MOLOTOV: The figures have not been substantiated.
CHUEV: Not substantiated?
MOLOTOV: No, no, not at all. In those years I was out in the country on grain procurement trips. Those things couldn’t have just escaped me. They simply couldn’t. I twice traveled to the Ukraine. I visited Sychevo in the Urals and some places in Siberia. Of course I saw nothing of the kind there. Those allegations are absurd! Absurd! True, I did not have occasion to visit the Volga region….
No, these figures are an exaggeration, though such deaths had been reported of course in some places.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 243

What can one say about Conquest’s affirmation of 6,500,000 `massacred’ kulaks during the different phases of the collectivization? Only part of the 63,000 first category counter-revolutionaries were executed. The number of dead during deportations, largely due to famine and epidemics, was approximately 100,000. Between 1932 and 1940, we can estimate that 200,000 kulaks died in the colonies of natural causes. The executions and these deaths took place during the greatest class struggle that the Russian countryside ever saw, a struggle that radically transformed a backward and primitive countryside. In this giant upheaval, 120 million peasants were pulled out of the Middle Ages, of illiteracy and obscurantism. It was the reactionary forces, who wanted to maintain exploitation and degrading and inhuman work and living conditions, who received the blows. Repressing the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries was absolutely necessary for collectivization to take place: only collective labor made socialist mechanization possible, thereby allowing the peasant masses to lead a free, proud and educated life.
Through their hatred of socialism, Western intellectuals spread Conquest’s absurd lies about 6,500,000 `exterminated’ kulaks. They took up the defence of bourgeois democracy, of imperialist democracy.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 98 [p. 82 on the NET]

Lies about the collectivization have always been, for the bourgeoisie, powerful weapons in the psychological war against the Soviet Union.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 98 [p. 85 on the NET]

The borders of the Ukraine were not even the same in 1926 and 1939. The Kuban Cossaks, between 2 and 3 million people, were registered as Ukrainian in 1926, but were reclassified as Russian at the end of the twenties. This new classification explains by itself 25 to 40 per cent of the `victims of the famine-genocide’ calculated by Dushnyck–Mace.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 107 [p. 91 on the NET]

(Alec Nove)
Additionally, the figures on famine-related deaths cannot be precise, for “definitional” reasons…. Ukrainian statistics show a very large decline in births in 1933-34, which could be ascribed to a sharp rise in abortions and also to the non-reporting of births of those who died in infancy.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 269

Concerning the scale of the famine in 1932/33, we now have much better information on its chronology and regional coverage amongst the civilian registered population. The level of excess mortality registered by the civilian population was in the order of 3 to 4 million… which is still much lower than the figures claimed by Conquest and Rosefielde and Medvedev.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 290

The evidence presented to establish a case for deliberate genocide against Ukrainians during 1932-33, remains highly partisan, often deceitful, contradictory, and consequently highly suspect. The materials commonly used can almost invariably be traced to right-wing sources, anti-Communist “experts,” journalists or publications, as well as the highly partisan Ukrainian Nationalist political organizations. An important role in the thesis of genocide is assumed by the number of famine deaths–obviously it is difficult to allege genocide unless deaths are in the multi-millions. Here, the methodology of the famine-genocide theorists can at best be described as eclectic, unscientific; and the results, as politically manipulated guesstimates.
A “landmark study” in the numbers game is the article “The Soviet Famine of 1932-1934,” by Dana Dalrymple, published in Soviet Studies, January 1964. According to historian Daniel Stone, Dalrymple’s methodology consists of averaging “guesses by 20 Western journalists who visited the Soviet Union at the time, or spoke to Soviet emigres as much as two decades later. He averages the 20 accounts which range from a low of one million deaths (New York Herald Tribune, 1933) to a high of 10 million deaths (New York World Telegram, 1933.”
As Professor Stone of the University of Winnipeg suggests, Dalrymple’s method as no scientific validity; his “method” substitutes the art of newspaper clipping for the science of objective evidence gathering. This becomes apparent when one discovers the totally unacceptable use of fraudulent material built into the attempt to develop sensational mortality figures for the famine.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 45

While it is not possible to establish an exact number of casualties, we have seen that the guesstimates of famine-genocide writers have given a new meaning to the word hyperbole. Their claims have been shown to be extreme exaggerations fabricated to strengthen their political allegations of genocide.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 74

The scope of the hardships is chauvinistically restricted, distorted, and politically manipulated. Other nationalities who suffered–Russians, Turkmen, Kazaks, Caucasus groups– are usually ignored, or if mentioned at all are done so almost reluctantly in passing.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 99

Dr. Hans Blumenfeld, writing in response to Ukrainian Nationalist allegations of Ukrainian genocide, draws on personal experience in describing the people who came to town in search of food:
“They came not only from the Ukraine but in equal numbers from the Russian areas to our east. This disproves the “fact” of anti-Ukrainian genocide parallel to Hitler’s anti-semitic Holocaust. To anyone familiar with the Soviet Union’s desperate manpower shortage in those years, the notion that its leaders would deliberately reduce that scarce resource is absurd…. Up to the 1950s the most frequently quoted figure was 2 million [victims]. Only after it had been established that Hitler’s holocaust had claimed 6 million [Jewish] victims, did anti-Soviet propaganda feel it necessary to top that figure by substituting the fantastic figure of 7 to 10 million….”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 100

Had the 1941 population of Soviet Ukraine consisted of the remnants and survivors of a mass multi-million holocaust of a few years previous, or if they had perceived the 1932-1933 famine as genocide, deliberately aimed at Ukrainians, then doubtless fascism would have met a far different reception; Soviet Ukrainians would have been as reluctant to defend the USSR as Jewish survivors would have been to defend Nazi Germany.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 102

STALIN HAD TO EXPROPRIATE GRAIN IN THE WEST TO PREPARE FOR WAR WITH JAPAN

What happened was tragic for the Russian countryside. Orders were given in March, at the beginning of the spring sowing period in the Ukraine and North Caucasus and Lower Volga, that 2 million tons of grain must be collected within 30 days because the Army had to have it. It had to be collected, without argument, on pain of death. The orders about gasoline were hardly less peremptory. Here I don’t know the figures, but so many thousand tons of gasoline must be given to the Army. At a time when the collective farms were relying upon tractors to plow their fields.
That was the dreadful truth of the so-called “man-made famine,” of Russia’s “iron age,” when Stalin was accused of causing the deaths of four or 5 million peasants to gratify his own brutal determination that they should be socialized… or else. What a misconception! Compare it with the truth, that Japan was poised to strike and the Red Army must have reserves of food and gasoline.
… the fact remained that not only kulaks or recalcitrant peasants or middle peasants or doubtful peasants, but the collective farms themselves, were stripped of their grain for food, stripped of their grain for seed, at the season when they needed it most. The quota had to be reached, that was the Kremlin’s order. It was reached, but the bins were scraped too clean. Now indeed the Russian peasants, kulaks, and collectives, were engulfed in common woe. Their draft animals were dead, killed in an earlier phase of the struggle, and there was no gas for the tractors, and their last reserves of food and seed for the spring had been torn from them by the power of the Kremlin, which itself was driven by compulsion, that is by fear of Japan….
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 192

Their [peasants] living standards were so reduced that they fell easy prey to the malnutrition diseases–typhus, cholera, and scurvy, always endemic in Russia–and infected the urban populations….
Russia was wasted with misery, but the Red Army had restored its food reserves and its reserves of gasoline, and cloth and leather for uniforms and boots. And Japan did not attack. In August, 1932, the completion of the Dnieper Dam was celebrated in a way that echoed around the world. And Japan did not attack. Millions of Russian acres were deserted and untilled; millions of Russian peasants were begging for bread or dying. But Japan did not attack.
…The shortages of food and commodities in Russia were attributed, as Stalin had intended, to the tension of the Five-Year Plan, and all that Japanese spies could learn was that the Red Army awaited their attack without anxiety. Their spearhead, aimed at Outer Mongolia and Lake Baikal, were shifted, and her troops moved southwards into the Chinese province of Jehol, which they conquered easily and added to ” Manchukuo.” Stalin had won his game against terrific odds, but Russia had paid in lives as heavily as for war.
In the light of this and other subsequent knowledge, it is interesting for me to read my own dispatches from Moscow in the winter of 1932-33. I seem to have known what was going on, without in the least knowing why, that is without perceiving that Japan was the real key to the Soviet problem at that time, and that the first genuine improvement in the agrarian situation coincided almost to a day with the Japanese southward drive against Jehol.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 193

It meant, to say it succinctly, that Stalin had won his bluff: Japan moved south, not north, and Russia could dare to use its best men….
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 195

WHAT FAMINE THERE WAS IN THE EARLY 30’S WAS CAUSED BY THE KULAKS

There was famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933. But it was provoked mainly by the struggle to the bitter end that the Ukrainian far-right was leading against socialism and the collectivization of agriculture.
During the thirties, the far-right, linked with the Hitlerites, had already fully exploited the propaganda theme of `deliberately provoked famine to exterminate the Ukrainian people’. But after the Second World War, this propaganda was `adjusted’ with the main goal of covering up the barbaric crimes committed by German and Ukrainian Nazis, to protect fascism and to mobilise Western forces against Communism.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 113 [p. 96 on the NET]

The peasants passive resistance, the destruction of livestock, the complete disorganization of work in the kolkhozes, and the general ruin caused by continued dekulakization and deportations all lead in 1932-33 to a famine that surpassed even the famine of 1921-22 in its geographical extent and the number of its victims.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 238

Was there or was there not a famine in the USSR in the years 1931 and 1932?
Those who think this a simple question to answer will probably already have made up their minds, in accordance with nearly all the statements by persons hostile to Soviet Communism, that there was, of course, a famine in the USSR; and they do not hesitate to state the mortality that it caused, in precise figures–unknown to any statistician–varying from three to six and even to 10 million deaths. On the other hand, a retired high official of the Government of India, speaking Russian, and well acquainted with czarist Russia, who had himself administered famine districts in India, and who visited in 1932 some of the localities in the USSR in which conditions were reported to be among the worst, informed the present writers at the time that he had found no evidence of there being or having been anything like what Indian officials would describe as a famine.
Footnote: Skepticism as to statistics of total deaths from starvation, in a territory extending to 1/6 of the Earth’s landmass, would anyhow be justified. But as to the USSR there seems no limit to the wildness of exaggeration. We quote the following interesting case related by Mr. Sherwood Eddy, an experienced American traveler in Russia: “Our party, consisting of about 20 persons, while passing through the villages heard rumors of the village of Gavrilovka, where all the men but one were said to have died of starvation. We went at once to investigate and track down this rumor. We divided into four parties, with four interpreters of our own choosing, and visited simultaneously the registry office of births and deaths, the village priest, the local soviet, the judge, the schoolmaster and every individual peasant we met. We found that out of 1100 families three individuals had died of typhus. They had immediately closed the school and the church, inoculated the entire population and stamped out the epidemic without developing another case. We could not discover a single death from hunger or starvation, though many had felt the bitter pinch of want. It was another instance of the ease with which wild rumors spread concerning Russia.”
Without expecting to convince the prejudiced, we give, for what it may be deemed worth, the conclusion to which our visits in 1932 and 1934, and subsequent examination of the available evidence, now lead us. That in each of the years 1931 and 1932 there was a partial failure of crops in various parts of the huge area of the USSR is undoubtedly true. That is true also of British India and of the United States. It has been true also of the USSR, and of every other country at all comparable in size, in each successive year of the present century. In countries of such vast extent, having every kind of climate, there is always a partial failure of crops somewhere. How extensive and how serious was this partial failure of crops in the USSR of 1931 and 1932 it is impossible to ascertain with any assurance. On the other hand, it has been asserted, by people who have seldom had any opportunity of going to the suffering districts, that throughout huge provinces there ensued a total absence of foodstuffs, so that (as in 1891 and 1921) literally several millions of people died of starvation. On the other hand, soviet officials on the spot, in one district after another, informed the present writers that, whilst there was shortage and hunger, there was, at no time, a total lack of bread, though its quality was impaired by using other ingredients than wheaten flower; and that any increase in the death-rate, due to diseases accompanying defective nutrition, occurred only in a relatively small number of villages. What may carry more weight than this official testimony was that of various resident British and American journalists, who traveled during 1933 and 1934 through the districts reputed to have been the worst sufferers, and who declared to the present writers that they had found no reason to suppose that the trouble had been more serious than was officially represented. Our own impression, after considering all the available evidence, is that the partial failure of crops certainly extended to only a fraction of the USSR; possibly to no more, than 1/10 of the geographical area. We think it plain that this partial failure was not in itself sufficiently serious to cause actual starvation, except possibly, in the worst districts, relatively small in extent. Any estimate of the total number of deaths in excess of the normal average, based on a total population supposed to have been subjected to famine conditions of 60 millions, which would mean half the entire rural population between the Baltic and the Pacific (as some have rashly asserted), or even 1/10 of such a population, appears to us to be fantastically excessive.
On the other hand, it seems to be proved that a considerable number of peasant households, both in the spring of 1932 and in that of 1933, found themselves unprovided with a sufficient store of cereal food, and specially short of fats. To these cases we shall return. But we are at once reminded that in countries like India and the USSR, in China, and even in the United States, in which there is no ubiquitous system of poor relief, a certain number of people–among these huge populations even many thousands–die each year of starvation, or of the diseases endemic under these conditions; and that whenever there is even a partial failure of crops this number will certainly be considerably increased. It cannot be supposed to have been otherwise in parts of the southern Ukraine, the Kuban district and Daghestan in the winters of 1931 and 1932.
But before we are warranted in describing this scarcity of food in particular households of particular districts as a “famine,” we must inquire how the scarcity came to exist. We notice among the evidence the fact that the scarcity was “patchy.” In one and the same locality, under weather conditions apparently similar if not identical, there are collective farms which have in these years reaped harvests of more than average excellence, whilst others, adjoining them on the north or on the south, have experienced conditions of distress, and may sometimes have known actual starvation. This is not to deny that there were whole districts in which drought or cold seriously reduced the yield. But there are clearly other cases, how many we cannot pretend to estimate, in which the harvest failures were caused, not by something in the sky, but by something in the collective farm itself. And we are soon put on the track of discovery. As we have already mentioned, we find a leading personage in the direction of the Ukrainian revolt actually claiming that “the opposition of the Ukrainian population caused the failure of the green-storing plan of 1931, and still more so, that of 1932.” He boasts of the success of the “passive resistance which aimed at a systematic frustration of the Bolshevik plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest.” He tells us plainly that, owing to the efforts of himself and his friends, “whole tracks were left unsown,” and “in addition, when the crop was being gathered last year [1932], it happened that, in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50% was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing.”
So far as the Ukraine is concerned, it is clearly not Heaven which is principally to blame for the failure of crops, but the misguided members of many of the collective farms. What sort of “famine” is it that is due neither to the drought nor the rain, heat nor cold, rust nor fly, weeds nor locusts; but to a refusal of the agriculturists to sow (“whole tracks were left unsown”); and to gather up the wheat when it was cut (“even 50% was left in the fields”)?
Footnote: [“Ukrainia under Bolshevik Rule” by Isaac Mazepa, in Slavonic Review, January 3, 1934, pages 342-343.] One of the Ukrainian nationalists who was brought to trial is stated to have confessed to having received explicit instructions from the leaders of the movement abroad to the effect that “it is essential that, in spite of the good harvest (of 1930), the position of the peasantry should become worse. For this purpose it is necessary to persuade the members of the kolkhosi to harvest the grain before it has become ripe; to agitate among the kolkhosi members and to persuade them that, however hard they may work, their grain will be taken away from them by the State on one pretext or another; and to sabotage the proper calculation of the labor days put into harvesting by the members of the kolkhosi so that they may receive less than they are entitled to by their work” (Speech by Postyshev, secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, to plenum of the Central Committee, 1933).
Footnote: It can be definitely denied that the serious shortage of harvested grain in parts of southern Ukraine was due to climatic conditions. “In a number of southern regions, from 30 to 40% of the crop remained on the fields. This was not the result of the drought which was so severe in certain parts of Siberia, the Urals, in the Middle and Lower Volga regions that it reduced there the expected crops by about 50%. No act of God was involved in the Ukraine. The difficulties experienced in the sowing, harvesting, and grain collection campaign of 1931 were man-made” (“Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union,” by W. Ladejinsky, Political Science Quarterly, New York, June 1934, page 222).
The other district in which famine conditions are most persistently reported is that of Kuban, in the surrounding areas, chiefly inhabited by the Don Cossacks, who, as it is not irrelevant to remember, were the first to take up arms against the Bolshevik Government in 1918, and so begin the calamitous civil war. These Don Cossacks, as we have mentioned, had enjoyed special privileges under the tsars, the loss of which under the new regime has, even today, not been forgiven. Here there is evidence that whole groups of peasants, under hostile influences, got into such a state of apathy and despair, on being pressed into a new system of cooperative life which they could not understand and about which they heard all sorts of evil, that they ceased to care whether their fields were tilled or not, or what would happen to them in the winter if they produced no crop at all. Whatever the reason, there were, it seems, in the Kuban, as in the Ukraine, whole villages that sullenly abstained from sowing or harvesting, usually not completely, but on all but a minute fraction of their fields, so that, when the year ended, they had no stock of seed, and in many cases actually no grain on which to live. There are many other instances in which individual peasants made a practice, out of spite, of surreptitiously “barbering” the ripening wheat; that is, rubbing out the grain from the ear, or even cutting off the whole ear, and carrying off for individual hoarding this shameless theft of community property.
Unfortunately it was not only in such notoriously disaffected areas as the Ukraine and Kuban that these peculiar “failures of crops” occurred.
To any generally successful cultivation, he [Kaganovich] declared, “the anti-soviet elements of the village are offering fierce opposition. Economically ruined, but not yet having lost their influence entirely, the kulaks, former white officers, former priests, their sons, former ruling landlords and sugar-mill owners, former Cossacks and other anti-soviet elements of the bourgeois-nationalist and also of the social-revolutionary and Petlura-supporting intelligentsia settled in the villages, are trying in every way to corrupt the collective farms, are trying to foil the measures of the Party and the Government in the realm of farming, and for these ends are making use of the backwardness of part of the collective farm members against the interests of the socialized collective farm, against the interests of the collective farm peasantry.
Penetrating into collective farms as accountants, managers, warehouse keepers, brigadiers and so on, and frequently as leading workers on the boards of collective farms, the anti-soviet elements strive to organize sabotage, spoil machines, sow without the proper measures, steal collective farm goods, undermine labor discipline, organize the thieving of seed and secret granaries, sabotage grain collections–and sometimes they succeed in disorganizing kolkhosi.
However much we may discount such highly colored denunciations, we cannot avoid noticing how exactly the statements as to sabotage of the harvest, made on the one hand by the Soviet Government, and on the other by the nationalist leaders of the Ukrainian recalcitrants, corroborate each other. To quote again the Ukrainian leader, it was “the opposition of the Ukrainian population” that “caused the failure of the grain-storing plan of 1931, and still more so, that of 1932.” What on one side is made a matter for boasting is, on the other side, a ground for denunciation. Our own inference is merely that, whilst both sides probably exaggerate, the sabotage referred to actually took place, to a greater or less extent, in various parts of the USSR, in which collective farms had been established under pressure. The partial failure of the crops due to climatic conditions, which is to be annually expected in one locality or another, was thus aggravated, to a degree that we find no means of estimating, and rendered far more extensive in its area, not only by “barbering” the growing wheat, and stealing from the common stock, but also by deliberate failure to sow, failure to weed, failure to thresh, and failure to warehouse even all the grain that was threshed. But that is not what it is usually called a famine.
What the Soviet Government was faced with, from 1929 onward, was, in fact, not a famine but a widespread general strike of the peasantry, in resistance to the policy of collectivization, fomented and encouraged by the disloyal elements of the population, not without incitement from the exiles at Paris and Prague. Beginning with the calamitous slaughter of live-stock in many areas in 1929-1930, the recalcitrant peasants defeated, during the years 1931 and 1932, all the efforts of the Soviet Government to get the land adequately cultivated. It was in this way, much more than by the partial failure of the crops due to drought or cold, that was produced in an uncounted host of villages in many parts of the USSR a state of things in the winter of 1931-1932, and again in that of 1932-1933, in which many of the peasants found themselves with inadequate supplies of food. But this did not always lead to starvation. In innumerable cases, in which there was no actual lack of rubles, notably in the Ukraine, the men journeyed off to the nearest big market, and (as there was no deficiency in the country as a whole) returned after many days with the requisite sacks of flour. In other cases, especially among the independent peasantry, the destitute family itself moved away to the cities, in search of work at wages, leaving its rude dwelling empty and desolate, to be quoted by some incautious observer as proof of death by starvation. In an unknown number of other cases–as it seems, to be counted by the hundred thousand–the families were forcibly taken from the holding which they had failed to cultivate, and removed to distant places where they could be provided with work by which they could earn their substance.
The Soviet Government has been severely blamed for these deportations, which inevitably caused great hardships. The irresponsible criticism loses, however, much of its force by the inaccuracy with which the case is stated. It is, for instance, almost invariably taken for granted that the Soviet Government heartlessly refused to afford any relief to the starving districts. Very little investigation shows that relief was repeatedly afforded where there was reason to suppose that the shortage was not due to sabotage or deliberate failure to cultivate. There were, to begin with, extensive remissions of payments in-kind due to the government. But there was also a whole series of transfers of grain from the government stocks to villages found to be destitute, sometimes actually for consumption, and in other cases to replace the seed funds which had been used for food.
Footnote: Thus: “On February 17, 1932, almost six months before the harvesting of the new crop the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, directed that the collective farms in the eastern part of the country, which had suffered from the drought, be loaned over 6 million quintals of grain for the establishment of both seed and food funds.”
(“Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union,” by W. Ladejinsky, Political Science Quarterly, New York, June 1934, page 229).
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 199-205

UKRAINIAN PARTY ORDERS CAUSES OF FAMINE BE EXPOSED AND PEOPLE BE HELPED

[Supplement to minutes of the Ukrainian Party Kiev bureau, Feb. 22, 1933, instructing that the famine be alleviated and that “all who have become completely disabled because of emaciation must be put back on their feet” by March 5]

… 10. In view of the continued attempts by our enemies to use these facts against the creation of collective farms, the Raion Party Committees are to conduct systematic clarification work bringing to light the real causes of the existing famine (abuses in the collective farms, laziness, decline in labor discipline, etc.).

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 418

FAMINE LIES BEGAN WITH HEARST AGENT WALKER

In the fall of 1934, an American using the name Thomas Walker entered the Soviet Union. After tarrying less than a week in Moscow, he spent the remainder of his 13-day journey in transit to the Manchurian border, at which point he left the USSR never to return. This seemingly uneventful journey was the pretext for one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated in the history of 20th century journalism.
Some four months later, on Feb. 18, 1935, a series of articles began in the Hearst press by Thomas Walker, “noted journalist, traveller and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia.” The articles, appearing in the Chicago American and the New York Evening Journal for example, described in hair-raising prose a mammoth famine in the Ukraine which, it was alleged, had claimed “6 million” lives the previous year. Accompanying the stories were photographs portraying the devastation of the famine, for which it was claimed Walker had smuggled in a camera under the “most adverse and dangerous possible circumstances.”
In themselves, Walker’s stories in the Hearst press were not particularly outstanding examples of fraud concerning the Soviet Union. Nor were they the greatest masterpieces of yellow journalism ever produced by the right-wing corporate press. Lies and distortions had been written about the Soviet Union since the days of the October Revolution in 1917. The anti-Soviet press campaigns heated up in the late 20s and ’30s, directed by those, like Hearst, who wanted to keep the USSR out of the League of Nations and isolated in all respects.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 5

However, the Walker famine photographs are truly remarkable in that, having been exposed as utter hoaxes over fifty years ago, they continue to be used by Ukrainian nationalists and university propaganda institutes as evidence of alleged genocide. The extent of Walker’s fraud can only be measured by the magnitude and longevity of the lie they have been used to portray.
Horror stories about Russia were common in the Western press, particularly among papers and journalist of conservative or fascist orientation. For example, The London Daily Telegraph of November 28, 1930, printed an interview with a Frank Woodhead who had “just returned from Russia after a visit lasting seven months.” Woodhead reported witnessing bloody massacres that November, a slaughter which left “rows of ghastly corpses.”
Louis Fisher, an American writer for the New Republic and The Nation, who was in Moscow at the time of the alleged atrocities, discovered that not only had such events never occurred, but that Woodhead had left the country almost 8 months before the scenes he claimed to have witnessed. Fisher challenged Woodhead and the London Daily Telegraph on the matter; both responded with embarrassed silence.
When Thomas Walker’s articles appeared in the Hearst press, Fisher became suspicious–he had never heard of Walker and could find no one who had. The results of his investigation were published in the March 13, 1935 issue of The Nation:
“Mr. Walker, we are informed, ‘entered Russia last spring.’ that is the spring of 1934. He saw famine. He photographed its victims. He got heartrending, first-hand accounts of hunger’s ravages. Now famine in Russia is ‘hot’ news. Why did Mr. Hearst keep these sensational articles for ten months before printing them? My suspicions grew deeper….
I felt more and more sure that he was just another Woodhead, another absentee journalist. And so I consulted Soviet authorities who had official information from Moscow. Thomas Walker was in the Soviet Union once. He received a transit visa from the Soviet Consul in London on Sept. 29, 1934. He entered the USSR from Poland by train on October 12, 1934, (not the spring of 1934 as he says). He was in Moscow on the 13th. He remained in Moscow from Saturday, the 13th, to Thursday, the 18th, and then boarded a trans-Siberian train which brought him to the Soviet-Manchurian border on Oct. 25, 1934, his last day on Soviet territory. His train did not pass within several hundred miles of the black soil and Ukrainian districts which he ‘toured’ and ‘saw’ and ‘walked over’ and ‘photographed.’ It would have been physically impossible for Mr. Walker, in the five days between Oct. 13 and Oct. 18, to cover one-third of the points he ‘describes’ from personal experience. My hypothesis is that he stayed long enough in Moscow to gather from embittered foreigners the Ukrainian ‘local color’ he needed to give his articles the fake verisimilitude they possess.
Mr. Walker’s photographs could easily date back to the Volga famine in 1921. Many of them might have been taken outside the Soviet Union. They were taken at different seasons of the year…. One picture includes trees or shrubs with large leaves. Such leaves could not have grown by the ‘late sprang’ of Mr. Walker’s alleged visit. Other photographs show winter and early fall backgrounds. Here is the Journal of the 27th. A starving, bloated boy of 15 calmly poses naked for Mr. Walker. The next moment, in the same village, Mr. Walker photographs a man who is obviously suffering from the cold despite his sheepskin overcoat. The weather that sprang must have been as unreliable as Mr. Walker to allow nude poses one moment and require furs the next.
It would be easy to riddle Mr. Walker’s stories. They do not deserve the effort. The truth is that the Soviet harvest of 1933, including the Soviet Ukraine’s harvest, in contrast to that of 1932, was excellent; the grain-tax collections were moderate; and therefore conditions even remotely resembling those Mr. Walker portrays could not have arisen in the spring of 1934, and did not arise.”
Fisher challenged the motives of the Hearst press in hiring a fraud like Walker to concoct such fabrications:
“…Mr. Hearst, naturally does not object if his papers spoil Soviet-American relations and encourage foreign nations with hostile military designs upon the USSR. But his real target is the American radical movement. These Walker articles are part of Hearst’s anti-red campaign. He knows that the great economic progress registered by the Soviet Union since 1929, when the capitalist world dropped into depression, provides Left groups with spiritual encouragement and faith. Mr. Hearst wants to deprive them of that encouragement and faith by painting a picture of ruin and death in the USSR. The attempt is too transparent, and the hands are too unclean to succeed.”
In a post-script, Fisher added that a Lindsay Parrott had visited the Ukraine and had written that nowhere in any city or town he visited “did I meet any signs of the effects of the famine of which foreign correspondents take delight in writing.” Parrott, says Fisher, wrote of the “excellent harvest” in 1933; the progress, he declared, “is indisputable.” Fisher ends: “The Hearst organizations and the Nazis are beginning to work more and more closely together. But I have not noticed that the Hearst press printed Mr. Parrott’s stories about a prosperous Soviet Ukraine. Mr. Parrott is Mr. Hearst’s correspondent in Moscow.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 7-8

WALKER ROUTINELY LIED AND WAS A CRIMINAL

In any event, it will be recalled that Walker was never in the Ukraine in 1932-1933.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 11

Not only were the photographs a fraud, the trip to Ukraine a fraud, and Hearst’s famine-genocide series a fraud, Thomas Walker himself was a fraud. Deported from England and arrested on his return to the United States just a few months after the Hearst series, it turned out that Thomas Walker was in fact escaped convict Robert Greene. The New York Times reported: “Robert Greene, a writer of syndicated articles about conditions in Ukraine, who was indicted last Friday by a Federal grand jury on a charge of passport fraud, pleaded guilty yesterday before Federal Judge Francis Caffey. The judge learned that Green was a fugitive from Colorado State Prison, where he escaped after having served two years of an 8-year term for forgery.”
Robert Greene, it was revealed, had run-up an impressive criminal record spanning three decades. His trail of crime led through five U.S. states and four European countries, and included convictions on charges of violating the Mann White Slave Act in Texas, forgery, and “marriage swindle.”
Evidence at Walker’s trial revealed that he had made a previous visit to the Soviet Union in 1930 under the name Thomas Burke. Having worked briefly for an engineering firm in the USSR, he was–by his own admission–expelled for attempting to smuggle a “a whiteguard” out of the country. A reporter covering the trial noted that Walker “admitted that the ‘famine’ pictures published with his series in the Hearst newspapers were fakes and they were not taken in Ukraine as advertised.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 11

(Actually, one must recall, Walker never set foot in Ukraine, and entered the Russian Federation in the fall of 1934.)
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 59

Mace and his Harvard colleagues have the further audacity to state, in their introduction to Walker’s material: “American newspapermen… Thomas Walker… wrote plainspoken and graphic accounts of the Famine based on what he had witnessed in Ukraine in 1933.” Ignoring the fraudulent nature of the Walker series exposed over 50 years ago, the Harvard scholars conveniently backdate Walker’s stated 1934 trip to 1933….
Not only is this “scholarship” riddled with inaccuracies, exaggeration, distortion, and fraud, it resorts uncritically to Nazi sources without informing the reader of the spurious nature of the sources.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 61

HERRIOT TRAVELED THE UKRAINE AND SAID HE SAW NO FAMINE

It was following Hearst’s trip to Nazi Germany that the Hearst press began to promote the theme of “famine-genocide in Ukraine.” Prior to this, his papers had at times reflected a different perspective. For example, the October 1, 1934 Herald and Examiner, carried an article about the former French Premier, Herriot, who had recently returned from traveling around Ukraine. Herriot noted: “… the whole campaign on the subject of famine in the Ukraine is currently being waged. While wandering around the Ukraine, I saw nothing of the sort.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 15

FAKE PHOTOS OF EARLY 20’S FAMINE WERE APPLIED TO EARLY 30’S

Indeed, a wide assortment of photos and documentary film footage was taken in Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Armenia during the period of World War I, the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and foreign intervention, events which contributed to the Russian famine of 1921-22. These photos–taken by journalists, relief agencies, medical workers, soldiers and individuals–were frequently published in the newspapers and brochures of the period. Such photos were the most likely source for the famine-genocide photographic “evidence”: they could be easily culled from archives, collections, and newspaper morgues and grafted onto accounts of the 1930s.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 31

Overall, the film’s [Harvest of Despair] producers, Nowytsky and Luhovy, have managed to slap together a patchwork of material. Film reviewer Leonard Klady noted that co-producer Luhovy “admits most of his income comes from editing feature films of dubious quality. He has a reputation as a good ‘doctor’–someone who’s brought in to salvage a movie which is deemed unreleasable by film exhibitors and distributors.” In Harvest of Despair it appears that the doctor delivered one of the great cinema miscarriages of all time. Objectivity and scientific presentation are sacrificed on the altar of Cold War psychological warfare.
According to the Winnipeg Free Press, Luhovy “personally viewed more than one million feet of historic stock footage to find roughly 20 minutes (720 feet) of appropriate material for the film.” This says less about his research than about the total lack of photographic evidence of famine-genocide.
Indeed, not one documented piece of evidence is presented in the film to back up the genocide thesis. Instead, in a montage of undocumented stills, the viewer is subjected to Walker/Ditloff forgeries; numerous scenes stolen from the bi-now familiar publications covering the 1921-1922 Russian famine, Ammende photos (with all their contradictions noted earlier); 1920s photos used in the Nazi organ Volkischer Beobachter in 1933. Certain Harvest of Despair photos can also be traced to Laubenheimer’s Nazi propaganda books, as well as to a Ukrainian-language publication published in Berlin in 1922.
Other scenes both borrow from the past and from the future. For example, footage of marching soldiers has Red Army men wearing uniforms from the days of the Russian Civil War. Footage of impoverished women cooking is also of Civil War vintage. Other scenes display peasant costumes from the Volga Russian area of the immediate post-World War 1 period, not Ukrainians in 1933. Footage of miners pulling coal sledges on their hands and knees is actually of Czarist-era origins. Scenes of peasants at meetings wearing peculiar tall peaked caps date from earlier periods; further, their clothing is not consistent with Ukrainian costume. Material filched from Soviet films of the 1920s can be identified, including sequences from Czar Hunger (1921-1922) and Arsenal (1929), and even from pre-revolutionary newsreels.
Flipping forward to the future, the film shows scenes of military manufacturing of tank models not produced until later in the 1930s. As well: “the episode of bread distribution in Nazi besieged Leningrad (taken from ‘The Siege of Leningrad,’ one film of the epic ‘An Unknown War’) was used by the authors of the videofraud as ‘filmed evidence’ of food shortage… in Ukraine in the 1930s.” And so on, and so on.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 78

It seems that like others before them, the producers of Harvest of Despair scrounged through the archives looking for bits and pieces of old war-and-starvation shots that might be spiced into the film to great subliminal effect–bound together with narrative and interspersed partisan interviews. As much has been admitted, as we will see.
In November 1986, Ukrainian Nationalists in alliance with right-wing school board officials, made an attempt to place their famine-genocide propaganda in the Toronto high school curriculum. Toward this end, a film showing of Harvest of Despair was arranged at the Education Center. Panelists advertised for the event included then vice-chairman of the Toronto Board Of Education Nola Crewe, Dr. Yury Boshyk, Research Fellow at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and Marco Carynnyk, writer and researcher associated with Harvest of Despair in its research stage.
Confronted by this author in the discussion portion of the meeting, that the stills and footage used in the film were fraudulent, the panelists were forced to admit openly that this author’s charges were true. Though reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the fraud, deliberate deceit was confirmed. As the Toronto Star reported:
“Researcher Marco Carynnyk, who says he originated the idea of the film, says his concerns about questionable photographs were ignored. Carynnyk said that none of the archival film footage is of the Ukrainian famine and that very few photos from 1932-1933 appear that can be traced as authentic. A dramatic shot at the film’s end of an emaciated girl, which has also been used in the film’s promotional material, is not from the 1932-1933 famine, Carynnyk said.
“I made the point that this sort of inaccuracy cannot be allowed,” he said in an interview. “I was ignored.”

Perhaps this is why, to use the term of B.S. Onyschuk, vice-chairman of the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee, Carynnyk was “let go” from the film before its completion.
In light of the above, one wonders why Carynnyk waited several years before coming forward publicly with the truth, and even then only after a public challenge and exposure by this author.
In a quite incredible admission from an academic, Orest Subtelny, a history professor at York University, justified the use of frauds. Noting that there exist very few pictures of the 1933 famine, Subtelny defended the actions of the film’s producers: “You have to have visual impact. You want to show what children dying from a famine look like. Starving children are starving children.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 79

Dr. Ditloff, it will be recalled, was Director of the German government’s agricultural concession in the North Caucasus under an agreement between the German government and the Soviets. When Hitler took power in early 1933, Ditloff did not resign in protest. He remained as Director for the project’s duration, indicating that the Nazis did not consider him inimical to their interests. Following his return to Nazi Germany later that year, Ditloff gathered or fronted for a spurious assortment of famine photographs. These, as has been shown, included photos stolen from 1921-1922 famine sources. In addition, at least 25 of the Ditloff photos can be shown to have been released by the Nazis, many of which were passed to or picked up by various anti-Soviet and pro-fascist publishers abroad.
Some of Ditloff’s photos were published in the Nazi party organ Volkischer Beobachter (Aug. 18, 1933).
Whatever the actual mechanics of the distribution of the Ditloff-Walker photographs, their fraudulence is well-established. Those intent on propagating the famine-genocide myth for political/purposes have not hesitated to use these photographs repeatedly to this day–without adding a shred of authenticating evidence to this questionable material.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 34-35

NAZIS TRY TO BLAME SOVIET FOR MASS EXECUTIONS IN THE UKRAINE

Included in Volume 1 of The Black Deeds of the Kremlin is a special section devoted to Nationalist allegations of Soviet mass executions…in Vynnitsya. Unearthed in 1943 during the Nazi occupation, the graves were “examined” by a Nazi-appointed “Commission” and were featured in Nazi propaganda films….
Post-war testimony of German soldiers, however, exposes the unearthing of mass graves at Vynnitsya as a Nazi propaganda deception.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 37

According to Israel’s authoritative Yad Washem Studies, Oberleutnant Erwin Bingel testified that on Sept. 22, 1941, he witnessed the mass execution of Jews by the SS and Ukrainian militia. This included a slaughter carried out by Ukrainian auxiliaries in Vynnitsya Park, where Bingel witnessed “layer upon layer” of corpses buried. Returning to Vynnitsya later in the war, Bingel read of the experts brought in by the Nazis to examine the exhumed graves of “Soviet” execution victims in the same Park. Upon personal verification, Bingel concluded that the “discovery” had been staged for Nazi propaganda purposes and that the number of corpses he saw corresponded to those slaughtered by Ukrainian Fascists in 1941.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 40

NYT CORRESPONDENT DENNY SAYS HE SEES NO FAMINE IN THE UKRAINE

By all credible accounts, the crops of 1933 and 1934 were successful. As a tribute to this fact, very few, if any famine-genocide hustlers today support claims of a 1934 famine. However, both Ammende [Author in 1936 of the famine-genocide book entitled Human Life in Russia], and following him Dalrymple, seemed to have been determined to starve Ukraine to death in 1934 as well. In fact, Dalrymple’s Ammende source for the list of 20 is Ammende’s letter to the New York Times published on July 1, 1934 under the heading “Wide Starvation in Russia Feared.” In a follow-up letter the following month, Ammende wrote that people were dying on the streets of Kiev. Within days, New York Times correspondent Harold Denny cabled a refutation of Ammende’s allegations. Datelined August 23rd, 1934, Denny charged: “This statement certainly has no foundation…. Your correspondent was in Kiev for several days last July about the time people were supposed to be dying there, and neither in the city, nor in the surrounding countryside was their hunger.” Several weeks later, Denny reported: “Nowhere was famine found. Nowhere even the fear of it. There is food, including bread, in the local open markets. The peasants were smiling too, and generous with their foodstuffs. In short, there was no air of trouble or of impending trouble.”
Obviously, nobody had informed the peasants that they were supposed to be falling prostrate with hunger that year.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 50

Before departing Dalrymple’s list, let it be noted that a significant number of the sources have been shown to be either complete frauds, hearsay based on “foreign residents” (an interesting journalistic term) or hearsay altogether, former Nazis and Ukrainian collaborators, while at least three of the estimates are cited from the anti-Soviet campaigns of the neo-fascist Hearst–Scripps-Howard style press and another five from books published in the Cold War years of 1949-53, save one which was printed in Nazi Germany.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 51

In the hands of Dalrymple and others, the dead seem to multiply at a most phenomenal rate. Hearsay, gossip, political testimonies, confessions of defectors, yellow journalism, Nazi and Ukrainian Rightists, all interconnect in an incestuous embrace throughout the famine-genocide campaigns.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 52

Almost all the collective farms established in 1931 and 1932 were shockingly mismanaged. What else could be expected when every village in Russia had been the scene of bitter internal strife, when animals had been slaughtered or allowed to die through incompetence, and grain had been buried, and barns and houses burned? It has been estimated that livestock dropped by 50% during those tragic years and there were large areas, as I saw with my own eyes in the North Caucasus in 1933, where miles of weeds and desolation replaced the former grainfields….
In that summer I drove nearly 200 miles across country between Rostov and Krasnodar through land that was lost to the weeds and through villages that were empty, yet even there I found a striking contrast. There was one communal farm in the south which had been established not long after the Civil War and remained under much the same management. It was an oasis of happiness and plenty in a stricken land. The people and their animals were plump and contented. Every family had two or three rooms. There was a day-nursery with screened windows and beds for the children, a communal restaurant which served excellent food neatly and cheaply, a fish pond, a pig and poultry farm, even a novel and profitable cultivation of castor-oil plants as lubricant for airplanes. This little community compared favorably with any farming outfit in the West. They weren’t, of course, so wealthy as American farmers, but they had overcome the age-old enemies of the Russian peasant–hunger, insecurity, ignorance, and disease, and were all busy as beavers, eager and full of hope.
Duranty, Walter. Stalin & Co. New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949, p. 77

DAIRYMPLE SAYS FAMINE DENIERS ARE LYING BUT OFFERS NO PROOF

Having categorized the Webb’s [Sydney and Beatrice], Herriot and Maynard as “dupes,” Dalrymple claims that Walter Duranty and “some other newsman” (whom he chooses not to name), “knew of the famine but avoided referring to it explicitly because of government pressure.” Dalrymple offers no proof of this allegation, but doubtless true to form, some hearsay or off-the-record gossip can be dredged up.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 53

USING DEMOGRAPHICS TO PROVE FAMINE IS BOGUS

Another contribution to the recent revival of the famine-genocide campaign is Walter Dushnyck’s 50 Years Ago: The Famine Holocaust in Ukraine.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 66

Attempting to shore up his thesis of famine-genocide, Dushnyck turns to an “examination” of the number of famine deaths. Rather than averaging hearsay estimates a la Dalrymple, Dushnyck’s “method” consists of projecting an anticipated population growth rate, based on the 1926 census, onto the listed population of the 1939 census for Ukraine. The difference between the hypothetical estimate and the 1939 census listing is then pronounced to be “famine victims.”
For example, Dushnyck states: “taking the data according to the 1926 census… and the January 17, 1939 census… and the average increase before the collectivization… (2.36% per year), it can be calculated that Ukraine… lost 7 1/2-million people between the two censuses.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 69

Though this “method” of calculating famine deaths is widely employed by famine-genocide theorists, the frequency of its use does not make it any more scientifically valid. U.S. sociologist Albert Szymanski, in criticizing an estimate of 3 million deaths, has noted:
“This estimate assumes: (1) that even in the conditions of extreme famine, instability and virtual Civil War, peasants would conceive at the same rate as in less precarious periods; (2) that abortion or infanticide (intentional or not) did not significantly increase; (3) that there were as many women of maximum reproductive age in 1932-1933 as before or after. All of these assumptions are erroneous. All peasants have traditional techniques of birth control and are thus able to limit their reproduction to a significant degree; it is the economic benefit attendant upon having large families which is operative… (Further) legal abortion was so widely practiced in this period that, in 1936, the state banned it as part of the campaign to increase the population.”

A decline in the birth rate could thus have been expected, and not only due to the reasons outlined by Szymanski. In examining the demographics of the famine era, Wheatcroft states:
“As is well known, the First World War, Civil War and the early years of the 1920s caused a great gap in births in these years. The age cohort born in 1914 would have been 16 in 1930 and so would have been just entering the period of major reproduction. Consequently, Lorimer and other scholars have concluded that the age structure of the population would have led to a decline in births throughout the early 1930s and until the missing populations born into the 1914-1922 age cohorts have passed on well into the future.”

[Following in the footsteps of Dushnyck] Harvard’s James Mace states: “If we subtract our estimate of the post-famine population from the pre-famine population, the difference is 7,954,000, which can be taken as an estimate of the number of Ukrainians who died before their time.” But, as respected demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver have pointed out, Mace is confusing population deficits with excess mortality. By making no allowance for a decline in the birth rate, Mace equates those who were never borne with those who “died before their time.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 71

The Mace -Dushnyck methodology also ignores other factors: change of declared nationality, intermarriage, assimilation, migration, etc., all of which have an impact on census figures. For example, Wixman has pointed out that in the late 1920s–between the two censuses in question–the Kuban Cossacks were reclassified from Ukrainian to Russian (they live in Russia). Anderson and Silver note: “If the reclassified Ukrainians numbered 2-3 million suggested by Waxman, then between 25-40% of Mace’s estimated deficit of Ukrainians could be accounted for in this way.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 72

But Medvedev himself lends credence to the less wild estimates by citing an estimate, made on the basis of gaps in the age structure and demographic projections, of as many as 3 million infant deaths owing to the 1932-33 famine. This [false] estimate assumes: (a) that even in conditions of extreme famine, instability, and virtual civil war, peasants would conceive and give birth at the same rate as in less precarious periods; (2) that abortion or infanticide (intentional or not) did not significantly increase; and (3) that there were as many women of maximum reproductive age in 1932-33 as before or after. All of these assumptions are erroneous. All peasants have traditional techniques of birth control and are thus able to limit their reproduction to a significant degree; it is the economic benefit attendant upon having large families which is operative–a factor not applicable during famines–not ignorance of birth control. Legal abortion was so widely practiced in this period that, in 1936, the state banned it as part of the campaign to increase the population.
Other exaggerated estimates of the number who died during these periods are based on apparent discrepancies between the 1926 and 1939 (or 1959) census figures, and the number of people who should have been in the census categories assuming earlier rates of population growth or, alternatively, the actual rate of growth of other populations at the same time. Such estimates assume that a decline in the reported population, or its failure to grow at its ‘normal’ rate, is largely a reflection of deaths from famine, abuse, or execution. Not only are fewer live births to be expected during times of famine and trouble–as well as disproportionately high infant mortality–many people emigrate from areas of famine in search of food, work, or refuge. In the Soviet Union in the 1930-33 period millions of destitute peasants migrated to the cities to take up jobs in the industrializing urban economy, others left the regions of greatest destitution to settle elsewhere; some left the Soviet Union altogether….
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 225-226

[In his report to the 17th Party Congress in January 1934 Stalin stated] We had an increase in the population of the Soviet Union from 160,500,000 at the end of 1930 to 168 million at the end of 1933.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 13, p. 343

REAL NATURAL CAUSES OF THE FAMINE ARE IGNORED BY CRITICS

“Evidence” prominently featured in the famine-genocide campaign has been shown to be fraudulent or suspect. Fake photographs, unscientific statistics-juggling and politically motivated hearsay and testimony are among the many devices employed to embellish allegations of famine-genocide. Subject to similar manipulation are the [actual] causes of the famine: drought, sabotage, soviet amateurish planning, excesses and mistakes in history’s first mass socialization of agriculture in the context of a hostile international environment.
Throughout the history of the famine-genocide campaign, the factors of drought and sabotage have been ignored, denied, downplayed or distorted. Soviet excesses and mistakes, in contrast, are emphasized, given an “anti-Ukrainian” motivation, described as deliberately and consciously planned, and the results exaggerated in depictions of starvation deaths in the multi-millions. The central event–the collectivization of agriculture as part of socialist development–is never given anything but a classically anti-Communist interpretation….
For some promoters of “famine-genocide,” anything other than man-made causes are ignored or denied. Natural causes, such as drought, are alleged never to have taken place; claims that drought was a contributing factor are denounced as Soviet inventions. One might then expect that no non-Soviet source could be cited to substantiate drought.
However, A History of Ukraine by Mikhail Hrushevsky–described by the Nationalists themselves as “Ukraine’s leading historian”–states: “Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions; and during the winter of 1932-33 a great famine, like that of 1921-1922 swept across Soviet Ukraine….” Indeed, nowhere does History of Ukraine claim a deliberate, man-made famine against Ukrainians, and more space is actually devoted to the famine of 1921-1922.
More recent histories can also be cited on the subject of drought. Nicolas Riasnovsky, former visiting professor at Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, notes in his History of Russia that drought occurred in both 1931 and 1932. Michael Florinsky, immediately following a description of the mass destruction wrought by kulak resistance to collectivization, states: “Severe droughts in 1930 and 1931, especially in the Ukraine, aggravated the plight of farming and created near famine conditions.” Professor Emeritus at Columbia and a prolific writer on the USSR, Florinsky can hardly be accused of leftist sympathies: born in Kiev, Ukraine, he fought against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War.

While drought was a contributing factor, the main cause of the famine was the struggle around the collectivization of agriculture which raged in the countryside in this period.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 91-92

Nonetheless, two studies discuss the harvests in those years. Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft argue that the 1931 and 1932 harvests were small due to drought and difficulties in labor and capital, especially the decline in draft animals….
In this essay I re-examine the harvests of 1931 and especially 1932 on the basis of newly available archival documents and published sources, including some that scholars have never utilized. I show that the environmental context of these famines deserves much greater emphasis than it has previously received: environmental disasters reduced the Soviet grain harvest in 1932 substantially and have to be considered among the primary causes of the famine. I argue that capital and labor difficulties were significant but were not as important as these environmental factors, and were in part a result of them. I also demonstrate that the Soviet leadership did not fully understand the crisis and out of ignorance acted inconsistently in response to it. I conclude that it is thus inaccurate to describe the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as simply an artificial or man-made famine, or otherwise to reduce it to a single cause. Overall, the low harvest, and hence the famine, resulted from a complex of human and environmental factors, an interaction of man and nature, much as most previous famines in history.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 6

Soviet agronomic literature and other published and archival sources from the 1930s, however, which no previous scholarship on the famine has discussed, indicate that in 1932 Soviet crops suffered from an extraordinarily severe combination of infestations from crop diseases and pests.
The most important infestation in 1932 came from several varieties of rust, a category of fungi that can infest grains and many other plants.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 13

While rust infestations were not a new problem in Russia, the extreme outbreak in 1932 took agronomists by surprise, and they did not fully understand it.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 16

…losses from rust and smut in 1932 reached approximately 9 million tons, 13% of the official harvest figure and nearly 20% of the lowest archival harvest estimate. It should also be noted that while these estimates are approximate, they are also the only concrete estimates, based on any even remotely scientific evidence, of overall 1932 grain harvest losses from any environmental or human factors available in any published or archival sources that I have been able to find.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 17

The warm, humid weather in 1932 also led to severe insect infestations, including locusts, field moths, and other insects on grain and sugar beets. An agronomic journal reported that in 1932 a “mass multiplication” of Asian locusts took place in all the important breeding grounds of the desert zone, including Daghestan, the Lower Volga, the Ural River delta, the North Caucasus, and the Kalmyk Oblast. OGPU reports during the spring of 1932 noted infestations of locusts, meadow moths, hessian flies, beet weevils, and other insects. A report of 28 May noted that beet weevils had infested nearly 100,000 hectares of beets in Ukraine; in one district the weevils destroyed almost 500 hectares in three hours.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 18

As will be seen below, these natural disasters were only part of a complex of factors that made 1931-1932 disastrous agricultural years. Nonetheless, drought, rain, and infestations destroyed at least 20% of the harvest, and this would have been sufficient on its own to have caused serious food shortages or even famine. If these factors had not been in evidence in 1931 and 1932 agricultural production would have been considerably larger, and while procurements could have caused shortages in specific regions, they would not have caused a famine like that of 1933….
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 20

My research on Soviet farm labor policies and actual peasant practices and my reading of this literature, however, has made me skeptical of the argument for labor resistance as the exclusive or even dominant cause of the low harvests and famine in the early 1930s. First, while some peasants were so resentful of collectivization and procurements that they attempted to sabotage the farms, for peasant resistance to have been sufficient to cause the low 1932 harvest an extremely large number of peasants would have had to act this way, that is, to have avoided work and attempted to destroy the harvest. In other words, the argument asserts that the majority of peasants attempted to deprive their families and fellow villagers of sufficient food to last until the next harvest. This interpretation, therefore, requires us to believe that most peasants acted against their own and their neighbors’ self-interest. This viewpoint is difficult to accept both on general human terms and particularly when applied to peasants in Russia and Ukraine. The great majority of these peasants had lived for centuries in corporate villages that had instilled certain basic cooperative values, and the kolkhosi perpetuated basic features of these villages.
Second, the argument is reductionist because it attempts to explain everything that happened in this crisis by human actions, specifically by the conflict between the Soviet government and the peasants, with an emphasis on peasant resistance as a kind of heroic struggle against the oppressive regime. Such reductionism is problematic because it does not account for actions that do not fit the pattern of resistance, that took place outside the nexus of resistance. If the situation had been as conflictual as this interpretation implies, if the great majority of peasants did little or no farm work and performed the work they did do neglectfully and poorly out of spite, then the harvest in 1932 would not have been even 50,000,000 tons but practically nothing.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 26

On the basis of the above discussion, I contend that an understanding of the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 must start from the background of chronic agricultural crises in the early Soviet years, the harvest failures of 1931 and 1932, and the interaction of environmental and human factors that caused them. In 1932, extremely dry weather reduced crops in some regions, and unusually wet and human weather in most others fostered unprecedented infestations. These conditions from the start reduced the potential yield that year, as drought had…in 1931. At the same time, the regime’s procurements from the 1931 harvest left peasants and work livestock starving and weakened. Crop failures, procurements that reduced fodder resources, peasant neglect, overuse of the limited number of tractors, and shortages of spare parts and fuel all combined to reduce available draft power. Farm work consequently was performed poorly in many kolkhosi and sovkhozy, often even when peasants were willing to put in the effort. Finally, farming activities combined with other environmental problems–soil exhaustion, weeds, and mice–to further reduce the 1932 harvest to famine levels.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 45

Any study that asserts that the harvest was not extraordinarily low and that the famine was a political measure intentionally imposed through excessive procurements is clearly based on an insufficient source base and an uncritical approach to the official sources. The evidence cited above demonstrates that the 1932-1933 famine was the result of a genuine shortage, a substantial decline in the availability of food caused by a complex of factors, each of which decreased the harvest greatly and which in combination must have decreased the harvest well below subsistence. This famine therefore resembled the Irish famine of 1845-1848, but resulted from a litany of natural disasters that combined to the same effect as the potato blight had 90 years before, and in a similar context of substantial food exports. The Soviet famine resembles the Irish case in another way as well: in both, government leaders were ignorant of and minimized the environmental factors and blamed the famines on human actions (in Ireland, overpopulation, in the USSR, peasant resistance) much more than was warranted….
If we are to believe that the regime starved the peasants to induce labor discipline in the farms, are we to interpret starvation in the towns as the regime’s tool to discipline blue and white-collar workers and their wives and children? While Soviet food distribution policies are beyond the scope of this article, it is clear that the small harvests of 1931-1932 created shortages that affected virtually everyone in the country and that the Soviet regime did not have the internal resources to alleviate the crisis.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 46

The evidence and analysis I have presented here show that the Soviet famine was more serious and more important an event than most previous studies claim, including those adhering to the Ukrainian nationalist interpretation, and that it resulted from a highly abnormal combination of environmental and agricultural circumstances.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 47

…the famine resulted directly from a famine harvest, a harvest that was much smaller than officially acknowledged, and that this small harvest was in turn the result of a complex of natural disasters that [with one small exception] no previous scholars have ever discussed or even mentioned. The foot notes in the Carl Beck Paper contain extensive citations from primary sources as well as Western and Soviet secondary works, among others by D’Ann Penner and Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies that further substantiate these points and I urge interested readers to examine those works as well.
Tauger, Mark. His comments at random.

THERE WAS A FAMINE FOR MANY REASONS

Soviet mistakes and excesses, drought and the organized campaign of sabotage and resistance resulted in the famine of 1932-1933. There was no plan to wipe out Ukrainians as a people; the mistakes–even when accompanied by tragic and unforgivable excesses– do not constitute “pre-planned genocide.”
The famine was compounded by typhus epidemics. Internationally acclaimed urban planner and recipient of the Order of Canada, Dr. Hans Blumenfeld worked as an architect in the Ukrainian city of Makeyevka at the time the famine. He writes:
“There was indeed a famine in 1933, not just in Ukraine, but also in… the lower Volga and the North Caucasus;… There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate their number… Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever.
Dr. Hans Blumenfeld offers a useful personal summary of the period:
… [The famine was caused by] a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the south. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the “kulaks,” but less eager to organize a co-operative economy. By 1930 the Party had already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses…. After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it can hardly be otherwise….
In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 96-97

Under these conditions there was little reason for anti-Russian or separatist tendencies among the Ukrainians, and I never encountered them. I was therefore rather surprised to read recently in the respected French paper Le Monde, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the starvation of 1933, that was due to a planned “genocide” of the Ukrainian nation. Given the dire shortage of labor in the Soviet Union at the time, this hypothesis is rather absurd. It is equally absurd to assume that any government could be so stupid as to believe that starvation could be an effective means to break national resistance–in the face of the experience of the Irish famine of the 1840s and many others….
There was indeed a famine in 1933, not just in the Ukraine, but also in other semiarid regions of the USSR, the Lower Volga and the North Caucasus; and Makeyevka, located near the junction of these three regions, felt the full impact of it. Many peasants from there came to the city; the steelworks tried to employ some of them but most left, finding the work too hard. Some were already too far gone, with swollen limbs. There were also many lost children, which were either taken into children’s institutions or, very frequently, adopted by urban families; two of my old friends, building workers from Vienna who at the time worked in Makeyevka, each adopted one such child. Only once did I see a child with spindly legs and a swollen belly; it was in the garden of a nursery school at the hand of a nurse waiting for the doctor. Nor did I ever see a corpse lying in a street….
There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate the number, and I doubt if anybody has. What were the reasons and what could have been done to avoid this terrible calamity?
There was a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the South. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the “kulaks,” but less eager to organize a cooperative economy. By 1930 the Party and already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses. One of the cadres engaged in this work later reported his experience: the local Communists had told him, “We are building socialism in the village, and you and your Stalin are stabbing us in the back.” After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it could hardly be otherwise. In addition, the depression in the West destroyed the market for oil and timber, with which the Soviets had hoped to pay the debts incurred during the First Five-Year Plan. So, instead of being able to import grain, the Soviet Union actually exported some. What alternatives did they have? I can see only two: use their gold reserve, or get a loan
in the West. They tried to do the latter, but obtained it only in 1934 when they no longer needed it. If blame for the terrible suffering of 1932 has to be assigned, it falls in equal parts on the Soviet Government for refusing to part with their gold reserve, and on the West for refusing to loan when it was needed.
…Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever….
In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace. Certainly, stupidity and callousness inflicted much avoidable suffering during the process of collectivization, and many Soviet kolkhozes continued to suffer from the fact that they started on the wrong foot–in contrast to those in other countries such as East Germany and Hungary, which have learned from the mistakes made in the Soviet Union. But Soviet agriculture is not the monumental failure which it is often regarded as in the West.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 152-154

The Soviet government did have small reserves of grain, but continually drew these down to allocate food to the population. Since virtually the entire country experienced shortages of food, indicating that the procurement and distribution data are reasonably accurate, clearly the Soviet Union faced a severe shortage, and the most important cause of that shortage has to have been small harvests in 1931 and 1932.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 5

DESTRUCTION BY THE KULAKS ALONG WITH DROUGHT CAUSED THEIR OWN STARVATION

Even in the winter of 1931-1932, with the great scarcity of grain, we somehow managed to survive because of our vegetables. But the year of 1932 had not been normal. That sprIng we had a massive famine during which the people consumed even the seeds for planting, so there was nothing left with which to plant the vegetable gardens. Most gardens remained overgrown with weeds. The meager allotment of food received from the collective farm as advance payment was soon consumed. With no additional help forthcoming starvation set in.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 164

… the slaughter of cattle and the feasting went on–there was no way of stopping it. Animals were killed because no fodder was left or because they had become diseased from neglect; and even the bednyaks who, having joined the kolkhozes, had every interest in preserving their wealth, went on dissipating it and stuffing their own long-starved stomachs. Then followed the long and dreadful fast: the farms were left without horses and without seed for the sowing; the kolkhozniki of the Ukraine and of European Russia rushed to central Asia to buy horses, and, having returned empty-handed, harnessed the few remaining cows and oxen to the ploughs; and in 1931 and 1932 vast tracts of land remained untilled and the furrows were strewn with the bodies of starved muzhiks. The smallholder perished as he had lived, in pathetic helplessness and barbarism; and his final defeat was moral as well as economic and political.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 119

MISMANAGEMENT BY SOVIET OFFICIALS WAS A MAJOR CAUSE OF THE FAMINE

How far this famine was “man-made” in the sense that Stalin and his government deliberately provoked it by wholesale collectivization is another story. Evidence gathered on the spot showed that the lack of efficiency of the peasants themselves was partly to blame, that in some regions crop prospects were bright enough before the harvest but that harvesting was shockingly mismanaged; vast quantities of grain were hidden or simply wasted, because collection and distribution of foodstuffs disintegrated in the prevailing chaos. On the other hand, it can fairly be argued that the authorities were responsible because they had not foreseen the muddle and mess and taken steps beforehand to correct it. The proof of this is that things took a marked turn for the better in the following year, when the Communist Party set its hand, almost literally, to the plow….
Yet it is interesting to note that Stalin did directly and specifically assume responsibility for what had occurred. In a speech of January 11, 1933, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he said: “…. Why blame the peasants?… For we are at the helm; we are in command of the instruments of the state; it is our mission to lead the collective farms; and we must bear the whole of the responsibility for the work in the rural districts.”
Duranty, Walter. Stalin & Co. New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949, p. 78-79

FAMINE WAS CAUSED BY DROUGHT, INFESTATIONS, WEATHER AND FUNGUSES

Despite this, and despite the anecdotal evidence that resistance scholars present, however, clear and substantial evidence shows that harvests varied in the 1930s primarily and mostly from environmental factors. Serious droughts reduced the harvest in 1931 and 1936 drastically…and those of 1934 and 1938 moderately, and a complex of natural disasters made the 1932 harvest the lowest of the decade and a primary cause of the famine of 1932-33.
While peasant resistance did take place in the 1930s, it is extremely difficult to document its effect on production. In 1931, for example, peasants sowed a record area; although some was sown too late, under better weather conditions the crop would have been much larger. By the same token, the improved harvest of 1933, and the good harvest of 1935 and 1937, resulted first of all from favorable weather. Other scholars have emphasized the primary importance of environmental factors in the 1930s, showing for example that soil exhaustion, drought and other circumstances reduced harvests in 1931-32. A Russian scholar showed in a recent study of kolkhozy in the Urals that the most important influence on kolkhoz labor productivity was climate.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 77.

Kolkhozy in 1932 faced extremely difficult conditions. The 1931 harvest was extremely low, despite a large sown area, primarily because of drought, but also because of organizational and supply problems. The low harvest and grain procurements left many farms with little or no food by early 1932, especially in the drought regions of the Volga, Kazakhstan, the Urals and Ukraine. This led many peasants to flee their villages seeking food. Reforms in February 1932 tied remuneration more closely to work and prohibited equalizing income distribution, but many farms misunderstood or ignored them, or implemented them incorrectly, and famine conditions encouraged equalizing distribution. The regime issued food aid and seed loans, but these were often delayed and insufficient….
During the 1932 harvest season Soviet agriculture experienced a crisis. Natural disasters, especially plant diseases spread and intensified by wet weather in mid-1932, drastically reduced crop yields. OGPU reports, anecdotal as they are, indicate widespread peasant opposition to the kolkhoz system. These documents contain numerous reports of kolkhozniki, faced with starvation, mismanagement and abuse by kolkhoz officials and others, and desperate conditions: dying horses, idle tractors, infested crops, and incitement by itinerant people. Peasants’ responses varied: some applied to withdraw from their farms, some left for paid work outside, some worked sloppily, intentionally leaving grain on the fields while harvesting to glean later for themselves.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 81.

My study of the Ukrainian famine of 1928-29 shows, first, that the grain crisis had a substantial material basis in severe regional crop failures, especially in Ukraine, caused by an array of natural disasters. Whether the Soviet Union had an absolute shortage of food in 1928-29 is impossible to say because the harvest statistics are suspect, but the country certainly had much less food available in 1928-29 than in the good years of NEP, 1926-27. No shift in price policies (to which the grain crisis is often attributed) could have prevented the harsh weather conditions of these years. The agricultural measures introduced in response to the 1924 crop failure and famine had not protected Ukraine from this disaster. As Rykov, stated in September 1928 while in Ukraine examining relief efforts, “For over four years we have been fighting drought in Ukraine. The effectiveness of our expenditures obviously cannot be considered sufficient.” Given the thin margin of surplus that Soviet agriculture produced in these years, a regional natural disaster of this sort could cause a famine and have disastrous repercussions throughout the economy.
Tauger, Mark. “Grain Crisis or Famine?” in Provincial Landscapes, Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953 by Don Raleigh, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Penn., 2001, Chapter 7, p. 167.

PEASANTS WORKED EVEN HARDER AND PRODUCED MORE AFTER THE 1932 FAMINE

Peasants in the famine regions were weak, and estimates are that between four and 7 million people died of the famine in villages and towns. Yet, somehow, on the whole peasants worked harder in 1933 than in 1932. By June 1933, the farms had sown a larger area than by that date in the previous three years (1930-32). The German agricultural attachE Otto Schiller drove 6000 miles through the main agricultural regions in the summer of 1933 and described a greatly strengthened and consolidated kolkhoz system. He attributed this both to administrative pressure and hunger as a motivating force, and also to effective management and labor organization. Reports from all over the USSR indicated that peasants who had avoided working in the kolkhoz now competed with each other to work, and had a ‘better attitude’ towards work in the kolkhoz than before. And the result, as documented in Table 2, was a dramatic increase in the harvest in 1933…. Thus there can be no doubt that the general pattern of intensified work, improved conditions and higher output evident from the statistics was in fact representative of conditions throughout the country.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 83.

Studies conducted in the mid-1930s found that kolkhozniki actually worked harder than non-collectivized peasants had worked in the 1920s, clear evidence of significant adaptation to new system.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 87

SOVIET GOVT TRIED TO AID FAMINE VICTIMS

That year (1931) was one of severe drought in the Volga, Western Siberia, parts of Ukraine, and other regions. Acknowledging this, the regime publicly sent procured grain back to drought regions as food relief and seed, organized a conference of specialists to discuss measures against drought, and began implementation of some of the measures proposed.
Tauger, Mark. “Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: a Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust.” The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 2001, p. 44.

AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM

The Soviet Union is the only country in the world in which it is a crime for any person to give or receive any “direct or indirect privileges on account of race or nationality” and where any preaching of “race or national exceptionalism or hatred or contempt” is punishable by law. This was a ” fighting point” enshrined in the Soviet Constitution, which was adopted after the rise of Hitler Germany across the border. Acts of race prejudice are severely dealt with in the Soviet Union. Ordinary drunken brawls between Russians may be lightly handled as misdemeanors, but let a brawl occur between a Russian and a Jew in which national names are used in a way insulting to national dignity, and this becomes a serious political offense.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 40

“At bottom every Jew is a Bolshevik!” was the constant theme of Rosenberg’s tirades.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 117

The idea of of a holy crusade against Soviet Russia dominated all of Rosenberg’s writings.
Sayers and Kahn. The Great Conspiracy. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946, p. 118

The official Communist Party and Soviet attitude toward anti-Semitism, or indeed toward any stirring up of racial animosity, is one of uncompromising hostility.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 228

How much discrimination there was against Jews in educational institutions is hard to tell. It was never general but certainly there was some. It was evasive and struggles always developed against it. My best friend felt for a time undermined in her university job, because she refused to yield to the anti-Semitism which seemed to be promoted by the Party secretary at the university. One day she came home exultant. “Now I know the party doesn’t stand for anti-Semitism,” she said. “They removed A… He was in charge of universities here for the Central Committee, and was behind much of this anti-Semitism.”
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 112

…The comment frequently made that the hostility of the Party leaders to the Opposition minority was partly due to the fact that most of the Opposition leaders are Jews is unjustified on grounds of race prejudice….
Jews are not discriminated against in public employment, and most employment is public. Anti-semitism is expressed rather in social slights, sometimes in open insults. But offenders may be, and are, arrested and tried in the courts, which universally penalize them.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 76

Reference is occasionally made to the arrest and exile of Zionists as an expression of anti-semitism in Russia. Numbers of Zionists have been exiled, it is true, but only in political cases involving either Zionist Socialists opposed to the Communist regime, or Zionists alleged to have connections with bourgeois agencies or individuals abroad. Since the Zionist movement is essentially bourgeois, and dependent on friendly relations with Great Britain as the power controlling Palestine, those connections have been inevitable.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 77

The Communist Party is officially opposed to Zionism, and no Communist may be a Zionist.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 78

You see, Zionism and anti-Semitism are blood brothers. Both are reactionary and inimical to the interests of the working class. It sometimes happens that people of non-Jewish nationality trip up on this slippery ground and slide either toward favoring the Zionists, who are reactionaries, or toward becoming anti-Semites, who are equally reactionary.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 202

I met all sorts of Jews in the Soviet Union, and, being interested in Jewish questions, I discussed matters with them exhaustively. The amazing tempo of production calls for men, hands, and brains: the Jews willingly harnessed themselves to this process, and thus assimilation made further progress there than anywhere else in the world. I met Jews who said to me: “For many years I have never given a thought to the fact that I am a Jew; it was only your questions which reminded me of it again.” I was moved by the unanimity with which the Jews I came across emphasized how completely they felt in harmony with the new state. Formerly they had been despised, persecuted, without a calling, their life without meaning, Luftmenschen rootless people of the air; now they were peasants, workers, intellectuals, soldiers, all deeply grateful for the new order.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 82

The Bolsheviks did not tolerate on their territory overt manifestations of anti-semitism, least of all pogroms, for they well realized that anti-semitism had become a cover for anti-communism.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 101

The Sovnarkom is said on July 27, 1918, to have issued an appeal against anti-semitism, threatening penalties for pogroms.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 111

In addition, there were few genuine Russians among the moderate Socialists–most of them were Jews or Georgians, whereas the overwhelming majority of the Bolsheviks were pure Russians. ‘Somebody among the Bolsheviks remarked jestingly that since the Mensheviks were the faction of the Jews and the Bolsheviks that of the native Russians, it would become us to make a pogrom in the party.’ Anti-semitism could hardly be read into this heavy jocular aside, because nobody had been more blunt than Koba in the condemnation of racial hatred.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 91

Immediately after the Bolshevik revolution expressions of anti-Semitism became a crime. In July 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars called for the destruction of ‘the anti-Semitic movement at its roots’ by forbidding ‘pogromists and persons inciting to pogroms’. In 1922, the Russian Criminal Code forbade ‘agitation and propaganda arousing national enmities and dissensions’ and specified a minimum sentence of one year’s solitary confinement (and ‘death in time of war’) as punishment. In 1927, the Russian Republic passed legislation outlawing the dissemination, manufacture, or possession of literature calculated to stir national and religious hostility….
During the Civil War and throughout the 1920s there was an active official government campaign against anti-Semitism. Incidents involving and actions taken against were frequently reported in the Soviet press. In this period the Party published over 100 books and brochures opposing anti-Semitism.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 88

For two years following the Bolshevik takeover, new laws against anti-Semitism helped to prevent overt attacks on Jews…. By the end of the 1930s, Jews had assumed prominent roles throughout Soviet society, particularly as party activists, editors, and journalists and as leaders of industrial enterprises and cultural institutions.
…The visibility of Jews was noticeable enough to complicate relations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 34

STALIN WAS AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM

Stalin was surrounded by Jewesses–from Polina Molotova and Maria Svanidze to Poskrebysheva and Yezhova.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 267

Stalin has repeatedly condemned, along with other forms of race prejudice, anti-semitism. Russia has steadily been building a society which is free of the dangerous germs of race hate. Jews, as well as all others, are free to live where they wish, go to universities and technical schools, and secure any job for which they are fitted. Since the Jews were a scattered people and could not properly preserve their language and culture when a minority among other groups, the District of Biro-bijan, a fertile area as large as Holland and Belgium combined, has been established for those who wish to live there.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 73

Stalin was not an anti-Semite, as he is sometimes portrayed. He appreciated many qualities in the Jewish people: capacity for hard work, group solidarity, and political activeness. Their political activeness is unquestionably higher than average.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 192

This makes me believe that humor directed at any nationalist group was pleasing to Stalin, and that he was neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Muslim, only opposed to any nationalist enclave of power.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 295

To the end Stalin maintained that he opposed Jews who were Bundists, or religious activists, or ‘cosmopolitans’, or secessionists, or Zionists, or agents of American-Israeli organizations, but was not against Jews as such. On the contrary he had provided them with the Jewish autonomous region (in an inhospitable corner of Siberia, which attracted only a few thousand hopeful immigrants).
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 290

Stalin’s attitude was unequivocal. Personally free from crude racial prejudice, he was wary of openly offending against the party canon which was hostile to anti-Semitism. Jews were quite prominent in his entourage, though far less so than they had been in Lenin’s. Litvinov stood for over a decade at the head of the Soviet diplomatic service; Kaganovich was to the end Stalin’s factotum; Mekhlis was the chief political Commissar of the army; and Zaslavsky and Ehrenburg were the most popular of Stalin’s sycophants.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 605

Yet, while Hitler’s Armies were advancing, the Soviet authorities did their best to evacuate the Jews from the threatened areas, even though in some towns–the case of Taganrog was notorious–the Jews, disbelieving the warnings about what awaited them under Nazi occupation, refused to budge. With Stalin’s authorization, a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, headed by well-known personalities was formed; he called upon the Jews of the West to support the Soviet Union…. Jews serving with the armed forces fought bravely, were decorated, and promoted even to the highest ranks. But qua Jews they were not accorded any merit…. After the war Soviet citizens guilty of collaboration with the Nazis and of Jew-baiting were punished as traitors.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 606

Koba too does not like Jews, but in my opinion he understands the absurdity of anti-Jewish measures.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 54

Trotsky also saw an obvious anti-Semitic orientation in the Moscow trials, at which a disproportionately high number of the defendants were Jewish. At the first show trial, 10 (out of 16) of the defendants were Jews, at the second, 8 (out of 17). Trotsky felt that it was particularly monstrous that, of the terrorists supposedly sent by him into the USSR, who were simultaneously working for the Gestapo, all, as if by selection, turned out to be Jews. In all this, Trotsky saw an attempt by Stalin to exploit the anti-Semitic moods that still existed in the country in the struggle against the Opposition.
The statements by Trotsky were met with indignation abroad not only by pro-Stalinists but also by bourgeois-liberal Jewish circles. Thus the famous American Zionist activist, Stephen Wise, explained his refusal to participate in the commission to investigate the Moscow Trials by the fact that Trotsky was not acting in good faith by raising the Jewish issue in connection with these trials. “If his other charges,” declared Wise, “are as unsubstantiated as his complaint on the score of anti-Semitism, then he has no case at all.”
Rejecting Trotsky’s statements about the continued existence of anti-Semitism in the USSR, B. Z. Goldberg, a journalist who had contributed to the New York newspaper, Der Tog wrote: “In order to beat Stalin, Trotsky considers it right to make Soviet Russia anti-Semitic…. Is this the truth, Mr. Trotsky? Is it honest to write this when it is not true?… We are accustomed to look to the Soviet Union as our sole consolation as far as anti-Semitism is concerned…. It is therefore unforgivable that Trotsky should raise such groundless accusations against Stalin.”
For many years, accusations that Stalin was anti-Semitic were refuted not only by foreign Jewish circles, but by members of the Russian emigration. The Israeli historian Nedava reports that even in 1952, that is at the culmination of state anti-Semitism in the USSR, Kerensky told him that in the Soviet Union anti-Semitism had long since been eradicated, and that statements about the existence of anti-Semitism there were invented by supporters of the Cold War.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 154

Also he [Stalin] retained Dzerzhinsky as an ally in the coming struggle for power. Dzerzhinsky, as a Pole naturally hated Russians, and he was not warm towards the Jews. An association with a Georgian was not intolerable to him and he felt that Stalin must naturally share his own antipathies. In the latter surmise he was wrong, for Stalin has no racial prejudices.
Graham, Stephen. Stalin. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970, p. 58

I wondered how Stalin, being [allegedly–Ed.] anti-semitic, could have two Jewish secretaries: Mekhlis and Kanner.
Bazhanov, Boris. Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, c1990, p. ___w59

It was said later that Stalin was hostile to Kapler because he was Jewish, but when this was happening that did not matter.
Beria, Sergo. Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin’s Kremlin. London: Duckworth, 2001, p. 150

As I have said, my father [Beria] did not believe that Stalin was anti-Semitic, even after his struggle against Trotskyism. He had many Jewish friends…. In 1947 he sent Kaganovich to the Ukraine because of the virulent anti-semitism which had developed there and which risked discrediting the USSR, whereas Khrushchev encouraged these anti-Semitic tendencies in the Party in the Ukraine. Calculation governed all of Stalin’s actions. He realized that the Jews were needed in that period. Mekhlis [a Jew] was for a long time his personal secretary, and became editor of Pravda before being given charge of propaganda in the Army and, finally, charge of State Control. Stalin kept him close to himself and retained his services for years.
Beria, Sergo. Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin’s Kremlin. London: Duckworth, 2001, p. 211

When they gathered at his apartment for Svetlana’s 11th birthday on 28 Feb 1937, Yakov, Stalin’s gentle Georgian son, brought Julia, his Jewish wife, for the first time.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 268

On the other hand, most of the women around him and many of his closest collaborators, from Yagoda to Mekhlis, were Jewish. The difference is obvious: he hated the intellectual Trotsky but had no problem with the cobbler Kaganovich….
Stalin was aware that his regime had to stand against anti-Semitism and we find in his own notes a reminder to give a speech about it: he called it “cannibalism,” made it a criminal offense, and regularly criticized anti-Semites. Stalin founded a Jewish homeland, Birobizhan, on the inhospitable Chinese border but boasted, “The Tsar gave the Jews no land, but we will.”
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 305

Stalin then attacked anti-Semitism: he [Stalin] had lately insisted that Jewish writers must have their Semitic names published in brackets after their Russian pseudonyms. Now he asked the surprised Committee: “What’s this for? Does it give pleasure to someone to underline that this man is Jewish? Why? To promote anti-Semitism?”
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 623

[Footnote]: Yet Stalin still remembered his loyalest retainer Mekhlis [a Jew], who had suffered a stroke in 1949. Now dying at his dacha, all he longed for was to attend the 1952 Congress. Stalin refused, muttering that it was not a hospital but when the new Central Committee was announced, he remembered him. Mekhlis was thrilled–he died happy and Stalin authorized a magnificent funeral.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 627

Simonov, then editor-in-chief of Literaturnaiia Gazeta, a major organ for literary affairs, was present at a Politburo meeting on February 26, 1952,…when the list of candidates for the Stalin prizes were presented for consideration to Stalin. Next to certain names, Simonov recounted, were other names in brackets. In each case the bracketed name had a noticeably Jewish appearance such as ” Rovinsky.”
Stalin was irritated. “Why does it say Maltsev, but in brackets “Rovinsky”? For what purpose? For how long will this continue?…..” he demanded. “Why is this being done? Why are two names being written?” Stalin appeared offended. He proceeded to instruct his amazed audience: “If a man chose a literary pseudonym–that’s his right. We’re not speaking about anything other than elementary decency… But apparently someone thought to underline the fact that this man had a double name, to underline that he was a Jew. Why would you underline this? Why would you do this? For what purpose instill anti-semitism? Who needs this?”
According to Simonov, Stalin’s comment astounded the important literary and government figures who attended the February meeting and had an impact on Soviet literary society. News of this incident spread by word-of-mouth in upper echelon cultural circles, the effect of which was to distance Stalin himself from the crude anti-Semitic campaign still underway that was the cause of the parentheses in the first place. It made people think twice about their own accusations. How could ordinary citizens expose Jews as Jews if Stalin himself could not support such invidious considerations?
Naumov and Brent. Stalin’s Last Crime. New York: HarperCollins, c2003, p. 201-202

In 1943 the Jews were useful to him [Stalin], and he sent Mikhoels and others to America to raise money and goodwill for the Soviet war effort; in 1947, he supported the establishment of the state of Israel and allowed, if unwillingly, his daughter to marry Morozov a Jew.
Naumov and Brent. Stalin’s Last Crime. New York: HarperCollins, c2003, p. 217

As early as September 1948 he [Ehrenburg] publicly demonstrated his support for Stalin’s view of the State of Israel, in his Pravda article, “The Union of the Snub-nosed”. Ehrenburg argued that the charge of anti-semitism, discrimination, and the suppression of the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union was nothing more than malicious fabrications by enemies of the Soviet order. He argued that Israel was nothing but a bourgeois state, incompetent to decide the Jewish question; nor could it unite Jews around the world.
Naumov and Brent. Stalin’s Last Crime. New York: HarperCollins, c2003, p. 306

The Hungarian Jew Karl Pauker commanded Stalin’s personal security detail for a time in the 1930s and used to shave the dictator with an open razor….
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 33

Once in power, Stalin…found it opportune to denounce anti-Semitism, as in his famous statement to the Jewish Telegraph Agency in January 1931: “Anti-Semitism is an extreme expression of racial chauvinism and as such is the most dangerous survival of cannibalism.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Stalin permitted Jewish settlements to flourish in the Crimea, supported the creation of a secular Yiddish culture, and established a Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan to rival Palestine for the allegiance of Jewish masses inside and outside the country. He was once reported saying, “The czar gave the Jews no land. Kerensky gave the Jews no land. But we will give it.” Stalin, it seemed, was ready to help the Jews become a “normal” national minority with a territory of their own.
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 33

[In replying on January 12, 1931 to an inquiry by the Jewish News Agency in the United States Stalin stated] Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
…Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
In the USSR anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under USSR law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 13, p. 30

Dzhughashvili’s comments were later used against him as proof of anti-semitism. They were certainly crude and insensitive. But they scarcely betoken hatred of all Jews–or indeed of all Georgians. He, a Georgian, was repeating something that a Russian Bolshevik had said about Russians and Jews. For many years into the future he would be the friend, associate, or leader of countless individual Jews.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 77

Stories also surfaced that Stalin made anti-semitic remarks in private. Against this is the incontrovertible fact that Jews were among Stalin’s friends and associates before and after the Great War.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 101

In the light of his continued association with Jewish friends, it would be difficult to call him an anti-semite;
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 326

He did not refuse to allow Jewish people the right to cultural self-expression after the October Revolution; indeed his People’s, Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs gave money and facilities to groups promoting the interests of Jews. Within his family he had opposed his daughter’s dalliance with the Jewish film-maker Kapler. As a father, he had much reason to discourage Svetlana from having anything to do with the middle-aged, womanizing Kapler.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 568

His campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” cannot be automatically attributed to hatred of Jews as Jews. He moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states. The Greeks, Poles, and Koreans had suffered at his hands before the Second Were War for this reason. Campaigns against cosmopolitanism started up when relations between the Soviet Union and the USA drastically worsened in 1947. At first Jews were not the outstanding target. But this did not remain true for long. A warm reception was accorded by 20,000 Jews to Golda Meir at a Moscow synagogue in September 1948 after the foundation of Israel as a state. This infuriated Stalin, who started to regard Jewish people as subversive elements. Yet his motives were of Realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice .
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 568

Stalin’s attitude toward this growing anti-Semitism was one of friendly neutrality. But matters went so far that he was forced to come out with a published statement which declared, “We are fighting Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not because they are Jews, but because they are Oppositionists,” and the like.
Trotsky, Leon, Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 399

When speaking at a session of the Moscow City Soviet (Council) on November 6, 1941, Stalin said, “The reactionary Nazi Party with their brutal anti-Jewish pogroms are no better than the Russian tsarist regime that allowed the Black Hundred pogroms.”
Korolyov, Anatoly. Soviet Jewish Doctors Dissected Hitler, Novosti, Russian News and Information Agency, 7/5/05.

Furthermore, Stalin’s inner circle included four Jewish ministers (people’s commissars): Lazar Kaganovich, Boris Vannikov, Semyon Ginzburg and Isaak Zaltsman. These men were responsible for the railroads, ammunition, military construction and the tank industry.
Korolyov, Anatoly. Soviet Jewish Doctors Dissected Hitler, Novosti, Russian News and Information Agency, 7/5/05.

And, Stalin, what can be said about him?
I [Kaganovich] will tell you something about Stalin. There are Stalin’s statements on this question that anti-semitism is criminally punishable. He was not an anti-semite. But life is such a paradox that all his opponents were Jews. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky… what could he do if all his enemies were Jews?
Then he was very scrupulous and careful by nature on political and nationality matters.
THUS SPAKE KAGANOVICH by Feliks Chuyev, 1992

Both Dovator and Kreizer excelled as Soviet military commanders and are applauded in the memoirs of Stalin’s most famous marshals. Both were among the highest Jewish officers in Stalin’s armies….
Colonel-General Dragunsky, who was wounded four times during the war and achieved fame as a tank commander, told me that during the war more than a hundred generals of Jewish ancestry served in the Red Army. This figure is also mentioned in an official booklet, Jews in the USSR–Figures, Facts, Comment, published in Moscow in 1982. The existence of these generals complicates the conventional impression of Stalin as anti-Semite. A look at Red Army rosters shows that many soldiers who were members of minorities, including Jews, Georgians and Armenians, were able to climb to the top of the ladder of command.
Axell, Albert. Stalin’s War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders. London, Arms and Armour Press. 1997, p. 115

On the subject of anti-Semitism, the three generals had almost identical views. They hadn’t encountered bigotry in the military; all the men they mixed with in the Army were impervious to prejudice. Dragunsky said that after the Berlin operation was completed in mid-1945 only a handful of military persons were awarded the country’s highest decoration–the Gold Star Hero Medal. ‘I, a Jew, was one of those few. Stalin himself approved the order, knowing I was a Jew.” According to Dragunsky, political indoctrination in the Army had weeded out bigotry.
Axell, Albert. Stalin’s War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders. London, Arms and Armour Press. 1997, p. 117

…some of the best-known Soviet war correspondents were Jews, such as Ehrenburg and Grossman, both of whom wrote highly acclaimed novels. Meanwhile, there was the presence of over 100 Russian Jews who attained the rank of general in Stalin’s army.
Axell, Albert. Stalin’s War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders. London, Arms and Armour Press. 1997, p. 118

SET UP TERRITORY FOR THE JEWS

Small industries were already starting in the Jewish autonomous territory.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 94

The region’s [Birobidjan] chief destiny is to become an industrial district producing consumer goods for the whole Soviet far east, a task which especially fits the capacities of the great belt of Jews that live on the Soviet Union’s western borders. (Since Hitler’s invasion, many Jewish refugees have gone to Birobidjan.)
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 95

The Union knew another way [to treat the Jews]. It has assimilated the greater part of its 5 million Jews, and it has placed at the disposal of the remainder a vast autonomous territory [District of Biro-bijan] and the means for its colonization, thereby creating for itself several millions of active and intelligence citizens, fanatically devoted to the regime.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 82

And now today in the Biro-Bidjan territory one sees a proper town with schools, hospitals, government buildings, and a theater, and one can travel there from Moscow in the through coach of an express. Although the Plan provides for the immigration of more than 100,000 Jews over the next three years, the authorities have to maintain strict supervision, so numerous are those willing to immigrate.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 86

PROTECTING JEWS

Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were also shipped into the interior of the USSR in what seems to have been a rough and inefficient manner, causing many complaints to go abroad. Theirs was a somewhat different case. They were people without homes or jobs in the new territories. They had fled thither to escape from Hitler and were clogging the housing facilities of cities and towns along the Soviet border. They were given about nine months to find jobs; failing this, at a moment when the Nazi menace was growing, they were deported to other areas where jobs were available. When Hitler’s forces later marched into Lvov and all the surrounding territories, basic deportees may have been glad that they had been shipped away.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 170

… Jews were given priority in evacuation from areas about to be overrun by the Nazi invaders. Virtually all Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust (250,000) survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union and being evacuated East. In the immediate post-World War II period, Yiddish culture thrived in the USSR. The Jewish State Theatre continued to prosper in Moscow; a tri-weekly paper, Aynikayt, was published, also in Moscow; between 1946 and 1948 110 books were published in Yiddish. The Soviet Union was the first country to accord diplomatic recognition to Israel.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 89

GOOD JOB UNITING MANY NATIONALITIES

The greatness of this achievement in human association can hardly be exaggerated. To bring into being a multinational State uniting races which for centuries had been at each other’s throats, inflicting pogroms and enslaving each other; races which were largely illiterate, steeped in superstition, and engulfed in abysmal ignorance, was daring in the extreme. Every nation became free to speak it’s own language, have its own schools, form its own government, and exercise its own clearly-defined right to federate or withdraw from the federation…. The boundaries of the republics and other autonomous regions are but the demarcation lines of authority in essentially national matters….. And as class oppression vanishes, national oppression vanishes also. Every nation has the “right” to separate itself from the Union, but none is likely to wish to exercise that “right” when it’s economic and social existence and national freedom are tightly bound up with union.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 147

Every nationality in the union was allowed full linguistic autonomy and what might have seemed a dangerously lavish degree of cultural and political autonomy. Thus the Jews, who had remained alien expatriates under Tsardom, received a small autonomous area with the promise of an independent Republic if and when the number of the population concentrated at any one point should justify the augmented status.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 215

For in practice 2 rules are followed in regard to the Soviet national system. First, the power is progressively restricted to “proletarian elements” of the population–the workers and poor peasants, whether industrialized or not. Second, 95 percent of the political leaders are communists, and what is more, it is an almost invariable rule that the national Communist Party secretaries and their most important district subordinates are either Russians or members of a different nationality from the people around them.
It must be admitted also that the Bolsheviks adhere with remarkable steadiness to their creed of communist equality irrespective of race or color, which assures the members of former “subject” people’s opportunities to rise to the highest central positions and removes any feeling of racial inferiority.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 215

Stalin’s thesis began by demonstrating the already proven fact that the misrule of the Czars and their treatment of the subject peoples as inferior beings, had been one of the main factors in the rapid disintegration of the old Empire. “If we fall into this error of Great Russian superiority, we shall suffer a similar fate,” insisted Stalin, “but if we go to the other extremes advocated by the Mensheviks and certain European Socialist parties, and divide the new State into a number of separate entities on an ethnological basis only, we shall weaken ourselves vis-a-vis the capitalist states of Europe and eventually be defeated piecemeal in a future war.” Between these twin dangers Stalin steered the Soviet ship on a middle course.
In his suggested plan the right of secession from the Soviet republic was granted to each one of the Constituent States should its people prefer to rule themselves rather than live under the aegis of the Bolshevik party. While it remained part of the USSR, each nation was to have its own elected assembly, which would exercise complete authority in the local concerns of the population; only in decisions as to foreign policy were the Assemblies subordinate to the Central Authority. No attempt was made to Russianize the peoples of the different nations, cultural traditions were to be perpetuated in the new schools, already spreading into the most backward provinces.
By these means Stalin confidently maintained that the centuries-old antipathy between the subject peoples and their Russian oppressors could eventually be destroyed.
The wisdom of this fundamental contribution to the creation of the USSR has now been proved to the hilt. Whereas in the half-century before October, 1917, national uprisings against the Central Government had occurred with unfailing regularity, under Bolshevik rule not one widespread effort has been made by any one of the peoples to escape from the Federation of Soviet Republics. This is in itself a great achievement and will in the future be recognized as one of Stalin’s most far-reaching contributions to world progress, as each succeeding year piles proof on proof of the sound foundation upon which the Soviet State has been constructed.
Without Stalin’s foresight, Japan would unquestionably have established a puppet kingdom in Eastern Russia at the same time as she annexed Manchukuo; but for the solidarity of the Stalin constitution Hitler might have found support among the Ukrainian people such as he found among the rabid nationalist minorities which brought Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and France under a foreign domination. Perhaps even these misbegotten offspring of the Versailles agreement would have achieved a lasting stability, if they had originated in the same free choice which created the Soviet state.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 56

This federation at first was loosely organized. Regional autonomy expressed itself in a variety of flexible forms. Some of these local governments retained their own foreign offices; others issued their own money. Each nationality received the amount of freedom which its workers and peasants demanded. The Communists relied on the pressure of mutual economic interests to bring and hold these peoples together, once capitalist exploitation, the source of their bitterness, was removed.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 80

In the West it is not realized that after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Ukraine received a certain autonomy within the Soviet Union that went further than any sovereignty it had ever enjoyed under Austrian, Polish, or Tsarist rule. Unlike those in other republics, Ukrainian Communist rulers were always regarded in Moscow as influential junior partners, and cooperation with the enormous republic was considered crucial to the stability of the entire state. That is why the Ukraine retained all the attributes of an independent state: education in the native language, traditional arts and literature, its own Politburo (which was enjoyed by no other republic), its own membership in the United Nations, all of which were unthinkable under other dominations.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 259

But a Georgian is a Georgian. A Ukrainian is a Ukrainian. They are no more Russians than you or I are.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 89

This dogma of racial liberation, this unfettering, combining with that of social liberation, with the slogans of peace, land, and the control of production by labor, and welding together national aspirations and Socialism, had the effect of giving considerable impetus to the preparations for the October Revolution. The attitude taken up by the Bolsheviks with regard to the problems of nationalities brought them the sympathy of everyone, without bringing about the national secessions that some people expected. And there, once again, far-seeing wisdom, in its intrepid thoroughness, completely triumphed. “If Kolchak and Denikin were beaten,” wrote Stalin, “it is because we have had the sympathy of oppressed nations.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 93

Soviet Russia is performing an experiment without parallel anywhere in the world in organizing the co-existence of a number of nations and tribes within a single proletarian state on a basis of mutual confidence and voluntary and fraternal goodwill. Three years of Revolution show that this experiment has every chance of success.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 204

Perhaps Stalin and the rest of us exaggerate the degree to which he succeeded in taming the national minorities with his compromise, but he seems to a gotten what he wanted, and so have his successors. So far [1965], there has been no Yugoslavia, Poland, or Hungary within the USSR. Stalin certainly believed that the creation of the new Soviet brotherhood and supra-national patriotism in a giant industrial state was better than the murderous communal strife of Tsarist days, or the establishment of dozens of squabbling, economically impotent, little new countries. And the strength of the national minorities, nearly half the population of the USSR, had been harnessed, without crippling concessions to any nationalism, to his real purpose–the industrial and military drive for power.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 233

Stalin’s own contributions to the whole discussion [of keeping the nationalities together] have never been made public and still remain inaccessible in a secret Stalin fond in the Presidential Archive. Particularly after 1991 there has apparently been a reluctance to reveal how well Stalin understood the potential danger of disintegration, given certain constitutional preconditions. He was less optimistic than others about the spread of revolution in the West, believing on the contrary that there was a need to make preparations in order to be in a position to repel aggression.
Medvedev, Roy & Zhores. The Unknown Stalin. NY, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 267

Every nationality in the union was allowed full linguistic autonomy and what might have seemed a dangerously lavish degree of cultural and political autonomy. Thus, the Jews, who had remained alien expatriates under Czardom, received a small autonomous area with the promise of an independent republic if and when the number of the population concentrated at any one point should justify the augmented status.
At first sight such an arrangement might seem to foster a spirit of petty nationalist and racial antagonism and universal disintegration–that is the exact opposite of what the Bolsheviki are trying to achieve. In a heterogeneous capitalist State–the British Empire, for instance–liberty given minor nationalities must have had a centrifugal effect, but in the USSR the Communist party acts as a cement to bind the whole mass together and permit the facile exercise of central control.
…The strictness of the party discipline does the rest, and, although there have been cases of regional friction and sporadic difficulty, the system on the whole seems to work more smoothly than any organization of a heterogeneous State yet devised by man.
…It must be admitted also that the Bolsheviki adhere with remarkable steadiness to their creed of Communist equality irrespective of race or color, which assures the members of former “subject” peoples opportunities to rise to the highest central positions and removes any feeling of racial inferiority.
Stalin is a Georgian, Trotsky a Jew, Rudzutak a Lett, Dzershinsky was a Pole. These men offer salient examples for Communists of every nationality in the USSR. It is thus clear that the Soviet federal system, while reinforcing nationalism, did not sacrifice cohesion and centralized direction.
Duranty, Walter. “Stalinism Solving Minorities Problem” New York Times, June 26, 1931.

RIGHT OF SECESSION IS UNQUALIFIED

This right of secession is unqualified in the 1936 Constitution, whereas its exercise was subject to approval by all the Republics under the 1924 Charter. The right to secede has never been formally granted in any other true federation. The assertion of such a right in United States precipitated the Civil War.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 310

It was Stalin who, in April 1917, reported on the national question at the Conference of the Bolshevik Party…. Stalin proposed the adoption of the conception recommended during the Tsarist regime. The theory was accepted, not without a struggle; a fairly powerful opposition came from Pyatakov, and a certain number of delegates, against the clause establishing the right of nations to independence, even to the length of separation; the possible consequences of this clause frightened them.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 92

STALIN FIRMLY OPPOSED SECESSION BY NATIONALITIES

The Georgian Mensheviks were in favor of the secession of Georgia from Russia. Stalin was naturally in favor of the autonomy of the Caucasian peoples in language and administration, but he was a fanatical opponent of the breaking up of the Russian Empire, and consequently of the secession of Georgia.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 28

What is certain is that Stalin was instinctively opposed to any splitting of Russia into its national components.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 54

Stalin, needless to say, was entirely in agreement with Lenin that these populations [the minority peoples] should only be granted their apparent national independence if they accepted the Soviet regime, the regime of the dictatorship of proletariat.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 59

Comrade Stalin combated the federalist tendencies of the bourgeois nationalists, which the Mensheviks shared. He argued that the victory of the proletariat demanded the unity of all workers, irrespective of nationality, and that national partitions must be broken down and the Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish and other proletarians closely amalgamated as an essential condition for the victory of the proletariat all over Russia.
Yaroslavsky, Emelian. Landmarks in the Life of Stalin. Moscow: FLPH, 1940, p. 40

LENIN FIRMLY OPPOSED NATIONALISM

Lenin was as far as could be from being a nationalist. It is quite clear that at that time he regarded any national feeling as a narrowness, a sort of superstition, almost as morbid…. It may be that he also felt that it would be inexpedient for him as a Russian, a member of the dominant nation, in whose name the other peoples were oppressed, to carry out this work himself. Stalin, on the other hand, was not a Russian but a member of a people subjugated by the Russians. Both from the political and the propagandist point of view it would be much more effective if he dealt with this subject. He seemed, indeed, to be the very man for the job…. With his knowledge and experience, Stalin was obviously the very man that was wanted. He had had years of experience through his political activity and his agitation among the motley nationalities of the Caucasian towns, and he must have been very successful in mastering the nationalities problem; for the Bolshevik organizations composed of the various nationalities had chosen him again and again as their delegate at various congresses and conferences.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 29

But Lenin himself, with his personal revulsion against any shade of nationalism….
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 30

To him [Lenin] nationalism, Russian nationalism included, was just an obsession, as senseless as any other superstition, and, after all, that is [as] intelligible.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 56

STALIN CHOSEN BY LENIN TO HEAD NATIONALITIES ISSUE

The first part of the work is undeniably of permanent value. It was concerned with finding a universally valid definition of the concept Nationality. That problem Stalin solved brilliantly.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 30

This first considerable work of Stalin’s bears all the marks of his character. The first part shows already in the still young Stalin an extraordinary exactitude of thought. His analysis of his subject is exemplary, the logic of the steps in his argument is faultless, and his formulations are models of precision.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 36

A People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, that is to say a ministry, was set up within the government, to deal with the questions of national minorities. Stalin was regarded from the first as the Party’s expert on this subject, and became the Commissar.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 48

In Cracow in 1912 Stalin unquestionably made a very good impression on Lenin…. Lenin’s regular visitors in exile, whether at Cracow or Zurich, were almost all intellectuals. Stalin, when he met him, shoemaker’s son and pupil of a seminary (which to Lenin meant a man virtually without education), was naturally regarded by Lenin, consciously or unconsciously, as a representative man of the masses. But Stalin was already well-read and energetically educating himself, and in conversation with him Lenin found that though he was a man of the lower class Stalin was able to discuss any political matter with him on equal terms. Indeed, there was one subject on which this young man could give information to the party leader, for all the latter’s wide knowledge and experience. Stalin could not only tell him much that was of great interest about the real working-class environment, but, as a representative of a national minority, could tell him about the psychology of those minorities, about which Lenin knew next to nothing. Lenin had never lived in any part of Russia inhabited by a non-Russian population. Stalin was the first representative he had met of the masses of a non-Russian people under Russian rule, and he had much that was new and impressive to tell him. Thus it is not surprising that in a letter to Maxim Gorky Lenin described Stalin as a ‘remarkable Georgian’.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 102-103

…when they took power in 1917, they made Stalin, Commissar of Nationalities, in charge of the problems of non-Russian peoples in the new state.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 15

Stalin was an expert on nationalities and was therefore the head of this department for a period of six years under Lenin; he was thus dealing with one of the two main problems of the revolution…. The country which we today call the USSR…gives every one of its constituent peoples as much liberty in regard to its language as Switzerland gives to each of its 22 little cantons. In this respect Russia is actually modeled on Switzerland.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 71

Yenukidze states, “…Stalin wrote a great deal on the national question. On this question, in particular, he is undoubtedly after Lenin the most competent theoretician in our party.
Life of Stalin, A Symposium. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1930, p. 94

If a Leninist nationalities policy is not pursued now, republics might secede from us. We have colossal experience in this regard…. It was none other than Lenin who made the appointment to one of the most important posts of the time, People’s Commissar of Nationalities. He appointed Stalin to head up this ministry!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 194

On most matters, though, he [Stalin] agreed with Lenin; and Lenin for his own part badly needed Dzhughashvili’s contributions on the national question. Whereas the Mensheviks had several theorists who wrote about the nationalities in the Empire, the Bolsheviks had only Dzhughashvili. No wonder Lenin warmed to him.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 93

STALIN WARRED AGAINST ISLAM FORCING WOMEN TO WEAR VEILS [BURQA]

There came also a sharp conflict with Islam; for Stalin now attempted to make an end of the old forms of existence even in that fanatically Mohammedan region. Particularly sanguinary, and accompanied by many murders, was the campaign for the equality of rights of women. Women who allowed themselves to be persuaded by the communist agitators to throw away the veil were murdered almost without exception by their fellow villagers.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 177

STALIN UNITED A LARGER AREA THAN THE CZARS EVER CREATED

In the matter of foreign relations it is obvious that Stalin will leave behind him a great and splendid realm. If we consider him simply as a Russian statesman, and apply the old historical measure of values to his life’s work, he is actually, in the nationalist sense, the greatest Russian statesman in all history. He is not only won back for Russia all that the Russian Tsars were compelled to cede at the beginning of this century, but has secured almost all the territories claimed by the Tsars since Catherine The Great. All that was ceded to Japan by the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, after the defeat in the Russian-Japanese war, was Russian again, with a little added. The Karelian Isthmus, conquered by Peter the Great but ceded to Finland at the beginning of the last century, has been recovered by Stalin. The Baltic provinces, and Bessarabia, lost in 1918–Volhynia and western White Russia, Lithuania and Vilna–in a word, the 1914 frontier, has been won back and extended. Of the old Russia, only two small districts on the Russo-Turkish frontier, Kars and Ardahan, ceded to the Turks in 1919, are missing. The Russian revolution voluntarily renounced Congress Poland. It is Russian once more; and Eastern Galicia, the northern Bukovina, and Carpatho-Ukraine, the regions for which Russia fought in 1914-17, regions which had never been under Russian rule, are now Russian.
The dream of all the Tsars has been attained, all the ‘Five Russias’ are united under a single sceptre: Great Russia, Little Russia (Ukraina), White Russia, Red Russia ( Galicia), and sub-Carpathian Russia. For the first time in history, all the eastern Slavs are united in a single realm. It was the ambition of all the rulers of Russia, attained by none –until now, by Stalin.
Nor is that all. Since the 18th-century Russia had regarded herself as the protector of all the Slavs. Panslavism provided the modern ideology for that claim. Now the inclusion of all Slav States under Russian leadership and guidance has been achieved. During the war Stalin resuscitated Panslavism as a political instrument, and actually created organs for that policy, such as the Committee of the Slav Peoples, in Moscow, and the Pan-Slav Congresses.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 391-92

In the Far East, too, Stalin has fulfilled the political ambition of the Tsars. The small region of Tannu Tuva, quietly striven for by Russian policy during the last 20 years of the Tsardom, with no apparent prospect of wresting it from Chinese sovereignty, is today Russian territory. The Tsars also laid claim to Mongolia; Stalin has made it a vassal State….
While Russia’s 1914 frontier has not been reached in the Middle East, and the old Russian dream of dominance of the Dardanelles has still not been fulfilled, the Stalinist foreign policy has at least attained more than even the Treaty of San Stefano of 1877, which was subsequently revised to Russia’s disadvantage at the Congress of Berlin. Russia is now, in any case, at the gates of Byzantium.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 393

STALIN DOES AN EXCELLENT JOB WITH THE NATIONALITIES DEPT.

… no such comprehension prevailed in Russia, where at least 80 adults out of every hundred could neither read nor write, living and dying according to the customs and practices of their ancestors, customs which had scarcely altered since the Middle Ages.
This was the situation which Stalin faced in 1921, with the additional handicap of having no assistants of outstanding ability, no officials except those trained in the tradition of the Romanovs, for whom the subject peoples had been merely a source of revenue and cannon fodder. There was no spectacular fanfare, no trumpetings and self-advertisement about the way Stalin set about his task. Trotsky had already discovered an easy way to recruit staffs by the simple expedient of offering jobs to the displaced officials of the old regime, who were at least able to muddle through without making too obvious errors. How valuable these “hired Bolsheviks” really were was later revealed, for when Trotsky’s prestige fell and his influence grew correspondingly weaker, his assistants and confidants had no compunction in transferring their allegiance to whoever could guarantee their salaries.
This was not Stalin’s way; by careful hand-picking the Commissariat for Nationalities slowly acquired a staff whose qualities and technical achievements made their department justly famous as the most efficient of the multitude of bureaus and subcommittees which were generated by the early years of reconstruction.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 55

We find Stalin in the years before the World War developing the exact definition of “nation” as a “historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 77

No matter what has been said about the Soviet Union, it has never exploited the small national groups within its boundaries. Where, under the Tsar, a thousand hates and animosities were kept at fever pitch, equality has brought harmony and eager co-operation. Today there is no country which has less racial discrimination than the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin devised and carried out the policy which not only provides a humane and admirable example for the world, but which also has made the Soviet Union internally strong.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 72

In a number of republics, rather large groups of enemies of the Soviet state were revealed…. No one mastered the national question, no one organized our national republics more sagaciously than Stalin. The formation of the Central Asian Republics was entirely his doing, a Stalinist cause! He skillfully mastered the matter of borders and the very discovery of entire nations…. I regarded and still regard him as having accomplished colossal and difficult tasks that were beyond every one of us in the party at that time.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 196

About 10 years ago, in very solemn circumstances, Stalin observed that although the main basis of the Soviet Republic was the alliance of the workers and the peasants, the subsidiary basis of the Republic was the alliance of all the different nationalities existing in Russia….
And today he is looked upon as the man who understands it most thoroughly in the whole Union.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 88

“The Declaration of the Peoples of Russia” was one of the first legislative Acts of the Soviet Government. Conceived and drawn up by Stalin, it enacted:
The equality and sovereignty of all the peoples of Russia. The right to do what they wished with themselves, even to the extent of separation and the formation of independent States. The suppression of all national (Russian) and religious (Greek Orthodox) restrictions and privileges. The free development of national minorities and of racial groups finding themselves in the territory of the former Russian Empire.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 94

But the men of October, who succeeded in bringing about their Revolution in the midst of an extremely diversified juxtaposition of races and of countries–and one into which, moreover, long traditions of oppression had in many cases inculcated an exaggerated idea of nationalism, these men, for the first time in history, put forward a reasonable and serious solution of this age-old antagonism all over the planet, a logical formula which combined the two irreducible essentials, national individuality and practical federation, and placed patriotism not against but in Socialism.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 96

Stalin was not a man of conventional learning; he was much more than that; he was a man who thought deeply, read understandingly and listened to wisdom, no matter whence it came. He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance; nor did he let attack drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct. As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality.
Statement by W.E.B DuBois regarding COMRADE STALIN on March 16, 1953

…under Stalin’s “nationalities policy” the Uzbeks, Tadjiks, Bashkirs, Kazahks and the rest became equal partners of the Russians and Ukrainians. Better still, the Soviet regime took special pride in improving the lot of these backward people, and making them feel genuinely grateful to the Russians: and it is, of course, perfectly true that if, under the Tsarist regime, as much wealth as possible was pumped out of the Russian “colonies” of Central Asia, the Soviets pumped wealth and money into them. If there was, at times, resistance, even violent resistance, against the Soviets in Central Asia, it was not for economic reasons, but almost exclusively for religious reasons, the Soviets’ atheism being wholly unacceptable to certain traditional Moslem communities.
Werth, Alexander. Russia: The Post-War Years. New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1971, p. 40

He [Stalin] maintained that if ever the message of Marxism was to be accepted in the borderlands of the former Russian empire, it had to be conveyed in languages which were comprehensible and congenial to the recipients. The idea that Stalin was a “Great Russian chauvinist” in the 1920s is nonsense. More than any other Bolshevik leader, including Lenin, he fought for the principle that each people in the Soviet state should have scope for national and ethnic self-expression.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 202

During his 10 months sojourn abroad Stalin wrote a brief but very trenchant piece of research entitled “Marxism and the National Problem.”
Trotsky, Leon, Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 154

PERCENTAGE OF JEWS AS REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS IS HIGHER THAN OTHER GROUPS

That the Jews supplied both leaders and rank-and-file members of the revolutionary movement in greater proportion than the Russians or any of the other races which inhabited the Tsarist Empire is undeniable and quite natural, in view of the systematic and merciless policy of anti-Semitic repression and discrimination which the Tsarist Government applied,….
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 225

…the fact that the number of Jews in the upper and middle ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy is considerably in excess of their proportion in the population….
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 226

…But the percentage of Jews in the Communist Party is only slightly higher than their percentage in the population. In the Soviet Parliament of 531 members, there were only 20 Jews in 1927.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 75

Lenin knew that Rykov was a right-winger and not very reliable with respect to the party. But he was a good economist, and Lenin had promoted him to the position of chairman of our main economic center,…
Although Rykov was in favor of including the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the government, he had never openly opposed the October Revolution, as Kamenev had. Another consideration was that a Russian be the head of the government. At that time Jews occupied many leading positions, though they made up only a small percentage of the country’s population….
There were many dubious people in the guise of Leninists.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 120

Almost all the Mensheviks were Jews. Even among the Bolsheviks, among the leaders, there were many Jews…. Lenin criticized the main Menshevik theoreticians, and they were Jews without exception.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 121

They say the Jews made the Revolution, not the Russians.
Well, hardly anyone believes that. True, in the first Soviet government and in the Politburo, Jews constituted the majority.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 191

Many of Stalin’s men had Jewish wives: Voroshilov, Andreev, Rykov, Kirov, Kalinin…. There is an explanation. Oppositionist and revolutionary elements formed a higher percentage among Jews than among Russians.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 191

In 1933 the internal passport system was introduced, and Jews were identified as a national group, even though they had no republic to be their homeland. In every major ministry at this time, Jews held top positions.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 288

In his [Ivanov-Skuratov] article “The Question of the Role of Aliens in the Victory of Soviet Power” he writes:
“… In the early 30s the number two man in the party after Stalin was Kaganovich and his fellow tribesmen [i.e., Jews] gathered the most important commissariats into their hands–Litvinov the Foreign Affairs Commissariat, Yagoda the NKVD, Yakovlev the Commissariat of Agriculture; Gamarnik, and after him Mekhlis, the Political Directorate of the Red Army.”
… It is common knowledge of course that not only the Bolshevik party but all the Russian revolutionary parties–including the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists, and Anarcho-Communists–had a disproportionately large number of Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians, Finns, Poles, and other “aliens” (i.e. non-Russians) in their membership.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 557

[Said in 1926] I couldn’t help smiling at the threat; Soltz, the head of the Central Control Commission, is the son of the Rabbi of Vilna.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 27
Young Jews furnished a large number of the cadres in revolutionary parties and organizations. Jews had always played an important role in the leadership of these parties. The Bolshevik party was no exception to this rule, and almost half its Central Committee were Jews.
Bazhanov, Boris. Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, c1990, p. 143

Finally, Mekhlis, a native of Odessa and, although a Jew, a favorite of the supreme leader’s. Mekhlis was, at various times, editor-in-chief of Pravda, the people’s commissar of state control, and the head of the political administration of the Red Army, with a rank of colonel general.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 176

Jewish intellectuals and workers were disproportionately active in the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. In 1922, Jews represented 5.2 percent of Communist Party membership (about five times their percentage of the population). From the late 1920s through to World War II the proportion of Jews in the party was about 4.3%.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 88

Jews have the highest representation in the Communist Party of any other Soviet nationality. In 1965, 80 out of every 1000 Jews belonged to the party, compared to the Soviet average of 51 per 1000. In 1969, Jews made up 1.5% of the Party (an over-representation factor of 1.67)…. Between 1920 and 1940 the percentage of Jews in the Party fluctuated around 4.5% to 5.0%.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 94

Western attempts to present the Soviet Union as a virulently anti-Semitic society cannot be substantiated. Historically, the Jewish people in the USSR have fared, and continue to fare, very well in almost: all respects. Jews are over-represented in the highest paying occupations, in the skilled professions, in the institutions of higher education and in all except the top levels in the Communist Party;…
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 99

An extensive examination of the position of the Jews in the Soviet Union shows that the Western attempt to color the Soviet Union as fundamentally anti-semitic is baseless. In fact, Soviet Jews were found to be heavily over-represented in both professional life and the Communist Party. No evidence of official anti-Semitism and little evidence of popular anti-Semitism was found.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 296

At the all-union level there were a few Jewish survivors, notably, Kaganovich, his brother M. M. Kaganovich as commissar of the defense industry, Mekhlis as chief editor of Pravda, and Litvinov as foreign commissar.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 491

Yet nationality always mattered in Soviet politics, however internationalist the Party claimed to be. There were a high proportion of Jews, along with Georgians, Poles, and Letts, in the Party because these were among the persecuted minorities of Tsarist Russia. In 1937, 5.7% of the Party were Jews yet they formed a majority in the government.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 305

The Jewish poet Fefer, executed in 1952 with his colleagues from the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, said before his death, “It seemed to me that only Stalin could correct the historical injustice committed by the Roman kings…. I have nothing against the Soviet system. I am the son of a poor schoolteacher. Soviet power made a human being out of me and a fairly well-known poet as well.”…
Many Jews felt this way, which helps explain why so many could be found in the Soviet security organs and throughout the governmental bureaucracy. Jews had advanced with extraordinary speed from second-class citizens in Tsarist Russia to the plenipotentiaries of a great world power: Trotsky, Litvinov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Yagoda, Kaganovich, and Lozovsky (executed as a member of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee in 1952) were only a few of the Jews who rose through the system to the very top and exercised more real power in the Soviet Union than Jews had for nearly two millennia anywhere else in the world. Many others can be found in this book: Shvartsman, Broverman, Palkin, Raikhman, Sverdlov, Sheinin, Maklyarsky, Ehrenburg, Zhemchuzhina.
Naumov and Brent. Stalin’s Last Crime. New York: HarperCollins, c2003, p. 331

A striking feature of Mr. Wilton’s examination of the tumultuous 1917-1919 period in Russia is his frank treatment of the critically important Jewish role in establishing the Bolshevik regime.
The following lists of persons in the Bolshevik Party and Soviet administration during this period, which Wilton compiled on the basis of official reports and original documents, underscore the crucial Jewish role in these bodies. These lists first appeared in the rare French edition of Wilton’s book, published in Paris in 1921 under the title Les Derniers Jours des Romanoffs. They did not appear in either the American or British editions of The Last Days of the Romanovs published in1920. [R. Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1993)]
“I have done all in my power to act as an impartial chronicler,” Wilton wrote in his foreword to Les Derniers Jours des Romanoffs. “In order not to leave myself open to any accusation of prejudice, I am giving the list of the members of the [Bolshevik Party’ s] Central Committee, of the Extraordinary Commission [Cheka or secret police], and of the Council of Commissars functioning at the time of the assassination of the Imperial family.
“The 62 members of the [Central] Committee were composed of five Russians, one Ukrainian, six Letts [Latvians], two Germans, one Czech, two Armenians, three Georgians, one Karaim [Karaite] (a Jewish sect), and 41 Jews.
“The Extraordinary Commission [Cheka or Vecheka] of Moscow was composed of 36 members, including one German, one Pole, one Armenian, two Russians, eight Latvians, and 23 Jews.
“The Council of the People’s Commissars [the Soviet government] numbered two Armenians, three Russians, and 17 Jews.
“According to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of 556 important functionaries of the Bolshevik state, including the above-mentioned, in 1918-1919 there were: 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles, three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews.”

“The other Russian Socialist parties are similar in composition,” Wilton went on. “Their Central Committees are made up as follows:”
Mensheviks (Social Democrats): Eleven members, all of whom are Jewish.
Communists of the People: Six members, of whom five are Jews and one is a Russian.
Social Revolutionaries (Right Wing): Fifteen members, of whom 13 are Jews and two are Russians (Kerenski, who may be of Jewish origin, and Tchaikovski).
Social Revolutionaries (Left Wing): Twelve members, of whom ten are Jews and two are Russians.
Committee of the Anarchists of Moscow: Five members, of whom four are Jews and one is a Russian.
Polish Communist Party: Twelve members, all of whom are Jews, including Sobelson (Radek), Krokhenal (Zagonski), and Schwartz (Goltz).

THE REVOLUTION SAVED THE JEWS AND GAVE THEM RIGHTS

Free access to the state service and to the universities and higher schools, absolute elimination of restrictions — on the right of movement and residence and other humiliating marks of pre-revolutionary racial discrimination, protection against mob violence–these are the substantial gains which the Russian Jews owe to the Revolution.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston : Little, Brown, 1930, p. 226

SURVIVAL OF CAPITALISM IN MEN’S MINDS PRODUCT OF NATIONALISM

The survivals of capitalism in the minds of men, Stalin pointed out, were much more tenacious in the sphere of the national question than in any other.
Alexandrov, G. F. Joseph Stalin; a Short Biography. Moscow: FLPH, 1947, p. 123

In the face of a world in which peace between nations is literally an absurd formula, each one of the 75 or so contemporary nations having but one aim (which some of them do and some do not admit), namely, to live to the detriment of one another….
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 98

LENIN WANTS JEWS ON COMMISSIONS TO ASSURE PROGRESS

Stalin recounted that he went to Lenin and said, “I’m setting up a commission of inquiry. I am appointing so and so to it.” Lenin said the him, “Not a single Jew? No, nothing will come of it!”
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 192

FEDERATION OF SOVIET NATIONS IS BETTER FOR ALL THAN INDEPENDENCE

Because, for all weak or backward nations (representing the majority of the Russian group) the system is amazingly more advantageous and intelligent, from whatever point of view one looks at it, than the system of simple and pure independence. Federated nations work towards a common end and are scientifically at peace with one another. As foreigners, however, instead of co-operation there is competition, which changes, by force of circumstances, into antagonism and enmity –with all the burdens, all the slaveries, all the perils and all the smotherings of conscience which go with it. The Soviet nations are at once small and great. If they were to leave the Union they would become small without any compensating factor.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 99

STALIN FOUGHT GREAT RUSSIAN CHAUVINISM OVER OTHER NATIONALITIES

However, when the Soviets first came into power, there was a somewhat special “Asiatic” conception of the problem of nationalities. It was manifested by strong “colonializing tendencies,” that is to say the subjection of the distant country, and a preponderance of the Russian element in its administration and in the development of its Soviet assimilation. Russian workers and Russian propagandists went into Asia, directed everything and settled everything themselves, the native population being “neglected by socialism,” according to Stalin’s own expression.
This did not agree with one of the principles of Leninist Marxism, which was a particularly dear one to Stalin, namely the untrammelled, direct and conscious participation of all in the common work. So Stalin fought bitterly against these eruptions of Muscovite exclusivism mingled with socialist organization, and against putting into practice methods which were very nearly “protectorate” or colonial methods in dealing with Soviet natives, as being a system which was erroneous in theory and foolish in practice.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 104

Some people depict the struggle of the borderland “governments” as a struggle for national liberation and against the “soulless centralism” of the Soviet government. This, however, is wrong. No government in the world ever granted such extensive decentralization, no government in the world ever afforded its peoples such plenary national freedom as does the Soviet government of Russia. The struggle of the borderland “governments” was and remains a struggle of the bourgeois counter-revolution against socialism. The national flag is tacked on to the cause only to deceive the masses, only as a popular flag which conveniently covers up the counter-revolutionary designs of the national bourgeoisie.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 187

Culture in general attracted his occasional,and unpredictable,interventions. Stalin’s aide Mekhlis rang up Pravda cartoonist Yefimov in 1937 and told him to come immediately to the Kremlin. Suspecting the worst, Yefimov feigned influenza. But “he’–Stalin–was insisting; Yefimov could postpone the visit at most by a day. In fact Stalin simply wished to say that he thought Yefimov should cease drawing Japanese figures with protruding teeth. “Definitely,’ replied the cartoonist. “There won’t be any more teeth.’
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 305

NOTHING CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED EXCEPT THROUGH INTERNATIONALISM

Events also show–and one must not tire of proclaiming these truths–that one must embrace Internationalism in a practical way before one can emerge from chaos, because history, whether we want it to or not, speaks to us internationally. They show that nothing can be accomplished, even within frontiers, without disregarding frontiers.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 273

STALIN’S NATIONALITIES PROGRAM HAS DEGREES OF INDEPENDENCE AND AUTONOMY

Soviet autonomy is not a rigid thing fixed once and for all time; it permits of the most varied forms and degrees of development. It passes from narrow administrative autonomy (the Volga Germans, the Chuvashes and the Karelians) to a wider, political autonomy (the Bashkirs, the Volga Tatars and the Kirghiz); from wide political autonomy to a still wider form of autonomy (the Ukraine and Turkestan); and finally from the Ukrainian type of autonomy to the supreme form of autonomy –contractual relations (Azerbaijan). This elasticity of Soviet autonomy constitutes one of its prime merits, for this elasticity makes it possible to embrace all the various types of border regions in Russia, which vary greatly in their levels of cultural and economic development.

Soviet autonomy is the most real and concrete way of uniting the border regions to Central Russia. Nobody will deny that the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkestan, the Kirghiz Republic, the Bashkir Republic, the Tatar Republic, and other border regions, since they are striving for the cultural and material prosperity of their masses, must have their native schools, courts, administration and government bodies recruited principally from among the native people. Furthermore, the real Sovietization of these regions, their conversion into Soviet countries closely bound to Central Russia and forming with it one state whole, is inconceivable without the widespread organization of local schools, without the creation of courts, administrative bodies, organs of government, etc., recruited from among people acquainted with the life and language of the population.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 201-202

There was a brighter side, too, to Stalin’s activity. He worked with great vigor and determination on one of the most difficult problems that the revolution had inherited. It will be remembered that in 1918 he called to life the self-governing republic of Bashkirs. In the spring of 1920 an autonomous Soviet republic of the Tartars was founded. In October of the same year Kirghizian self-government followed. After the civil war a Daghestan republic was constituted, comprising a multitude of tribes speaking 36 languages and vernaculars. Karelians, Yakuts, and others went ahead with forming their own administrations. None of these republics was or could be really independent; but all enjoyed a high degree of self-government and internal freedom; and, under the guidance of Stalin’s Commissariat, all tasted some of the benefits of modern civilization. Amid all the material misery of that period, the Commissariat helped to set up thousands of schools in areas where only a few score had existed before. Schemes for the irrigation of arid land and for hydro-electrical development were initiated. Tartar became an official language on a par with Russian. Russians were forbidden to settle in the steps of Kirghizia, now reserved for the colonization of native nomads. Progressive laws freed Asiatic women from patriarchal and tribal tyranny. All this work, of necessity carried out on a modest scale, set a pattern for future endeavors; and even in its modest beginnings there was an elan and an earnest concern for progress that captivated many an opponent of Bolshevism.

In the summer of 1922, soon after Lenin’s first stroke, the Politburo began to discuss a constitutional reform that was to settle the relations between Russia and the outlying republics. Stalin was the chief architect of the reform. Throughout the second half of 1922 he expounded the principles of the new constitution. These were, briefly, his ideas: the federation of Soviet Republics should be replaced by a Union of Republics. The union should consist of four regional entities: Russia, Transcaucasia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia. (It was in connection with this scheme that he pressed the Georgians to join the Transcaucasian federation.) He was opposed to the idea that the union should be formed directly by the constituent republics; and he insisted on the need for intermediate links between the central administration and the individual republican governments. His motive was that central control would be more effective if it were exercised through four main channels than if it were dispersed in a much greater number of direct contacts between Moscow and the local administrations. The Commissariats were to be classed into three categories: (a) Military Affairs, Foreign Policy, Foreign Trade, Transport, and Communication were to be the sole and exclusive responsibility of the Government in Moscow. The governments of the various republics were not to possess any commissariats dealing with those matters. (b) In the second category were the departments of Finance, Economy, Food, Labor, and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. These were not to be subordinate to the central government, though they were to be subject to a measure of co-ordination from Moscow. (c) Home Affairs, Justice, Education, and Agriculture belonged to the third category and were to be administered by the provincial governments in complete independence. Sovereign power was to reside in the All-Union Congress of Soviets and, between the congresses, in the Central Executive Committee. The latter was to be composed of two chambers: the Supreme Council and the Council of Nationalities. All ethnical groups were to be represented by an equal number of delegates in the Council of Nationalities. The Central Executive Committee appointed the Council of People’s Commissars, the Government.

During his first convalescence Lenin was consulted on the scheme and endorsed it. The Politburo once again pressed the Georgians to join the Transcaucasian federation. The Ukrainians demurred at Moscow’s intention to conduct foreign policy on their behalf and refused to wind up their own Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Nominally, however, the scheme left the republics with a very wide measure of self-government. It allowed them to manage independently their home affairs, security, and police, under the circumstances by far the most important department.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 244

Politically the point was to reconstruct the Tzarist empire, that prison of nations, territorially, politically, and administratively, in line with the needs and wishes of the nations themselves.

Trotsky , Leon , Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 155

NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION IS SECONDARY TO PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP

The right of self-determination means that a nation can arrange its life according to its own will. It has the right to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign and all nations are equal.

This, of course, does not mean that Social-Democrats will support every demand of a nation. A nation has a right even to return to the old order of things; but this does not mean that Social-Democrats will subscribe to such a decision if taken by any institution of the said nation. The obligations of Social-Democrats, who defend the interests of the proletariat, and the rights of a nation, which consists of various classes, are two different things.

… It should be born in mind that besides the right of nations to self-determination there is also the right of the working class to consolidate its power, and to this latter right the right of self-determination is subordinate. There are occasions when the right of self-determination conflicts with the other, the higher right–the right of a working class that has assumed power to consolidate its power. In such cases–this must be said bluntly– the right to self-determination cannot and must not serve as an obstacle to the exercise by the working class of its right to dictatorship. The former must give way to the latter.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 278

BOLSHEVIKS SUPPORT NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE UP TO COMPLETE SECESSION

The Bolsheviks advocated the self-determination of nations up to and including their complete governmental separation from Russia as independent nation-states. This did not mean that the Bolsheviks would welcome the separation of the national regions from Russia or help them secede.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 50

Bukharin dissented from Lenin on crucial points of Marxist theory and politics, among others on nationalities. While Lenin advocated their right to self-determination and interpreted that right in the sense that Poles, Ukrainians, Letts, and so on were entitled to secede from the Russian empire and constitute themselves as independent nations, Bukharin disputed that view and saw in it a superfluous concession to Polish, Ukrainian, and other nationalisms. He believed that the revolution would cut across existing national divisions. Bukharin’s argument left no mark on Stalin’s essay, which was consistently Leninist.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 119

JEWISH CULTURE AND YIDDISH ARE FOSTERED IN THE SU

Yiddish, like all national languages, is carefully fostered in the Union. There are Yiddish schools and Yiddish newspapers; there is a Yiddish literature of considerable standing. Congresses are called for the cultivation of the language, and Yiddish theaters enjoy the highest prestige. I saw in the Yiddish State Theatre at Moscow an extraordinarily good performance of King Lear with that great actor Michoels in the title part and Suskins giving a splendid Fool. The sets were fine and original and the whole production excellently staged.

The establishment of the national Jewish state of Biro-Bidjan at first encountered almost insuperable difficulties,…

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 85

With the establishment of the Soviet regime [in the Ukraine] there was no discrimination by ethnic origin whatsoever. On the contrary, the city [ Kiev] had Jewish schools, a theater, a synagogue. A newspaper was published in Yiddish.

Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin’s Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 94

In special places [in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Podol in Kiev] the individual buyer could purchase any item in any quantity, such as a tea set, a carpet, a bicycle, or musical instruments. Weapons were also on sale, both wholesale and retail, including hunting guns, small-caliber rifles, hunting knives, and cartridges. Even though the Civil War had ended only a short time before, no one seemed worried that arms were freely available. Hunting rifles were registered with amateur hunters’ organizations, and as for small-caliber guns, no one paid any attention to them at all. My father gave me such a gun as a present.

Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin’s Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 95

In 1919, a Jewish State Theatre was established in Moscow, and by 1934 a further 18 had been established in other cities. Jewish Theatre, as well as other expressions of Jewish culture, were strongly supported by the Soviet state. In 1932, 653 Yiddish books were published with a total circulation of more than 2.5 million. In 1935, there were Yiddish dailies in Moscow, Kharkov, Minsk, and Birobidzhan; in the Ukraine alone 10 Jewish dailies were in circulation.

Many anti-Soviets in the West, especially Zionists, had argued that the 1948-53 campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Zionism’ was really a manifestation of anti-Semitism (analogous to that of Hitler’s) but a realistic assessment demonstrates that this argument functioned to serve the interests of Western and Israeli Zionists in their long-term battle with Jewish Marxists for hegemony in the Jewish community, as well as to strengthen Western imperialist support for Israel.

Professionally and economically the Jewish people have fared extremely well in the period of Soviet power. They are, for example, far more highly educated than any other nationality in the Soviet Union, and in 1970-71 the ratio of higher education students per 1000 population was 49.2. This is almost twice as high as the next highest group, the Georgians, who had a ratio of 27.1 per 1000. (Russians ranked fourth on this indicator with a ratio of 21.1 per 1000).

Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 91

SOVIET GOVT WORKS TO TURN NOMADS INTO SETTLED PROLETARIANS

I have told in a previous chapter about the liquidation of kulaks. This process had been accompanied by a similar process which the Communists described as de-nomadization. Just as the authorities had labeled several hundred thousand small farmers as kulaks, and taken them off their land and put them at work in industries, mines, and forests under police guard, so they had removed hundreds of thousands of nomads from the steppes and put them at work in mines and factories or tried to induce them to settle down on collective cattle farms. They did this because they held the opinion that nomads are backward and cannot be raised up to the Communist notions of a higher civilization until they are taken away from the steppes and their roving life and changed into proletarians, or wage-earners, either in industries or on state-controlled farms.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 107

The nomad tribes had been heavy sufferers in both the First and Second Bolshevik Revolutions. In the Civil War following 1917, their horses and sheep had been confiscated by one armed force after another; and then in 1921, when the greatest of modern famines swept through Russia, the Kazaks herds and flocks had been further reduced, so that in 1923 the number of domestic animals in Kazakhstan was only about 30 percent of what it had been in 1916.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 184

The nomads were once again among the principal sufferers when the Second Communist Revolution started in 1929. But the nomads were dirty and superstitious, and I can understand how the Communist reformers believed that they were doing them a favor by breaking up their old forms of life and persuading them, even by the use of force if necessary, to adopt a manner of life which was considered more civilized and sensible.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 185

LIKE THE KULAKS SOME NOMADS DESTROYED THEIR HERDS RATHER THAN COLLECTIVIZE

I have told how the liquidation of kulaks resulted in a shortage of food which continued for several years. The process of de-nomadization aggravated the food shortage by causing the destruction of the nomad’s herds. When the Communist “shock troops” began to break up these herds, and put pressure on the nomad owners to pool their animals in so-called collective farms, the latter simply killed their animals. At that time, I do not think the authorities worried about this, because they believed the herds could easily be replaced. They learned better later;…
In such a place as Kazakhstan, where most of the population had existed for generations on the products of the herds, the destruction of animals in the years following 1930 had very serious effects. I have been told that thousands died of starvation; whether that is true or not, I cannot say. But I can testify from my own observation that the former nomad herders were a long time recovering from the effects of this turbulent period, when the Communist authorities organized an assault upon the nomads, and the latter developed a sort of mass hysteria which caused them to destroy their means of livelihood.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 108

The ex-nomads who survived this period were rounded up, as the kulaks had been, and put to work in the mines and in the few industries which had been started at that time in the nomad regions. The well-to-do nomads, such as the “kumiss king” I had visited in Bashkiria, were taken over by the police and exiled to some region remote from their former homes, where they were put to work in forests or mines, or settled on cattle farms. Many of them resisted dispossession; these were adjudged criminals, and sent to jail or shot.
By the time I was assigned to the Ridder mines, a virtual civil war with the nomads had been fought and won. There were still occasional skirmishes with some nomads who stubbornly refused to give up their old forms of life, but for the most part the Kazaks and Kirghizians had admitted defeat and some of them were already more are less enthusiastic supporters of the new order. Such supporters were greatly encouraged by the authorities and liberally rewarded.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 109

These villages had been set on fire during the struggle between the nomads and Communist reformers, and were still burning months later. This drifting smoke offered evidence both of the severity of the struggle, and of the eventual triumph over the old and unprogressive way of life.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 187

SIBERIA IS FINE LAND WITH UNJUST REPUTATION

The worst thing about the Russian exile system, so far as I am concerned, is the bad reputation it has given to Siberia. Before I went to Russia, I had an idea that Siberia was a gloomy sort of place, a land of everlasting cold and darkness. Why did I have this idea? Because most of what I had read about Siberia was connected with the exile system, which has used Siberia as a dumping ground for criminals and political undesirables both before and since the Russian Revolution.
Of course, I should have known better. Books have been written both before and since the revolution to show what a fine place Siberia is. But the connection between Siberia and exiles had stuck in my mind above everything else I read about this part of the world, and I suspect that many other Americans still have the same attitude.
If anyone should ask me what I think is the most hopeful thing about Russia, I should reply at once and without any hesitation: ” Siberia!”
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 144

For myself, I would certainly rate Siberia as far more important than Bolshevism in any estimate of Russia’s future. So long as the Russians hang on to Siberia, they don’t need to worry about what social and political system operates in their country. They can even afford to give up a large part of European Russia, although this includes many extremely valuable and rich regions; retreat back into the Urals and Siberia, and still consider themselves one of the largest, richest, and most promising countries in the world.
I have traveled back and forth and up and down across Siberia dozens of times during the past 10 years, and I will stake my reputation on the claim that Siberia under proper management can be made superior to any other country in Europe or Asia, and could give the United States a run for its money.
I am using the name Siberia here in the old sense, which he still used by most of the Soviet citizens who live there, even if the present authorities have divided up the old territory into several parts with new names. According to this interpretation, Siberia includes that region beginning 100 miles east of the Ural Mountains and extending to the Pacific Coast, as well as the Lake Baikal region and the maritime provinces taken over from China in the middle of the 19th-century. This Siberia extends to the Arctic seas on the north and as far south as the Central Asian republics, so that its southern regions are almost tropical.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 145

When I made my first trip through Siberia, and saw how badly mistaken I had been in my own mind about the nature of the country, I decided I must be unusually dumb. But I have learned since that Americans have been visiting Siberia for a long time, and that each new arrival, not profiting by the written impressions of his predecessors, makes the fresh discovery for himself that Siberia is not an Arctic waste such as he had imagined, but a great country more like the American Middle West and Northwest than any other stretch of the earth’s surface with which I am familiar.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 146

… another American named Bookwalter, a businessman from Springfield, Ohio, heard that the Russians were building a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific Ocean; and as he was a curious-minded sort of fellow, he went off in 1899 to have a look at it….
Bookwalter recorded his impressions in a book which he published himself and circulated privately in 1899.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 147

Bookwalter wrote: “Somehow I had formed the idea that Siberia was, in the main, a mountainous, broken, barren, and and even sterile country, covered with forests–which opinion, I am inclined to think, is somehow generally entertained in the West. Nothing could be farther from the fact. Of all the surprises met with in my somewhat extensive travels Siberia is the greatest.”
Bookwalter wrote a description of the similarities between Siberia and some of the western sections of the United States which are just as good today as when he wrote them: “There lies in western Siberia, from the Ural Mountains eastward, an unbroken tract of practically level land, about 8000 miles wide and nearly 2000 miles long; that is to say, an area equal to two-thirds of the United States, excepting Alaska. When I add that for the most part it is like or even superior to the fertile, treeless, level prairies of our own great West; that it extends over 30 degrees of latitude from the genial climate of Central Asia to the frigid north; that throughout this vast region is to be found the finest pasturage in the world; that in many parts wheat and other cereals can be grown equal to the Dakotas or Minnesota, and even Indian corn over a large section in the south–some feeble conception can be formed of the tremendous latent agricultural resources of this country.”
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 148

Abroad, Siberia is generally thought of as a wasteland, a desolate country used only as a prison for deportees. That is far from the truth. It is a splendid region with terrifically rich mineral resources, drained by immense rivers, and with an industrial future as brilliant as those of Canada or the United States. Life is calmer there than in European Russia, for the great distances permit a relaxation of the constant surveillance to which the European populations are subjected. There is more liberty in Siberia than in Russia.
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 104

NOMADS GIVEN SPECIAL TREATMENT BY THE RUSSIANS

The Russians who live among primitive tribesmen today have had to learn patience and forbearance to a marked degree. The Communists, possessing what someone has described as inverted snobishness, have decided that since the Russians exploited the tribesmen in the past, therefore the Russians must now submit to any sort of indignity. The tribesmen, having the mentality of shrewd children, have quickly caught on to the idea that the Russians have no comeback for any trick played on them, and some of the tribesmen abuse the favored position given them by the Communists. The Russians simply have to grin and bear it, as they know from experience that any effort to retaliate against the tribesmen will be severely punished, and that Communist courts will always give the tribesmen the benefit of every doubt.
During this epidemic of typhus in the Altai Mountains, we ran into one mining village where the whole population was in danger of infection, and those who could still move around were lined up in front of the dispensary….
The crowd had formed in line as its members arrived, and men and women stood there awaiting their turn to get into the dispensary. The Kazaks, knowing that the Russians were afraid of lice, were amusing themselves by picking lice off their clothing and flipping them onto the Russians. The expression of mixed anger, terror, and despair on the faces of those Russians was something to remember. But they could do nothing about it. The Kazaks wore sly and malicious grins, knowing that the Russians were powerless to object.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 191

SOVIET GOVT FOSTERS INTEGRATION AND RACE AND NATIONALITY MIXING

Often the families of exiles accompany them, and their children may settle down in Asia. Recently, in order to clear the border regions adjoining Finland, Poland, and other countries on the west, the authorities have shifted dozens of villages in mass to new lands in Siberia, where they are given credit and materials to build houses and community dwellings for themselves and begin life over in Asia.
In Russia today, as never before, Asiatics and Europeans are being thrown together as members of the same community. Already there are a considerable number of mixed marriages, and strong measures are taken to make sure that no social prejudice is shown against such marriages, and that the children get at least equal advantages.
The Soviet authorities deliberately encourage such marriages. They throw European and Asiatic young people together as much as possible, and Soviet scientists frequently publish articles declaring that children of mixed marriages are likely to be superior.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 261

As everyone knows, the Germans have started out to “purify” their race, while the Communists authorities in Russia appear equally determined to mingle the global blood of their 168 races and tribes as freely as possible.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 262

In the course of 70 years the process of ethnic integration was strongest in the central regions of the USSR, above all in Moscow and Leningrad. There was also a considerable degree of integration in Kiev, Minsk, Tbilisi, Baku, Tashkent, and Kharkov. If the USSR had continued to exist for another 40-50 years, “the Soviets” would have become as much a reality as “the Americans.”
Medvedev, Roy & Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin. NY, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 269

PEOPLE IN FAR EASTERN SIBERIA PREFER SOVIET RULE OVER JAPANESE OPPRESSION

Stalin and his associates, as empire-builders, have apparently anticipated for years that the Japanese would sooner or later strike out to build an empire for themselves on the Asiatic mainland. I have seen, during my own 10 years in Russia, what the Communists General Staff has done to hold Japan in check so far as Russian interests are concerned. First of all, the Russians have built a line of defense along the Manchurian border a strong as that which they are now building along European borders. They have built up a powerful, specialized army in the Far East, almost completely independent of the army in Europe. In this way, they succeeded in preventing a Japanese attack upon their own Far Eastern Territories, which are rich in natural resources of every kind.
I have heard it suggested that the Soviet population in the Far East is so discontented that it would welcome Japanese invasion. This is not true. I have talked with hundreds of Soviet citizens along the Amur and Shilka Rivers and all through the mining regions beyond Lake Baikal. Many of these people are not especially fond of Soviet rule, but they prefer it to the Japanese. They can remember when the Japanese occupied eastern Siberia; the Japanese were not induced to leave until 1922. The Japanese military acted so brutally during their occupation that they made enemies of the Soviet population for generations.
One middle-aged prospector working on the Shilka River told me about his experiences with the Japanese. He said that a Japanese garrison was kept just outside the town where he was living during the occupation. Members of this garrison, during their rest period, would take their guns and go up on the hillside overlooking the town. There they would sit taking pot-shots at people moving along the streets, and were highly amused when they made a hit. Incidents like this have made the people in eastern Siberia ready to back the Russians in a fight with the Japanese, even though they are not Communists.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 286

STALIN SAYS THE SU IS A UNION OF NATIONS

[Report to the 18th Congress on March 10, 1939]
Long live the great friendship of the nations of our country!
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 392

SOVIET GOVT OPPOSED ZIONISM AND THE ZIONISTIC ASPECTS OF JUDAISM

An analysis of anti-religious propaganda directed at Jews in 1960s finds such specific themes as: (1) The Jewish religion promotes allegiance to another state, Israel, and to a reactionary, pro-imperialist movement, Zionism; (2) the Jewish religion promotes the notion that the Jewish people are superior to others, ‘the chosen people’, and thus breeds hatred of other people’s; (3) the Jewish religion elevates the pursuit of material wealth, a pursuit incompatible with the Communist ideal of Soviet society; and (4) the Jewish religion calls for genocide and enslavement of other people’s by the Jews (a reference to the affect of Zionism on the Arabs).
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 93

From the beginning of the Soviet state in 1917, the Soviets, with various degrees of intensity, have systematically attacked Zionism as reactionary, pro-imperialist, racist and, since World War II, essentially fascist. They share their analysis with most of the rest of the world’s Marxists, including many Jewish Marxists, as well as with most progressive movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; especially those in the Islamic world. Anti-Soviets, especially those sympathetic to Zionism and the Israeli state, often fallaciously accuse the Soviet Union of anti-Semitism because of Soviet attacks on Zionism. But the two are quite different. Anti-Semitism, the ideology that Jews are a race to be despised and that to discriminate against them is justified, is against the law in the Soviet Union and, as far as I can ascertain, totally absent from all official Party and government written matter. Anti-Zionism, the notion that Jews should not seek or support a separate state in which all Jews maintain solidarity solely amongst themselves–rather than with individuals of other ethnic groups–is official state and Party policy.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 96

As we shall see, Stalin was growing more and more disturbed about the expressions of interest in Palestine and, later, Israel among Soviet Jews;…
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 40

Several weeks later, even larger crowds assembled on Rosh Hashanah and again on Yom Kippur. They waited for hours in front of the synagogue, then escorted Golda Meier through the streets, shouting, “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Stalin had had enough. On November 20, the party leadership approved the immediate disbanding of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, “since, as the facts show, this committee is a center of anti-Soviet propaganda and regularly submits anti-Soviet information to organs of foreign intelligence.”
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 41

Stalin told his daughter, “The entire older generation is contaminated with Zionism and now they’re teaching the young people, too.”
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 42

JEWS SUPPORTED SU IN THE WAR & THEIR SOLDIERS RECEIVED THE 4TH HIGHEST # OF MEDALS

… Mikhoels…sent a note to Shcherbakov objecting to a prominent article in the party Journal Bolshevik, which maliciously understated the number of medals that individual Jewish soldiers had received for valor during the first six months of the war. Although the Jews constituted a tiny minority within the Soviet population, they had received the fourth highest number (after the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians) and would soon surpass the Belarussians.
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 37

On the eve of the war there were about 3 million Jews living in the Soviet Union. The rapid German offensive physically divided the Jewish community: about 1,300,000 Jews found themselves on occupied territory before they had even had time to react. The remaining 1,700,000 Soviet Jews, who had either been evacuated or had remained on unoccupied territory, fought against the Nazis, with Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars and other ethnic groups of the USSR. …
Jews did not just serve as rank and file soldiers and officers. There were a number of outstanding Jewish military commanders: M. Katukov, Marshal of Armored Troops; Y. Smushkevich, Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force; and General M. Shmelev, Chief of Staff of Long-Range Aviation. In addition there were 92 Jewish generals and 9 army and flotilla commanders. In total, there were 270 Jewish generals and marshals. Korolyov, Anatoly.
Jews were also instrumental in shaping the ideology that would underpin the Soviet role in the war. Initially the Soviet people did not know what to make of the Nazi attack. Firstly, the Soviet Union once considered Germany an enemy but more recently had viewed it as a potential ally against Britain and the U.S. Secondly, the Soviet people, brought up to believe in internationalism, had thought that the German soldiers, i.e. German workers and peasants, would refuse to attack a socialist state and instead would join with the Russians to fight the oppressors, German capitalists.
A Jewish intellectual, Ilya Erenburg,…had traveled extensively and was perhaps the only Jew in the USSR who was aware of the racist motivations for the war. He was a military correspondent in Spain during the Spanish civil war, and his world outlook was informed by this experience. Six International Brigades had fought on the side of the Republicans in that war, and these units had included 6,000 Jewish volunteers.
By the time the Germans attacked, Erenburg was resolutely opposed to fascism. He had all the main national newspapers, Pravda, Izvestia, and Krasnaya Zvezda at his disposal, as well as the national radio stations. He emphatically rejected the internationalist dogma and called on the nation to, “Kill the Germans!”
…Erenburg confronted Nazi with racism head on. A whole volume of his Collection of Essays was to be devoted to his wartime pamphlets and articles. Erenburg became very popular in the embattled Soviet Union. People found his message much more instructive than the theory of internationalism. It was because of Erenburg that Stalin decided to discard the previous national anthem (the Internationale). In 1942, at the height of the war, Stalin announced a competition to compose a new anthem….
After the war, the question of what role the Jews had played in the defeat of Nazism sparked heated and sometimes acrimonious debate among historians. Some historians were determined to play down the role of the Jews at any cost, while others sought to do the opposite….
Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn tried to rise above the argument in his book about Jews in Russia, 200 Years Together. Although Russian liberals did not agree with everything that he wrote in the book, the part devoted to the war was met with general approval.
“I saw Jews fight courageously at the front. Two fearless anti-tank soldiers deserve special mention: Lieutenant Emmanuil Mazin, who was a friend of mine, and a young soldier called Borya Gammerov. The latter was called up when he was still at student. Both were wounded.”
Solzhenitsyn wrote about fellow Jewish writers who volunteered for the front, such as the poet Boris Slutsky, and the literary critic Lazar Lazarev, who fought at the front for two years until he received injuries to both arms. Dozens of pages are devoted to the participation of the Jews in the common war against Nazism…
On May 4, 1945, three Red Army soldiers, Churakov, Oleinik, and Seroukh, retrieved the charred bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun from a crater by the walls of the Reichschancellory in Berlin. The soldiers laid the corpses out on a soldier’s blanket. Hitler’s two dead dogs (an Alsatian and a puppy) were also laid out. Shortly after, the Fuhrer’s corpse was sent to Buch in the northeastern suburbs of Berlin for identification. Colonel Krayevsky, the Red Army’s chief pathologist, and doctors Anna Marants, Boguslavsky, and Gulkevich carried out the autopsy in the local clinic. The examination was overseen by Faust Shkaravsky, chief forensic expert for the First Belarusian Front.
All these doctors were Jews.
Even in his worst nightmares Hitler could never have imagined such a turn of events. Korolyov, Anatoly. Soviet Jewish Doctors Dissected Hitler, Novosti, Russian News and Information Agency, 7/5/05.

LENIN UPHOLDS THE RIGHT OF NATIONALITIES TO SECEDE

Lenin further refuted the anti-Bolshevik views of Bukharin and Pyatakov on the national question. They spoke against the inclusion in the program of a clause on the right of nations to self-determination; they were against the equality of nations, claiming that it was a slogan that would hinder the victory of the proletarian revolution and the union of the proletarians of different nationalities. Lenin overthrew these utterly pernicious, imperialist, chauvinist views of Bukharin and Pyatakov.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 233

VAST STRENGTH OF SU

The first mighty stimulus to the Soviet people’s courageous fighting is the public ownership of all the vast resources of 1/ 6 of the world.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 28

GROUPS ARE NEEDED TO MAKE DECISIONS

Single persons cannot decide. Experience has shown us that individual decisions, uncorrected by others, contain a large percentage of error.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 53

Indeed, Stalin’s stock phrase at the time was that not a single one of Lenin’s disciples was worthy of Lenin’s mantle and that only as a team could they aspire to leadership.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 298

The famous article by Stalin entitled “Dizziness from Success,” which appeared in Pravda on March 2, 1930, two months after the address to the Agrarian Marxists, and which called a sudden halt to the widespread excesses of Communist action in rural districts, was regarded by foreign correspondents and wide masses of peasants alike as an “order by Stalin.” Stalin himself immediately disclaimed any personal prestige therefrom accruing, stating publicly in the press: “Some people believe that the article is the result of the personal initiative of Stalin. That is nonsense, of course. The Central Committee does not exist in order to permit the personal initiative of anybody in matters of this kind. It was a reconnaissance undertaken by the Central Committee.” There is no need to assume, as many foreigners did, that this was a disingenuous disclaimer of personal rule. It was a very exact statement of fact.
Strong, Anna Louise. Dictatorship and Democracy in the Soviet Union. New York: International Pamphlets, 1934, p. 18

SOVIETS TREAT WOMEN AS EQUALS

…The famous “Red Amazons” and “Death Battalions” are fiction, not fact. But the Army medical services is full of women.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 115

Stalin took over a Party with scarcely 5% women–including a handful of real distinction, such as Krupskaya and Kollontai. He left the Party with over 21 percent women, all of them politically faceless.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 104

The wife of our host listened to her husband and made timid protests. One day when he was out, she opened her heart to us. “The Bolsheviks want to build up a new life; that can’t be done in a day.. But look, in the past women had no rights at all, they were proper slaves; the Bolsheviks have given us liberty, have made us the equals of men. That is what annoys my old man.”
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 42

MENNONITES PERSUADED TO LEAVE SU

Later the local farmers told me that German agents had been a factor in the sudden decision which seized large numbers of Mennonite farmers, German by descent, to “flea from the accursed atheist land.” Whole villages sold or merely abandoned their houses and cattle and came in hordes to Moscow, demanding the right to go abroad.
Strong, Anna L. The Soviets Expected It. New York, New York: The Dial press, 1941, p. 124

CATHOLIC CHURCH SERVES REACTION

Third Meeting of Hoxha with Stalin
November 1949
“The Vatican is a centre of reaction,” Comradely Stalin told me among other things, “It is a tool in the service of capital and world reaction, which supports this international organization of subversion and espionage. It is a fact that many Catholic priests and missionaries of the Vatican are old-hands at espionage on a world scale. Imperialism has tried and is still trying to realize its aims by means of them.”
Then he told me of what had happened once in Yalta with Roosevelt, with the representative of the American Catholic Church and others. During the talk with Roosevelt, Churchill and others on problems of the anti-Hitlerite war, they had said: We must no longer fight the Pope in Rome. What have you against him that you attack him?!
“I have nothing against him,” Stalin had replied.
“Then, let us make the Pope our ally,” they had said”, let us admit him to the coalition of the great allies.”
“All right”, Stalin had said, “but the anti-fascist alliance is an alliance to wipe out fascism and nazism. As you know, gentlemen, this war is waged with soldiers, artillery, machine-guns, tanks, aircraft. If the Pope or you can tell us what armies, artillery, machine-guns tanks and other weapons of war he possesses, let him become our ally. We don’t need an ally for talk and incense.”
After that, they had made no further mention of the question of the Pope, and the Vatican.
“Were there Catholic priests in Albania who betrayed the people?” Comrade Stalin asked me then.
“Yes,” I told him. “Indeed the heads of the Catholic Church made common cause with the nazi-fascist foreign invaders right from the start, placed themselves completely in their service and did everything within their power to disrupt our National Liberation War and perpetuate the foreign domination.”
“What did you do with them?”
“After the victory,” I told him, “we arrested them and put them on trial and they received the punishment they deserved.”
“You have done well,” he said.
Hoxha, Enver. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: 8 N‘ntori Pub. House, 1979.

SOME CLERGY ARE PROGRESSIVE

Third Meeting of Hoxha with Stalin
November 1949
“But were there others who maintained a good stand?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, “especially clergymen of the Orthodox and Moslem religion.”
“What have you done with them?” he asked me.
“We have kept them close to us. In its First Resolution our Party called on all the masses, including the clergymen. to unite for the sake of the great national cause, in the great war for freedom and independence. Many of them joined us, threw themselves into the war and made a valuable contribution to the liberation of the Homeland. After Liberation they embraced the policy of our Party and continued the work for the reconstruction of the country. We have always valued and honored such clergymen, and some of them have now been elected deputies to the People’s Assembly or promoted to senior ranks in our army. In another case, a former clergyman linked himself so closely with the National Liberation Movement and the Party that in the course of the war he saw the futility of the religious dogma, abandoned his religion, embraced the communist ideology and thanks to his struggle, work and conviction we have admitted him to the ranks of the Party.
“Very good,” Stalin said to me. What more could I add? “If you are clear about the fact that religion is opium for the people and that the Vatican is a centre of obscurantism, espionage and subversion against the cause of the peoples, then you know that you should act precisely as you have done.”
Hoxha, Enver. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: 8 N‘ntori Pub. House, 1979.

ANTI-RELIGION BATTLE SHOULD BE KEPT ON POLITICAL PLANE

Third Meeting of Hoxha with Stalin
November 1949
“You should never put the struggle against the clergy, who carry out espionage and disruptive activities, on the religious plane,” Stalin said, “but always on the political plane. The clergy must obey the laws of the state, because these laws express the will of the working class and the working people. You must make the people quite clear about these laws and the hostility of the reactionary clergymen so that even that part of the population which believes in religion will clearly see that, under the guise of religion, the clergymen carry out activities hostile to the Homeland and the people themselves. Hence the people, convinced through facts and arguments, together with the Government, should struggle against the hostile clergy. You should isolate and condemn only those clergymen who do not obey the Government and commit grave crimes against the state. But, I insist, the people must be convinced about the crimes of these clergymen, and should also be convinced about the futility of the religious ideology and the evils that result from it.
Hoxha, Enver. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: 8 N‘ntori Pub. House, 1979.

“You should never put the struggle against the clergy, who carry out espionage and disruptive activities, on the religious plane,” Stalin said, “but always on the political plane. The clergy must obey the laws of the state, because these laws express the will of the working-class and the working people…. But, I insist, the people must be convinced about the crimes of these clergyman, and should also be convinced about the futility of the religious ideology and the evils that result from it.”
Hoxha, Enver. The Artful Albanian. London: Chatto & Windus, 1986, p. 134

BOLSHEVIKS RULE BY MASS SUPPORT

This position of Stalin in relation to the Party was matched by the position of the Party in relation to the masses…. Since the moment when they [the Bolsheviks] first secured a majority in the Soviets prior to the November Revolution they have retained the confidence of the majority, or they could not have maintained power.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 173

“But if you take the progressive peasants and workers, not more than 15 percent are skeptical of the Soviet power, or are silent from fear or are waiting for the moment when they can undermine the Bolsheviks state. On the other hand, about 85 percent of the more or less active people would urge us further than we want to go. We often have to put on the brakes. They would like to stamp out the last remnants of the intelligentsia. But we would not permit that. In the whole history of the world there never was a power that was supported by nine tenths of the population as the Soviet power is supported.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 175

These characteristics of a Bolshevik party are far from being fully understood by supporters of the Soviet Union today. The Communist Party is continually being described as a small disciplined elite, ordering the people of the Soviet Union hither and thither for their own good. In short, the Soviet regime is pictured as the dictatorship of a Party.
This is a travesty which is unfortunately accepted by friends, as well as by enemies. In the remarks we have quoted above, Lenin is explaining to the Socialists of Western Europe that the Communist Party could only function on the basis of the confidence of the workers; that this confidence was not created by propaganda, but by people testing from their own experience the quality of the political leadership of the Party; that before any policy could be carried out, the Communist Party had to secure the co-operation of millions of people who were not Party members, who were not under Party discipline, who could not be coerced into co-operation, but who could only be convinced on the basis of their experience; and that further, if in the progress of the struggle a change of direction was necessary, not only the Party, but tens of millions of non-party people had to be convinced of the need for this change of direction and had to understand the methods of carrying it through.
In carrying out its activities, the Party rests on the trade unions and on the Soviets. Without the support of the 20 million trade unionists, without the support of the peasantry, organized in the Soviets and in the collective farms, the Party could not last for a week, for it is not the dictatorship of the Party, but a dictatorship of the working-class, in alliance with the peasantry.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 15-16

The British War Cabinet scheduled a meeting for July 29, 1919 to discuss the Russian situation. The news of Kolchak’s reverses emboldened those who had all along wanted an accommodation with Lenin. Their thinking was reflected in a memorandum submitted to the Cabinet by a Treasury official and banker named Harvey. The document grossly distorted the internal situation in Russia to press the argument for abandoning the White cause. Its basic premise held that in a Civil War the victory went to the side that enjoyed greater popular support, from which it followed that since Lenin’s government had beaten off all challengers it had to have the population behind it [the document stated]:
“It is impossible to account for the stability of the Bolshevik Government by terrorism alone…. When the Bolshevik fortunes seemed to be at the lowest ebb, a most vigorous offensive was launched before which the Kolchak forces are still in retreat. No terrorism, not even long suffering acquiescence, but something approaching enthusiasm is necessary for this. We must admit then that the present Russian government is accepted by the bulk of the Russian people.”

The pledge of the Whites immediately after victory to convene a Constituent Assembly meant little since there was no assurance that ” Russia, summoned to the polls, will not again return the Bolsheviks.” The unsavory aspects of Lenin’s rule were in good measure forced on him by his enemies:
“Necessity of state enables him to justify many acts of violence whereas in a state of peace his Government would have to be progressive or it would fall. It is respectfully contended that the surest way to get rid of Bolshevism, or at least to eradicate the vicious elements in it, is to withdraw our support of the Kolchak movement and thereby end the Civil War.”

Although the author did not explicitly say so, his line of argument led to the inescapable conclusion that support should also be withdrawn from Denikin and Yudenich.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 96

The very small number of active dissidents against the Soviet system has reflected their lack of support in the general population. All active dissidents have generally acknowledged that their ideas and activities are unpopular and elicit no responsive chords in the Soviet population. The Soviet system has a high degree of legitimacy among almost all of its citizens, as is readily admitted by virtually all of its critics both inside and outside the USSR. The legitimacy of the regime was greatly enhanced by the trauma of World War II and the heroic, and very bloody, victory over the Nazi invaders (which not only generated great feelings of solidarity and sacrifice, but also confirmed the national fear of foreign intervention which has lasted until today). The Communist Party’s successful industrialization and modernization program has also generated massive support for the Soviet system, as has the high rate of upward mobility and the considerable Soviet achievements in science, education, public-health, and other welfare services. Western Sovietologists (most of whom are not sympathizers of the Soviet system) essentially concede that there is widespread support for Soviet institutions among the Soviet people as a whole.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 274

UNDER STALIN STUDENTS GOT INTO UNIVERSITIES BY ABILITY ONLY NOT WEALTH

Students were admitted to the universities on the basis of ability only, and paid while they studied.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 176

CRITICS OF SU GET THEIR INFO FROM SOVIET SOURCES

Moreover, when these criticisms are published in the press, they provide the hostile foreigner with evidence of the apparent failure of Soviet communism. Indeed it is amusing to discover that nearly all the books that are now written proving that there is corruption, favoritism, and gross inefficiency in the management of industry and agriculture, are taken from reports of these discussions in the Soviet press, in Pravda, the organ of a Communist Party; in Isvestia, the organ of the government; in Trud, the organ of the trade union movement, and in many other local and specialist newspapers.
Webb, Sidney. The Truth about Soviet Russia. New York: Longmans, Green, 1942, p. 34

CRITICISM IS ENCOURAGED

As we have described previously, free criticism, however hostile it may be, is permitted, even encouraged, in the USSR, of the directors of all forms of enterprise, by the workers employed, or by the consumers of the commodities or services concerned.
Webb, Sidney. The Truth about Soviet Russia. New York: Longmans, Green, 1942, p. 74

Moscow, August 16, 1930–although “free speech” and a “free press” in the western sense are unknown in Soviet Russia, Moscow newspapers are now indulging in such a loud chorus of complaints, rebukes, and pessimism as has probably not been equaled since Jeremiah was the “official spokesman” of Israel. To read the newspapers one would suppose the country was headed straight to perdition.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 369

But it must not be assumed that the press is barren of criticism of the regime. Indeed, it is full of it–from Party meetings and in letters from the thousands of worker and peasant correspondents all over the Union. But it must all be helpful criticism, attacking bad administration or ill-advised regulations, and directed toward the upbuilding of Russia according to Soviet objectives. No criticism in opposition to the regime itself or its general program is tolerated.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 152

Former Mensheviks or Social Revolutionists, still numerous in the unions, are now not expelled even when critical. But their criticism must be “constructive,”–intended to remedy the evils and defects of the accepted system and program, not to attack its purposes….
But the general policy is to encourage “helpful” criticism and the fullest rank and file participation in solving industrial problems, a process not altogether easy in view of the relations of the unions to the State.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 169

I happened upon a village meeting way out in Moscow province called to receive the tax bills for the year brought over by a messenger from the county seat. For two hours I listened to as bitter and excited a denunciation of the government as I ever heard anywhere. The regime was roundly scored as a robber of peasants. There was not the slightest fear or limitation in speaking out. It even looked for a while as if the young messenger were to be mobbed. When they calmed down, with the appointment of a committee to take up their grievances, they found enough hope for the village solvency to vote money for new a fire apparatus and a new village bull. The meeting was convincing evidence of the lack of any fear of the government or of the police, and of a healthy resistance to what was to them injustice.
The offenses which the GPU controls have little relation to peasant life. I speak of that at the start to make it clear that the terrorism charged to the GPU does not exist for the masses of the Russian people.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 178

Thus, side-by-side with all the self-praise and glorification I have mentioned, the Soviet press throughout the war period carried sharp criticisms of party and state officials. Over a period of months I collected literally hundreds of items of this nature, covering a wide variety of activity. Probably the most numerous reprimands and warnings were addressed to officials responsible for weaknesses in the production system.
Slipshod methods of harvesting, which resulted in great losses of grain, were continuously criticized in specific regions. Individual officials caught in the wrongful use or appropriation of state property were singled out as examples. Instances of losses due to poor packing and shipment of manufactured goods were frequently cited, and engineers responsible for waste of metals and materials were upbraided. Outright thefts of materials and embezzlement of funds were exposed and cases of bribery of state employees were frequently reported in the Government and party press.
Blockheadedness, indifference to duty, and evasion of responsibility by officials and bureaucrats were the subject of many editorials and newspaper stories, in which individuals and localities were often mentioned by name. The detail into which these criticisms enter is frequently surprising….
…Other town fathers were rebuked for failing to provide adequate living quarters, for inhuman bureaucracy, for falsifying reports, for neglecting improvements in the school system, and so on.
Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 205

…Open criticism of different party branches for failure to accomplish their educational and organizational duties, in the rear and at the front, also, usually preceded or coincided with dismissals and new appointments. And from the extent of such criticism in the press it was evident that a process of change and reform was going on all the time.
Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 207

Stalin continued his criticism of party leaders by discussing another familiar topic: the “verification of fulfillment of decisions.”… Stalin stated, “There is still another kind of verification, the check-up from below, in which the masses, the subordinates, verify the leaders, pointing out their mistakes, and showing the way to correct them. This kind of verification is one of the most effective methods of checking up on people.”
Stalin stated, “Some comrades say that it is not advisable to speak openly of one’s mistakes, since the open admission of one’s mistakes may be construed by our enemies as weakness and may be used by them.
This is rubbish, comrades, downright rubbish. The open recognition of our mistakes and their honest rectification can, on the contrary, only strengthen our party, raise its authority in the eyes of the workers, peasants, and working intellectuals…. And this is the main thing. As long as we have the workers, peasants, and working intellectuals with us, all the rest will settle itself.”
Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 146

That this Soviet patriotism excludes all criticism is, moreover, by no means the truth. “Bolshevist self-criticism” is certainly no empty expression. One reads in the newspapers a succession of most bitter attacks on numerous real or imaginary grievances and on prominent individuals, whose fault, allegedly, these grievances are; I was astonished at industrial meetings by the strength of the criticisms leveled at the managers of the industries, and I stood amazed before news posters which attacked or caricatured principals and responsible people with positive savagery. And foreigners are not prohibited from expressing their honest opinions. I have already mentioned that not only did the national newspapers leave my articles uncensored, even when I deplored certain intolerances or excessive Stalin-worship, or when I demanded more light on the conduct of an important political trial; what is more, they took pains to reproduce as faithfully as possible in the translation every nuance of these very passages, negative as they were. The prominent national personalities whom I met were without exception more interested in criticism than in indiscriminating praise. They like to measure their own achievement with that of the West, and they measure accurately, often all too accurately, and when their own work falls short of that of the West, they do not hesitate to admit it. Indeed they often overrate Western achievements to their own disadvantage. But when a foreigner indulges in petty and inconsequent fault-finding and loses sight of the value of the whole achievement in unimportant shortcomings, Soviet people quickly lose patience, while empty hypocritical compliments they can never forgive.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 40

Of course, criticism had been strongly encouraged during the purges, and local records contain plenty of it. The press strongly endorsed criticism from below at the end of 1938.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 161

The regime regularly urged people to criticize local conditions as well as leaders, at least those below an exalted level…. Pravda went so far as to identify lack of criticism with enemies of the people: “Only an enemy is interested in saying that we, the Bolsheviks… do not notice actual reality…. Only an enemy… strives to put the rose-colored glasses of self-satisfaction over the eyes of our people.” As the Zawodny materials and a mass of other evidence show, these calls were by no means merely a vicious sham that permitted only carefully chosen, reliable individuals to make “safe” criticisms.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 185

National authorities took a different view and encouraged criticism from below, primarily for three reasons. First, it was a check on the pretensions and behavior of local officials. Second, it was a way of getting some reliable information about performance. Given the penchant of Soviet administrators to lie about what was happening, frank statements were highly prized at the upper levels of government. Third, workers’ ability to criticize made them feel that they played a significant role in their own affairs and that their views were taken seriously. In short, the opportunity to express grievances increased workers’ sense that the Soviet system was legitimate. At the same time, national figures and institutions could convey the sense, not without reason, that they defended ordinary people against local despots.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 188

These criticisms and threats from below challenged newly appointed administrators, undercutting the assertion that criticism was allowed only against those the regime had already decided to remove. In another case, speakers at a union election meeting heavily scolded one of their officials, yet he received the most votes of anyone present in the selection of an important commission. Criticism was encouraged and sometimes staged from above, but it was also an everyday occurrence that came from the workers themselves.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 190

In these and many other cases, workers behaved proudly and aggressively toward superiors; they stood firmly on their rights.
… But like this book, the same investigation also shows that workers constantly took the trouble to protest to various organizations and periodicals, from which they demanded a thoughtful response. Alienated people do not bother to express their grievances in this way any more than they bother to vote.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 196

Nowhere in the world outside the USSR is there such a continuous volume of pitiless criticism of every branch of government, every industrial enterprise and every cultural establishment. This perpetual campaign of exposure, which finds expression in every public utterance of the leading statesmen, in every issue of the press, and in every trade union or corporate meeting, is not only officially tolerated, but also deliberately instigated, as powerful incentive to improvement, alike in direction and in execution. Thus, the public speeches by Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and other Soviet statesmen–in striking contrast with those of British, French or American statesmen–nearly always lead up to a tirade of criticism of some part of soviet administration. They usually begin with a glowing, and, as we may think, an optimistic account of the successful progress of the department or institution under discussion, of its remarkable achievements and of the valuable services of those working in it towards the “building of the socialist state.” This is rendered all the more alluring by a vision of the dismal failure of capitalism in Europe and America. But invariably the speaker descends presently to an outspoken criticism of the technical shortcomings of the particular enterprise, with a detailed exposure of its partial or temporary failures, and often a scathing denunciation of particular cases of slackness or waste or other inefficiency, and similar criticism is invited from below. Official speakers will often blame conferences and congresses for their failure to criticize their own superior councils and committees, as well as their own officials, for their shortcomings and their failures.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 628

Stalin, the press, and the Stakhanovite movement all regularly encouraged ordinary people to criticize those in authority. At the very top, Stalin was certainly an unassailable figure, but during the Ezhovshchina anyone several rungs below him was fair game. If the citizenry was supposed to be terrorized and stop thinking, why encourage criticism and input from below on a large scale?
Thurston, Robert W. “On Desk-Bound Parochialism, Commonsense Perspectives, and Lousy Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest.” Slavic Review 45 (1986), 239.

it cannot be said, however, that the Kremlin abuses the terrific power of the press, the radio and Communist party effort. Stalin may not be one of the world’s great men in the sense that Lenin was, but he certainly “knows his politics” and has been careful to correct the dangers of unchallenged authoritative and unified control of public opinion by what is known as “self-criticism,” which is not the least interesting feature of the Stalinist system.
Self-criticism is the salt in the Soviet home propaganda pie. It enables any writer or speaker, high or low, to take a violent and enjoyable crack at almost any one or anything, provided he sticks to concrete facts or remains “objective,” as the Russians call it, and refrains from the unwisdom–or positive danger–of ideological criticism or covert attacks on the “party line” which will brand him with heresy and disgrace.
The Russians by nature have a streak of anarchic iconoclasm…and “self-criticism” gives then welcome relief from the stark rigidity of Stalinism, a relief no less delightful because it is apt to be dangerous. There has been cases when overzealous critics have been compelled to make ignominious retractions or have lost their jobs or even been expelled from the party.
But it is a splendid safety valve, none the less, and so widely used by the Moscow press in particular, which is closest, of course to the Kremlin, that a foreign observer often wonders whether everything is “going to the bowwows,” so long and grievous is the tale of mismanagement, waste and bureaucratic error…. The Communist Youth Pravade or an illiterate worker can sling a pebble at the Railroad Commissariat and get away with it if he only has got facts to back his charge.
Duranty, Walter. “Soviet Fixes Opinion By Widest Control,” New York Times, June 22, 1931.

SU CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES A JOB WHICH CAPITALISTS DON’T

Article 118: citizens of the USSR have the right to work, that is, the right to guarantee employment and payment for their work in accordance with its quantity and quality.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

The idea of the Soviets is founded on the right to work and the duty to work.
This categorical obligation, up to now imposed by no state on its citizens, is balanced through the equally new duty of the state: “The citizens of the union have the right to work, the right to be guaranteed a job and pay for their work, according to it’s value and amount. The right to work is assured through the socialistic system of economics.”
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 164

The Constitution also exacts certain duties from citizens. Every able-bodied citizen must work. The new Testament principle of “he who does not work shall not eat” is rigidly observed….
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 34

SU CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES A RIGHT TO REST

Article 119: citizens of the USSR have the right to rest.
The right to rest is insured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with pay for workers and other employees, and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes, and clubs serving the needs of the working people.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

SU CONSTITUTION GUARATEES SECURE RETIREMENT AND MEDICAL CARE

Article 120: citizens of the USSR have the right to material security in old age, and also in case of sickness or loss of capacity to work.
This right is insured by the wide development of social insurance of workers and other employees at state expanse, free medical service for the working people, and the provision of a wide network of health resorts at the disposal of the working people.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

SU CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES FREE EDUCATION AND STIPENDS

Article 121: citizens of the USSR have the right to education. This right is insured by universal compulsory elementary education, by education free of charge including higher education, by a system of state’ stipends for the overwhelming majority of students in higher schools, by instruction in schools in the native language, and by the organization in factories, state Farms, machine tractor stations, and collective Farms of free industrial, technical, and agricultural education for the working people.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

SU CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES WOMEN EQUAL RIGHTS AND CHILD CARE

Article 122: Women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life.
The realization of these rights of women is insured by affording women equality with men, the right to work, payment for work, rest, social insurance and education, and by state protection of the interests of mother and child, pregnancy leave with pay, and the provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries, and kindergartens.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

SU CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

Article 124: in order to insure or to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the USSR shall be separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious propaganda shall be recognized for all citizens.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

SU CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES FREEDOM OF PRESS AND SPEECH TO WORKING CLASS

Article 125: in accordance with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the USSR are guaranteed by law: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and meetings, ( freedom of street processions and demonstrations.
These rights of citizens are insured by placing at the disposal of the working people and their organizations printing shops, supplies of paper, public buildings, the streets, means of communication, and other material requisites for the exercise of these rights.
Constitution of the USSR. Moscow: Co-operative Pub. Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., Chapter 10, 1936

(Foreign Delegation’s Interview with Stalin on November 5, 1927)
QUESTION: Why is there no freedom of the Press in the USSR?
ANSWER: What freedom of the Press have you in mind? Freedom of the Press? For which class –the bourgeoisie or the proletariat? If it is a question of freedom of the Press for the bourgeoisie, then it does not and will not exist here as long as the Proletarian Dictatorship is in power. But if it is a question of freedom of the Press for the proletariat, then I must say that you will not find another country in the world where such broad and complete freedom of the Press exists as in the USSR. Freedom of the Press for the proletariat is not an empty phrase. And without the greatest freedom of assembly, without the best printing works, the best clubs, without free organizations of the working class, beginning with the narrow and ending with the broad organizations, embracing millions of workers, there is no freedom of the Press. Look at conditions in the USSR, survey the workers’ districts, and you will find that the best printing works, the best clubs, entire paper mills, entire ink factories, producing necessary material for the Press, huge assembly halls–these and many other things which are so necessary for the freedom of the Press of the working class, are entirely and fully at the disposal of the working class and the toiling masses. This is what we call freedom of the Press for the working class. We have no freedom of the Press for the bourgeoisie. We have no freedom of the Press for the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who represent the interests of the beaten and overthrown bourgeoisie. But what is there surprising in that? We have never pledged ourselves to grant freedom of the Press to all classes, and to make all classes happy. Taking power in October, 1917, the Bolsheviks openly declared that this Government is a government of one class, a government of the proletariat, which will subdue the bourgeoisie, in the interests of the toiling masses of town and country representing the overwhelming majority of the population of the USSR. How can one, after this, demand from the Proletarian Dictatorship freedom of the Press for the bourgeoisie?
Stalin, Joseph. The Worker’s State. London: Communist Party of Great Britain. 1928, p. 6

STALIN SAVED THE SOVIET PEOPLE BY PUSHING THEM

Had the party under Stalin not driven the Soviet people, by terrific pressure and incessant appeals, to prodigious and costly feats of construction and production, and had it not smashed ruthlessly the conspiracies of the 1930’s, the Soviet Union and all the United Nations would have suffered irreparable defeat in World War II at the hands of insanely savage foes who in the end would have left the vanquished without eyes for weeping and without tongues for protest or lamentation.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 198

The Communists do not merely reflect the will of the masses, as a ballot might, or a showing of hands. They do not merely analyze what the “majority want” and hand it out. It is their job to lead, to organize the people’s will. No group of unurged soldiers would ever vote to storm a trench. Certainly the workers of the Soviet Union would not have voted, un urged, unled, for the hardships of the Five-Year Plan of rapid industrialization taken out of their own food and comforts, for the painful speed of farm collectivization without adequate machines or organizers. But when the Communist Party analyzed, urged and demanded, showing the world situation and the need of making the USSR well prepared industrially and for defense, showing the enemy classes which must be abolished to attain the goal of a socialist state, they were able to find, organize and create, deep in the heart of the masses, a will that carried through. Without that will in tens of millions, the 3 million [party members] could have done little.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 104

During the decade from 1930 to 1940 some 200 industrial aggregates of all kinds were constructed and put into operation in the Urals. This herculean task was accomplished thanks to the political sagacity of Joseph Stalin and his relentless perseverance in forcing through the realization of his construction program despite fantastic costs and fierce difficulties.
Scott, John. Behind the Urals, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942, p. 256

…The reconstruction effort, added to the increased capacity which had been developed in the Urals and Siberia during the war, insured that by the time of Stalin’s death the Soviet industrial infrastructure had recovered from the ravages of the war.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 43

MOLOTOV: We demanded great sacrifices from workers and peasants before the war. We paid little to peasants for bread or cotton or their labor–we simply had nothing to pay with! What to pay? We are reproached–we didn’t think of the material interests of the peasants. Well, if we had, we would have wound up in a dead end. We didn’t have enough money for cannons!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 27

A first-class industry had to be created. This industry had to be so directed as to be capable of technically reorganizing not only industry, but also our agriculture and our railway transport. And for this it was necessary to make sacrifices and to impose rigorous economy in everything; it was necessary to economize on food, on schools and on textiles, in order to accumulate the funds required for the creation of industry. There was no other way of overcoming the famine in technical resources. Thus Lenin taught us, and in this matter we followed in the footsteps of Lenin….
Well then, there were comrades among us who were scared by the difficulties and began to call on the Party to retreat. They said: “What is the good of your industrialization and collectivization, your machines, iron and steel industry, tractors, combines, automobiles? It would be better if you gave us more textiles, if you bought more raw materials for the production of consumers’ goods and gave the population more of the small things which adorn the life of man. The creation of industry, and a first-class industry at that, when we are so backward, is a dangerous dream.”
Of course, we could have used the 3 billion rubles of foreign currency obtained as a result of the severest economy, and spent on the creation of our industry, for the importation of raw materials and for increasing the production of articles of general consumption. That is also a kind of “plan.” But with such a “plan” we should not have had a metallurgical industry, or a machine-building industry, or tractors and automobiles, or airplanes and tanks. We should have found ourselves unarmed in the face of the external foe. We should have undermined the foundations of Socialism in our country. We should found ourselves in captivity to the bourgeoisie, home and foreign.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 95-96

He [Stalin] ‘built socialism’; and even his opponents, while denouncing his autocracy, admitted that most of his economic reforms were indeed essential for socialism.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 361

KAGANOVICH SAYS ALL POWER IS IN CLIQUE’S HANDS IN CAPITALIST COUNTRIES

Speaking in Tashkent, where he stood for election, Kaganovich assured his auditors (Pravda December 10, 1937) that no real popular rule was possible in the bourgeois countries where all power is in the hands of “a few hundred millionaires, bankers, factory owners….”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 319

STALIN DESCRIBES REAL LIBERTY

“Real liberty,” declared Stalin to Roy Howard in 1936, “can be had only where exploitation is destroyed, where there is no oppression of one people by another, where there is no unemployment and pauperism, where a person does not shiver in fear of losing tomorrow his job, home, bread. Only in such a society is it possible to have real, and not paper, liberty, personal and otherwise.”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 326

My own prejudices are amply conveyed by the title of this book. Though over half of it is devoted to a description of the controls by the Soviet state, I have chosen to call it Liberty under the Soviets because I see as far more significant the basic economic freedom of workers and peasants and the abolition of privileged classes based on wealth;…
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 2

For although I am an advocate of unrestricted civil liberty as a means to effecting even revolutionary changes in society with a minimum of violence, I know that such liberty is always dependent on the possession of economic power. Economic liberty underlies all others. In any society civil liberties are freely exercised only by classes with economic power–or if by other classes, only at times when the controlling class is too secure to fear opposition.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 3

Such an attitude as I express toward the relation of economic to civil liberty may easily be construed as condoning in Russia repressions which I condemn in capitalist countries. It is true that I feel differently about them, because I regard them as unlike. Repressions in western democracies are violations of professed constitutional liberties, and I condemn them as such. Repressions in Soviet Russia are weapons of struggle in a transition period to socialism. The society the Communists seek to create will be freed of class struggle–if achieved–and therefore of repression.
I see no chance for freedom from the repressions which mark the whole western world of political democracy save through abolishing economic class struggle.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 4

Though I found a few opponents who were fearful of speaking out, and many cautioned me not to quote them, I found nowhere such universal fear as marks opponents of the dictatorships in Italy or Hungary…. Speech is fairly free everywhere in Russia. What the authorities land on is any attempt at organized opposition.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 9

That civil liberties, generally speaking, have not existed in fact for any classes except those with economic or political power is usually ignored by those who proclaim their validity as social principles.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 18

…No one who has seen the new life in Russian villages can doubt the feeling of liberty, of released effort and of hope which marks the active peasants–save for the ambitious well-to-do class (the Kulaks) who resist the new order because it restricts their freedom to hire labor and rent land.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 25

INTELLECTUALS AND SCIENTISTS IN SU ARE FREE

Foreign critics readily conclude that the Soviet intelligentsia is in helpless bondage and consists of sycophantic automatons, reduced to complete sterility. Nothing could be farther from the truth. No government anywhere at any time has done more than the USSR to promote art and science by providing facilities for training, work, and publication, and by giving scientists and artists economic security through regular salaries plus generous rewards for achievement through royalties, prizes, and numerous privileges. That this policy has paid dividends in shown by the striking accomplishments of Soviet music, drama, cinema, and literature as well as the biological and physical sciences. Yet all of the contributors have lacked “freedom” in the Western sense. And since freedom is commonly viewed in the West as the sine qua non of productivity, the enigma of Soviet culture seems to many quite inexplicable, particularly to those given to compiling cases (and there had been many) of Soviet intellectuals who have been dismissed, degraded, or even purged for political non-conformity.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 332

STALIN SAYS THOSE WITH PARTY CARDS ABUSE THE PRIVILEGE

Zhdanov stated on March 18, 1939, “It has been repeatedly pointed out by Lenin and Stalin that a bureaucrat with a Party card in his pocket is the most dangerous and pernicious kind of bureaucrat, because, possessing a Party card, he imagines that he may ignore Party and Soviet laws and the needs and interests of the working people.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 347-48

TRAITS OF GOOD PARTY LEADERS

Other life histories of the highest ranking party leaders serve to confirm the pattern already suggested…. All in varying agree share with Stalin and their colleagues those traits and experiences which, thus far, are the prerequisites of political eminence in the USSR: peasant or proletarian origin, poverty stricken youth, little formal education, much informal education in the school of hard knocks, early conversion to the cause, fame won in revolutionary education and organization, and a generous measure of vision, courage, unflagging energy, relentless determination, and genius for holding many jobs simultaneously and for directing and inspiring subordinates to perform the impossible. These leaders are not fawning yes-men or wordy agitators or arbitrary bureaucrats, but hard-driving executives.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 357

In a speech to the Active Workers of the Moscow Organization of the CPSU (April 1928) Voroshilov quotes Stalin as having said, “To sit at the helm and keep watch, seeing nothing until some calamity overtakes us–this is no kind of leadership. Bolshevism does not interpret leadership in this way. To lead means to foresee; and to foresee, comrades, is not always so simple. It is one thing when a dozen other leading comrades keep watch and notice defects in our work; but the working masses do not want to keep watch, or cannot do so; they therefore do not notice the defects.”
Life of Stalin, A Symposium. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1930, p. 45

…wherein lies the art of leadership.
“The art of leadership,” Stalin wrote, “is a serious matter. One must not lag behind the movement, because to do so is to become isolated from the masses. But neither must one rush ahead, for to rush ahead is to lose contact with the masses. He who wants to lead a movement and at the same time keep in touch with the vast masses must wage a fight on two fronts–against those who lag behind and against those who rush on ahead.”
Alexandrov, G. F. Joseph Stalin; a Short Biography. Moscow: FLPH, 1947, p. 111

Stalin has himself given what is probably the best characterization of what he tries to do in these words: “The art of leadership is a serious matter. One must not straddle behind a movement, nor run in front of it, lest one become in both cases separated from the masses. Whoever wants to lead and at the same time maintain his contact with the masses must fight on two fronts; against those loitering in the rear, and those speeding on ahead.”
Again, in April 1928, before the Moscow organization of the party, he declared that leaders often think they are watching but see nothing “until some calamity overtakes them–this is no kind of leadership. Bolshevism does not interpret leadership in this way. To lead means to foresee; and to foresee, Comrades, is not always so simple.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 13

[in a letter to Kaganovich on 11 August 1932 Stalin stated] Lenin was right in saying that a person who does not have the courage to swim against the current when necessary cannot be a real Bolshevik leader….
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 180

LENIN FIRST WANTED TO EQUALIZE INCOMES

Meanwhile, during the protracted socialist “transition” to communism, the equality of incomes is not, and never was, contemplated, since men and women differ markedly in their capacities to contribute to the welfare of the Commonwealth. Lenin toyed for a time, to be sure, with the notion of a moderate leveling of incomes. Under “War Communism,” and to a lesser extent under the NEP, wage and salary scales were influenced by this idea. Once the building of socialism was embarked upon in earnest, however, the gap between the best paid and the worst paid grew ever greater.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 575

SU ABOLISHED PRIVATE PROPERTY AND EXPLOITATION

What distinguishes Soviet society from all others, past and present, is not the allocation of income but the distribution and form of ownership of property…. No one in the USSR owns corporate stocks or bonds, or possesses tangible property (save houses and gardens and objects of personal use), or leases real estate for private rentals, or employs labor to produce services or goods exclusively for personal profit. If a “ruling class” be defined as a group at the peak of the social hierarchy, possessed of maximum deference, income, and power by virtue of private ownership of productive property, then the USSR has none and is already a truly “classless” society. The socialization of the means of production signifies the end of the propertied classes which, in their various forms, have controlled all hitherto existing societies.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 578

ALL WANT TO LIVE IN LUXURY WITHOUT WORK AND THAT THE SU ABOLISHES

But what is impossible for the Soviet intelligentsia is to become a propertied class or a leisure class living on unearned income. These are the earmarks of every landed aristocracy. To live without labor is the dream of every Western businessman, indeed the secret hope of almost all men and women everywhere, since the species is allergic to work, craves luxuries, preferably on a silver platter, and prefers a horizontal to a vertical position whenever possible. The pecuniary elites of the West consist in part of hard-working and hard driving executives and managers, and in part of idle rich. The latter indulge in conspicuous consumption and live without work by virtue of astute selection of ancestors, schools, colleges, fraternity brothers, wives/or business associates, affording access to adequate quantities of unearned increments.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 580

SU ELIMINATES LEISURE WITHOUT WORK BY OWNING PRIVATE PROPERTY

In the USSR, for better or for worse, leisure is all too scarce and no such group exists, or can come into being, so long as productive property may not be privately bought and sold, and so long as industrial capital is not raised by selling shares to individuals with private savings from which they hope to derive income without effort.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 581

WEALTHY SOVIET ELITE DOES NOT EXIST

“Striking it rich” is impossible. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is bad form. Excelling the Ivanoviches in socialist competition to cut production costs, increase output, and raise profits beyond the Plan is always the order of the day. Conspicuous success in such endeavors means prizes, bonuses, honors, and fame.
This elite bears little resemblance to any known aristocracy, plutocracy, or theocracy.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 581

No private person may legitimately make a penny of profit out of this system of state and cooperative industry and trade, banking and transport. There are no individual shareholders in the state industrial enterprises; and the financial columns of the Russian newspapers are restricted to brief quotations of the rates of the state loans. All the normal means of acquiring large personal fortunes are thus pretty effectively blocked up in Russia; and if there are some Nepmen, or private traders who have become ruble millionaires through lucky dealings in commerce or speculation, they are certainly neither a numerous nor a conspicuous class.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 131

The new class of state managers, or “red directors” of factories, who have replaced the former capitalist owners, are mostly Communists and former workers. But by the very nature of their position they must look at industrial life from a rather different angle from that of the workers. Although they make no personal profit out of the enterprises which they manage, they are supposed to turn in a profit for the state.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 174

But the general view of the Social Democratic and Anarchist critics of the Soviet regime, that there is a deep rift between a few Communist officeholders at the top and the working masses at the bottom, is, in my opinion, distorted, exaggerated, and quite at variance with the actual facts of the Russian situation.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 177

The difference in the standard of life is only determined by the ability of the single man. The external glamour of life, enjoyed in all other countries by a few big businessmen or rich heirs, has been sacrificed to a feeling of security guaranteed by no other state to its citizens. In order to remove the fear of the vacuum endured by 90% of the citizens, the enjoyment of the other 10% must be curtailed. Then the worker will not be filled any more by hate and jealousy, nor the owner by hate and fear of revolts.
Such a state without classes must necessarily be a state without races. Privileges for any race or color are explicitly denied by the Constitution.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 167

On the whole the men who remain in top leadership are the ablest of the 12 million government employees. Although shouldering more responsibility they do not receive salaries anywhere near as large as those of corporation presidents in the United States. They do receive decorations and they may have cities named after them. They are all provided with automobiles, expense accounts and good houses or apartments.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 39

Even more important than these liberties is the fact that they labor not for the private profit of employers (save for the small proportion employed in private industry), but for the profit of the whole community. State industries, like private, must show a profit to keep going, but the public use of that profit robs it of the driving force of exploitation.
The liberties enjoyed by workers in Russia, whether or not in unions (less than 10 percent are outside), go far beyond those of workers in other countries, not only in their participation in controlling working conditions and wages, but in the privileges they get as a class. The eight-hour day is universal in practice, alone of all countries in the world, with a six-hour day in dangerous occupations like mining. Reduction of the eight-hour day to seven hours is already planned for all industries. Every worker gets a two-week vacation with pay, while office workers and workers in dangerous trades, get a month. No worker can be dismissed from his job without the consent of his union. His rent, his admission to places of entertainment or education, his transportation–all these he gets at lower prices than others. When unemployed he gets a small allowance from his union, free rent, free transportation, and free admission to places of entertainment and instruction. Education and medical aid are free to all workers–or for small fees–extensive services being especially organized for and by them.
…There is in Russia no privileged class based on wealth. Practically all rents for land or buildings are paid to the state or to cooperatives; only a little of it goes to line private pockets. Money may be loaned at simple interest, the rate being limited. Money deposited with the state earns a rate of interest even higher than in capitalist countries. But nobody is getting rich off the interest on his savings and loans, for all incomes are both limited at their source, and, when much above the average, are heavily taxed. Persons with higher incomes are also obliged to pay higher prices for some necessities–especially rent. Inheritance of property is now theoretically unlimited, but so heavily taxed as in effect to destroy all above a moderate amount.
The new bourgeoisie, which has grown-up with the new economic policy–private traders, richer peasants…–is too small to constitute a noteworthy exception to the general absence of a wealthy class. And they are being increasingly restricted, despite the assertions to the contrary by the Communist Opposition and others. The statistics of private versus public enterprises show it. Earnings and incomes throughout Soviet Russia vary from the minimum of bare subsistence, 15 or 20 rubles a month, to 10 or 15 times that amount. Few incomes run above that figure (300 rubles a month, $150), the highest in all Russia being those of a few concessionaires and foreign specialists on salaries ($5000-$10,000). Even the few traders and concessionaires who have gotten rich are unable to invest money productively in Russia, except in state loans. None can be invested for exploitation. There is practically no chance for anyone to get rich under the Soviet system except a comparatively few traders, concessionaires, or the winners of some of the big state lotteries–and it is hard for any of them to stay rich under the heavy taxation.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 29-30

…Even to tourists in Russia the absence of any moneyed class is at once apparent…. No fine shops, no gay restaurants, no private motors–none of the trappings of wealth that lend color and variety to the life of bourgeois countries. Instead, a somewhat monotonous drabness and shabbiness, more than compensated for by the thought of its significance to the masses.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 30

And to anyone who accepts the view of social action as a struggle of classes, the political democracy of capitalist countries is only an instrument for the rule in the last analysis of a comparatively small class–the big property owners.
…Tested by it, the Soviet system clearly represents the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population–the workers and peasants–as opposed to propertied classes,…
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 35

One should keep in mind, however, that big incomes are still extremely rare. Earning power may vary in the Soviet Union, according to artistic or technical proficiency, but the extremes, as Louis Fisher has pointed out, are very close. No such “spread” is conceivable in the USSR as exists in Britain or America between say, a clerk in a factory and its owner. Among all the 165 million Russians, there are probably not ten men who earn $25,000 per year.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 567

SOCIALISM RESTORED NATIONAL MEANING AND REMOVED LEISURE CLASS

Despite the blundering and cruelty which are constant companions of all pioneers, the adventure has led to 2 interdependent results which are pearls without price amid the self stultifications and social schizophrenia of other industrial societies.
One is the cure of the mass neuroses of our time through the re-generation of personality around community values and purposes which afford escape from loneliness and, ultimately, from the class snobberies and mass envies characteristic of deeply divided societies.
The other is the cure of economic paralysis and stagnation, with their concomitants of wholesale insecurity, frustration, and aggression, through the building of an institutional framework wherein all who are willing to work may find productive employment in a constantly expanding economy.
The unpardonable sin of the Russian Revolution has been the liquidation of the old leisure class and the imposition of limitations on ownership which make the emergence of a new leisure class all but impossible.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 582

In the end it became clear that the whole economic system should be run by the State.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 206

SU DICTATORSHIP WAS NECESSARY AND SUCCESSFUL FOR WORKERS

“Dictatorship” in Soviet society is not a means (save in isolated instances, flowing from abuses of power) whereby a privileged and parasitic oligarchy exploits the community to its own advantage. Neither is it a formula for ” tyranny,” Nor an institutionalization of the corruption which often goes with absolute power. It is rather the means of integrating elite and mass, preserving the true faith, promoting high morale and group purpose, maintaining discipline and elan, and evolving and administering the broad All Union directives for serving the general welfare and the common defense. Soviet planning involves cooperation and collaboration by millions at all levels and stages of the process. But the necessary continuity, crusading fervor, and coordination from a common center are supplied, and at present can only be supplied, by maintaining the Party’s monopoly of legality and leadership.
Only those observers who are invincibly ignorant, or blinded by irrational fear and hatred, will deny that the Soviet system of business and power has, for all its abuses and crudities, promoted the liberation of men from impoverishment, exploitation, illiteracy, and prejudice and served the cause of human dignity and self respect on an immense scale. These purposes are of the essence of the Democratic dream. In this sense the USSR is a Democratic polity–in its ends and in its achievements, if not always in its means.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 585

The harsh word “dictatorship” is not pleasant. Nevertheless, in the West they are getting used to it. But it is being falsified there; they [presumably the Euro-Communist movement] don’t comprehend that without the dictatorship of the proletariat, they will never be able to move forward. However much they babble, the truth remains: either remain slaves of capitalism or, if you want to wrench yourself free, it is possible only with the aid of the dictatorship.
It is not by chance that in the theory of the state there is no room for “state of all the people.” Nowhere has it ever existed in reality.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 398

Poland and certain other states show that the concept of the “state of all the people” is not a particularly sound one.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 395

A state of all the people does not and cannot exist.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 404

The Soviet Union would never have been able to achieve what it has achieved if it had indulged in a parliamentary democracy according to the West European conception. The establishment of socialism would never have been possible with an unrestricted right to abuse. No government, constantly attacked in parliament and in the press and dependent on the result of elections, could ever have been able to impose on the population the hardships which alone made this establishment possible, and, faced with the alternatives either of using up a very great part of their strength in parrying foolish and malicious attacks, or of bending the whole of this strength to the completion of the structure, the leaders of the Union decided to restrict the right to abuse.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 66

STALIN BELIEVES DECISIONS SHOULD BE MADE BY GROUPS

Stalin is not an an arrogant man, although he is master and lord of a large and populous country. In meetings of the Politburo, he never says as Lenin used to say, “Here is the way things are and here is what we must do. If any of you have better ideas and can prove to me they are better, go-ahead.” Stalin doesn’t act like that. He says, “Here is the problem, and perhaps one of us” — say, Voroshilov, if it’s a military matter, or Mikoyan if its commerce, or Kaganovich for industry–“will tell us what he thinks.” After that, there is general discussion while Stalin sits and listens. He may lead the conversation as a lawyer can “lead” a witness, but when the decision is reached it is, or appears to be, a joint not a single decision.
Duranty, Walter. The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc., 1941, p. 35

For Stalin, whatever his later practice, gave the classic expression of the danger of individual decision, unchecked by collective thought. When Emil Ludwig, and later Roy Howard, sought to learn how “the great man made decisions,” Stalin impatiently replied: “With us, individuals cannot decide…. Experience has shown us that individual decisions, uncorrected by others, have a large percentage of error.” He added that the success of the USSR came about because the best brains in all areas–science, industry, farming, world affairs–were combined in the Central Committee, through which decisions were made.
This standard he, more than anyone, instilled in the Soviet people. For he always acted “through channels” and after building majorities….
In all my years in the USSR, I never heard them speak of “Stalin’s decision” or “Stalin’s orders,” but only of “government orders” or “the Party line,” which are collectively made. When speaking of Stalin, they praised his “clearness,” his “analysis.” They said: “he does not think individually.” By this, they meant that he thought not in isolation but in consultation with the brains of the Academy of Science, the chiefs of industry, and trade unions.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 22

It was nothing but the exceptional attitude adopted by Trotsky, whose public position had been a considerable one by Lenin’s side, and who showed a tendency to place himself above the Central Committee, that brought the question of “the leadership” up before the Fourteenth Congress. To Trotsky’s exuberant personality Stalin opposed the principle of Community-leadership. He declared: “One cannot direct the party without colleagues. It is absurd to think that we can. And now that we have lost Lenin it is stupid even to speak about it. Common labor, collective leadership, a united front and unity among the Central Committee, with, as a vital condition, the subordination of the minority to the majority, are what we really need at the present time.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 149

Not so very long ago, Stalin said to a foreign visitor who was anxious, as are all intelligent tourists in the USSR (particularly those who visit important Soviet personalities), to go closely into this question of personal power in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State (looking meaningly at Stalin): “No, one must make no individual decision. Individual decisions are always, or nearly always, biased. In every association, in every community, there are people to whose opinions heed must be paid. In every association, in every community, there are also men who may express erroneous opinions. Experience of three Revolutions has shown us that out of 100 individual decisions which have not been examined and corrected collectively, 90 are biased. The leadership organization of our Party in the Central Committee, which directs all the Soviet and communist organizations, consists of about 70 people and it is among those 70 members of the Central Committee that are to be found our best technicians, our cleverest specialists and the men who best understand every branch of our activities. It is in this Supreme Council that the whole wisdom of our Party is concentrated. Each man is entitled to challenge his neighbor’s individual opinion or suggestion. Each man may give the benefit of his own experience. If it were otherwise, if individual decisions were admitted, there would be serious mistakes in our work. But because each one may correct the errors of all the others and everyone considers these corrections seriously, our decisions have hitherto been as correct as it is possible for them to be.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 150

There was no question of personal dictatorship by Stalin in those days [after Lenin died]; to the contrary, Stalin came forward as the advocate of collective leadership. He accused Trotsky of seeking to assume one-man rule and supported Zinoviev and Kamenev in their attacks on Trotsky.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 85

When, at the Fourteenth Party Congress, Kamenev accused Stalin to his face of trying to set up one-man rule, Stalin blandly replied:
“To lead the party otherwise than collectively is impossible. Now that Ilich is not with us, it is silly to dream of such a thing [applause]. It is silly to talk about it. Collective work, collective leadership, unity in the party, unity in the organs of the Central Committee, with the minority submitting to the majority–that is what we need now.”
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 183

AVERAGE RUSSIAN THINKS HE IS FREER THAN AMERICANS

It is one of the strangest things, that the average Soviet Russian honestly believes that the system under which he lives, which we consider a tyranny, or dictatorship, or totalitarian regime, or anything save freedom–the average Russian thinks that his regime is freer than “the plutocratic oligarchy” (as he terms it) under which, he says, Americans live, move, and have their being. That’s what the Russian says, and that’s what the Russian thinks, and he doesn’t believe in our freedoms, but he does believe in his own. It’s amazing, but that’s how it is.
Duranty, Walter. The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 161

When one talks with Soviet people on the subject [freedom], they maintain that they alone possess effective democracy and that it exists in the so-called democratic countries in form only. And they ask how, if democracy means government by the people, the people can exercise this government if they are not in possession of the means of production. In the so-called democratic countries, they assert, the people are rulers in name only and not in fact; the power is actually in the hands of those who have control of the means of production. To what, they ask again, is this so-called democratic freedom reduced if one examines it more closely? It is confined to the freedom of railing with impunity against the government and the opposing political parties and being able, once in every three or four years, to throw a little piece of paper into a ballot box without being spied upon. But nowhere do these “liberties” afford a guarantee or even a possibility that the will of the majority will really be carried out. What can be done with freedom of opinion, of the press, of meetings, if one has no control over the press, printing-works, and meeting halls? And in what country have the people control over those things? Where can be people express their opinions effectively and where find effective representation?… And, the Soviet people conclude, all so-called democratic liberties will remain fictitious so long as they are not founded upon the true freedom of the people, which can exist only when the means of production are under the control of the community.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 58

I myself have held democratic liberties dear for most of my life, and freedom of opinion and of the press was to me, as to any author, very precious…. This democratic conviction of mine received its first blow during the War, when I was made to realize that, despite all democracy, war was continued against the will of the majority of the people. In the years after the War, the gaps in the usual democratic constitutions became more and more evident to me, and today I incline towards the opinion that constitutional civil liberties are more or less a decoy to enable the will of a small minority to be carried out.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 61

FEW SUPPORT THE LIVING CHURCH

On the other hand, though it may be reckoned that fully seven-tenths of the clergy and religious laity favor reform, it is doubtful whether more than a tenth is willing to support the “Living Church,” which the majority [of the clergy] regards as having sold itself for a mess of Bolshevik pottage.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 63

COMMUNISTS PROVIDE HONEST LEADERSHIP

In a country rotten with corruption the communists are honest. In a country where they are all-powerful they live meagerly and, like Lenin, work themselves beyond the limit of physical endurance. So they tried to resusitate Russian industry despite the handicaps of civil and foreign war, treachery, and incompetence.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 90

John Reed brings as back to the human reality of the revolution…. Reed helps to show us how petty and how wrong is the scurrilous gossip-column approach to history, which depicts these leaders as self-serving conspirators mad for power for power’s sake and each driven by personal ambition. Not, of course, that personal ambitions were absent, but they were minuscule parts of an overwhelming collective dedication to the revolution. And the spirit in which these men met, as even the scanty minutes reveal, was essentially one of good comradeship, in spite of some differences between them.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 34

Finally, if Soviet society had been so shaken by the trials and purges and so corrupted as Khrushchev, Conquest, and Medvedev imply, the USSR could not have won the war. Only a basically sound society could have achieved such a feat, a feat which required national cooperation, initiative, and morale.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 133

“Politics based on principles are the only honest ones,” said Stalin, repeating Lenin. That is the declaration of basic principle, the major precept which, as Stalin again says, “Enables one to storm impregnable positions.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 16

…Dzerzhinsky himself was a revolutionary ascetic, known to be morally incorruptible and dedicated absolutely to the revolutionary cause.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 5

As we were traveling back to Moscow, on the road, Stalin stopped the car for some fresh air. Vacationers with their children immediately surrounded Stalin. Stalin asked Vlasik to go and get some candies in order to give to the children. Vlasik went to this Georgian man who was running a kiosk, got the candies, and gave them out to the children, while the parents were discussing every subject imaginable with Stalin.
At night where we rested, Stalin asked Vlasik:
Did you pay the man for the candies?
No, I did not have the time.
Return immediately to the kiosk and pay the man the money that we owe him!
The kiosk man was very proud that he had sold candy to comrade Stalin.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 54

I confess that I approached Stalin with a certain amount of suspicion and prejudice. A picture had been built up in my mind of a very reserved and self-centered fanatic, a despot without vices, a jealous monopolizer of power. I had been inclined to take the part of Trotsky against him. I had formed a very high opinion perhaps an excessive opinion, of Trotsky’s military and administrative abilities, and it seemed to me that Russia, which is in such urgent need of directive capacity at every turn, could not afford to send them into exile. Trotsky’s Autobiography, and more particularly the second volume, had modified this judgment but I still expected to meet a ruthless, hard–possibly doctrinaire–and self-sufficient man at Moscow; a Georgian highlander whose spirit had never completely emerged from its native mountain glen.
… Everything I had heard in favor of the First Five Year Plan I had put through a severely skeptical sieve, and yet there remained a growing effect of successful enterprise. I had listened more and more greedily to any first-hand gossip I could hear about both these contrasted men. I had already put a query against my grim anticipation of a sort of Bluebeard at the center of Russian affairs. Indeed if I had not been in reaction against these first preconceptions and wanting to get nearer the truth of the matter, I should never have gone again to Moscow.
Wells, Herbert George. Experiment in Autobiography. New York: Macmillan. 1934, p. 684

All lingering anticipations of a dour sinister Highlander vanished at the sight of him. He is one of those people who in a photograph or painting become someone entirely different. He is not easy to describe, and many descriptions exaggerate his darkness and stillness. His limited sociability and a simplicity that makes him inexplicable to the more consciously disingenuous, has subjected him to the strangest inventions of whispering scandal. His harmless, orderly, private life is kept rather more private than his immense public importance warrants, and when, a year or so ago, his wife died suddenly of some brain lesion, the imaginative [people] spun a legend of suicide which a more deliberate publicity would have made impossible. All such shadowy undertow, all suspicion of hidden emotional tensions, ceased forever, after I had talked to him for a few minutes.
My first impression was of a rather commonplace-looking man dressed in an embroidered white shirt, dark trousers and boots, staring out of the window of a large, generally empty, room. He turned rather shyly and shook hands in a friendly manner. His face also was commonplace, friendly and commonplace, not very well modelled, not in any way “fine.” He looked past me rather than at me but not evasively; it was simply that he had none of the abundant curiosity which had kept Lenin watching me closely from behind the hand he held over his defective eye, all the time he talked to me.
The conversation hung on a phase of shyness. We both felt friendly, and we wanted to be at our ease with each other, and we were not at our ease. He had evidently a dread of self-importance in the encounter; he posed not at all, but he knew we were going to talk of very great matters. He sat down at a table and Mr. Umansky [the translator] sat down beside us, produced his notebook and patted it open in a competent, expectant manner.
I felt there was heavy going before me but Stalin was so ready and willing to explain his position that in a little while the pause for interpretation was almost forgotten in the preparation of new phrases for the argument. I had supposed there was about forty minutes before me, but when at that period I made a reluctant suggestion of breaking off, he declared his firm intention of going on for three hours. And we did. We were both keenly interested in each other’s point of view. What I said was the gist of what I had intended to say….
I had never met a man more candid, fair, and honest, and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him.
Wells, Herbert George. Experiment in Autobiography. New York: Macmillan. 1934, p. 687-689

Stalin’s salary is about 1000 rubles per month, the equivalent of which, in Russia in 1939, was about $200. He is completely uninterested in money. Like all the Soviet leaders he is a poor man; no financial scandal has ever touched any of them. Salaries of Communists are adjusted by category, this system having replaced the former rule whereby no man in the party could earn more than 225 rubles per month. There is no upward limit; the average is 600. No communist may accept a salary for more than one post, no matter how many he holds; and no member of the party is allowed in theory at least to retain royalties from books.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 534

“Their penal servitude is not a stigma,” wrote a well-informed anonymous commentator, “but a token of their new nobility. They are proud of their criminal record as the emblem of their new aristocracy. Yet the leaders of the Bolshevist regime are ‘good’ men in the most ominous meaning of that word…. The comparison with the early Church militant and the Jesuit order is irresistible. The Bolsheviks are latter-day saints and crusaders, but of a material not a spiritual world, and they are the most thoroughgoing reformers and moralists in history–in their own way. Some of them drink, some have mistresses, but their morality is of another kind. They are the first autocratic rulers in history who do not use their power for personal profit. They do not graft;… They have no castles, no titles, no purple robes; they live in a couple of rooms on a standard below that of an American bricklayer; they are pledged to personal poverty and service.”
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 537

If it were not for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia would probably have the dictatorship of a military clique or of certain bankers and financiers. Whatever may be said for or against the Soviet regime it must be admitted by both friend and foe that the Soviet leaders have kept the great natural resources of the country 100% in Russian hands. As much cannot be said for the rulers of many other backward countries. The Soviet dictatorship is one of the few instances in history where a small group of men have seized the power of a great nation and used that power not for personal aggrandizement and selfish gain but for what they thought was the best interests of all the common people.
The Communist Party is the vanguard of the new era. It is the alert, conscious minority which is guiding the country forward. If democracy and not dictatorship were in the saddle, would it be possible to continue the socialistic program long enough to give it a fair trial? Would not a fickle populace be lured away by the bright promises of charlatans and demagogues and hand over the power to interests which were secretly controlled by selfish financial interests?
…Americans may or may not be grateful that they do not live under communism and a Soviet system, but they certainly cannot with justice throw many stones at the Soviet power. Considering the illiteracy of the Russian masses, considering the backwardness of the country, who can be sure that any other party or any other structure of government would have done more for the genuine welfare of the people?
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 130-131

SMALL PEOPLE CAN CRITICIZE BIG ONES

Some cub reporter on the Communist youth Pravda or an illiterate worker sling a pebble at the railroad commissariat and get away with it if he only has facts to back his charge.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 204

Perhaps the administrators of industry are protected from criticism by the cowed masses? Heaven knows what Trotskyists and other critics of the Soviet Union would do if they were. For many hostile criticisms are based on the open public criticism directed against the organs of government and industry in the USSR, by the workers of the Soviet Union, both in the wall newspapers and the trade union press. In what other country of the world is it possible for the workers to establish in every department of the factory a wall newspaper exposing the shortcomings of the management on a whole variety of technical and social questions?
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 156

Indeed nothing would be more interesting than for some of the people who talk about lack of freedom of criticism in the Soviet Union to make a six months’ comparison of the British and Soviet press.
They would find in the Soviet press many criticisms of the poor functioning of certain factories in the Soviet Union. Are there factories which function poorly in Britain? There are, but even if the proprietors of the British press had any inclination or interest in criticizing these factories, there is one all-sufficient deterrent–the law of libel. They would find factories in the Soviet Union criticized for neglecting to improve the working conditions. There are many such factories in Britain, but again the law of libel prevents any possibility of pillorying the owners of such factories.
The fact is that not only are the officials in the State, the Party, and industry, removable, but they are subjected to a floodlight of criticism that is without parallel in any capitalist State.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 157

One of the chief revelations to come from the opening of Soviet archives is the sheer volume of letters received by newspapers, as well as party and state leaders and institutions. We now know that in the not atypical month of July 1935, Krest’ianskaia Gazeta (the peasants’ newspaper) received approximately 26,000 letters. Kalinin, who as president of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets was one of the most frequent recipients of letters, received an average of 77,000 a year between 1923 and 1935. Throughout 1936 Zhdanov, Leningrad party secretary, received 130 letters a day. The regional party secretary in Dniepropetrovsk, Khataevich, reported, perhaps with some exaggeration, that he received 250 letters a day. Letters also poured into other newspapers, municipal soviets, procurators’ offices, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), party and state control commissions, and offices of Politburo members and government leaders, including Stalin.
These letters contained complaints, petitions, denunciations, confessions, and advice…. The majority were sent by individuals who signed their names, for anonymous and collectively signed letters were frowned upon by the authorities. Regardless of their motivations for sending letters, authors expected a response, and archives indicate that some kind of response usually was forthcoming. Newspapers published only a tiny fraction of the letters. More often, staffers forwarded them to the appropriate agencies or wrote replies themselves. Individual leaders who received letters responded directly to some and forwarded others with comments and queries.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 7-8

The spring of 1936 seems to have been punctuated by warnings sent down from the top leadership, concerning the lack of interest so often shown by the authorities when they received letters of complaint in protest from ordinary working people. During March a decree went out from the Central Committee denouncing the “political blindness” of two regional newspaper editors and criticizing their attitude to this sort of readers’ letters as “bureaucratic” and ” feudal.” It ordered newspapers to publish the “politically most important” correspondence and to examine any allegations contained in it. In addition the decree contained a sharp attack on the current practice of forwarding letters of complaint to the people complained about. Later, the leadership of the Western Region ordered that complaints received by various bodies of the Party or of the soviets should be looked into carefully, and the archive material of this region gives evidence of an unprecedented zeal in analyzing information coming up “from below.”…
In May 1936 a decree from the Commission of Soviet Control, approved by the Council of People’s Commissars and receiving wide press coverage, severely condemned the abuse of power by officials of “soviet institutions”–that is the cadres running the administrative and economic apparatus of the whole country. Pointing out that most of the complaints received were about cadres overstepping their powers, the decree laid an increased responsibility on officialdom in the whole matter of examining and rectifying without delay the errors or faults that people wrote about….
This decree constituted nothing less than a forthright condemnation of the “soviet apparatus,” that is of the state apparatus itself, on account of its negligence in carrying out the repeated directives of the Party and the government, over taking into account objections and complaints by the public. The decree did more than order that complaints must not be passed on to the official concerned, it set time limits on investigating and dealing with them, and specified the individual responsibility of cadres at every level of the apparatus. It even made provision for officials to be brought to court if they should be guilty of slowness or failure in carrying out action to remedy faults brought to their attention in letters.
The letters and complaints in the archives of the Western Region cover virtually all the problems of daily life, from collective farms to industrial enterprises. They denounce the practices of the heads of these organizations, as well as the behavior of cadres of local soviets and even Party officials. With each letter go the papers showing what investigations were made, the reports and the evidence obtained, and other such documents. One can find that complainants were not always objective in their criticisms and that at times the allegations were false;…
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 66-68

SOVIET CENSORSHIP IS SENSIBLE AND BALANCED

Among the many difficulties, censorship, which is generally supposed to rank highest, is less terrible than is thought abroad. Though strict in a certain direction, it is usually applied with intelligence and moderation. Unlike most censors whom the writer has known in the past seventeen years, the Bolsheviks are always willing to discuss matters with the correspondent before a cable message is sent and meet him halfway in modifying a sentence so as not to break the thread of his message or even to convey in more moderate form the item disapproved.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 206

During the past two or three years there has been no censorship of news sent by mail, but it is always understood the responsibility for such news will fall on the correspondent if the authorities object later, whereas for cable messages the censor himself must bear the brunt of subsequent official ire.
It cannot be said, however, that the Soviet press department is equally satisfactory in giving news to foreign reporters. Contrary to what generally is believed abroad–perhaps for that very reason–far from the Soviet government pumping propaganda into resident correspondents, the latter generally have to extract it drop by drop. When the writer contrasts the admirable mechanism of the French press bureau–that is, propaganda department–during and shortly after the world war with the aloof inertia of the “scratch-for-yourself” attitude of the Soviet foreign office, it becomes positively infuriating to hear people abroad say: “Of course, Moscow correspondents write just what the authorities want.”
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 206

The censorship, though strict in a certain direction, is usually applied with intelligence and moderation. Unlike most censors whom the writer has known in the past seventeen years, the Bolsheviki are always willing to discuss matters with a correspondent before a cable message is sent and meet him half way in modifying a sentence so as not to break the thread of his message or even to convey in more moderate form the item disapproved.
During the past two or three years there has been no censorship of news sent by mail, but it is always understood that the responsibility for such news will fall on the correspondent if the authorities object later, whereas for cabled messages the censor himself must bear the brunt of subsequent official ire.
…Contrary to what generally is believed abroad–perhaps for that very reason–far from the Soviet Government pumping propaganda into resident correspondents the latter generally have to extract it drop by drop. When the writer contrasts the admirable mechanism of the French press bureau–that is, propaganda department–during and shortly after the World War with the aloof inertia of the “scratch-for-yourself” attitude of the Soviet Foreign Office, it becomes positively infuriating to hear people abroad say:
“Of course, Moscow correspondents write just what the authorities want.”
Far from knowing what they want, it is a labor of Hercules to drag scraps of official information from the omnivorous monopoly of Tass, the Soviet Government press agency….
Duranty, Walter. “Soviet Censorship Hurts Russia Most,” New York Times, June 23, 1931.

The Foreign Office maintains that its censorship is solely in the interests of “fairness and accuracy,” and that it never censors opinion. According to the correspondents, this general principle is usually observed. They have little complaint of the censorship, which they describe as “the lightest possible.” Dispatches are not blue-pencilled. If a change is desired the censor usually telephones the correspondent, asking if he would mind changing a phrase or sentence; or in serious matters he may ask the correspondent to discuss the point in person.
One correspondent who sent a dispatch on the night of the big police raids in Moscow in June, 1927, following the murder of the Soviet ambassador at Warsaw, alleged that “thousands were being arrested.” He was told that the censor could not approve such an exaggerated statement, but would let him say “over a 1000.” Subsequent estimates showed that the censor was nearer right than the correspondent.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 150

The Foreign Office keeps close watch on correspondents through reading the foreign press. It also sizes up their point of view. One type of correspondent, of whom there have been a number in Moscow, is the man who “lies by telling the truth.” He selects from the Russian press for his dispatches all the damaging articles he can find, omitting anything favorable to the Soviet regime. The censor cannot call him to account for inaccuracy, but he is warned that if his paper’s policy is to print only damaging news his leave to stay will not be renewed. Since the civil war ended in 1921 there have been only two actual expulsions of correspondents from the country–one English, one American. But some have not been readmitted after going out.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 151

SU RANK IS BASED ON MERIT, NOT WEALTH OR BIRTH

Rank may replace class in the Bolshevik cosmogony to satisfy human needs, but rank based on merit, not on wealth or birth.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 210

… for in Russia the highest incomes go to the big engineer and the great writer.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 143

STALIN SAYS THAT IN CAPITALISM STRONG PREY ON THE WEAK

Stalin said, “it is a law of capitalist society that the strong must prey on the weak; you are right if you are strong; if weak you are wrong!’”
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 236

CAN CRITICIZE RUNNING OF SYSTEM BUT NOT THE SYSTEM ITSELF

The public is taught to know and recognize all three “class enemies” and to welcome action against them. On the other hand, the press, while mercilessly exposing the defects in the present system, is careful never to suggest that a different system–that is, the previous system–might be better.
The press concentrates public attention upon defects and ways to improve them, upon enemies and ways to defeat them, but it rigidly excludes the implication that there is anything wrong with the system itself.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 282

While public opposition to the basic program of communism is impossible in the Soviet Union, criticism of all aspects of Soviet life is encouraged and rewarded. Stalin not only urges every worker to criticize publicly whatever is not sound in factory, mine, and mill, but he has pointed the way in his public addresses…. In its appeal of June 2, 1928, the Central Committee gave final shape to the campaign of self-criticism, calling upon all forces of the Party and the working-class to develop self-criticism ‘from top to bottom and from bottom to top,’ without respect of person.” The result is a perpetual stream of criticism in the papers attacking instances of inefficiency or wrong-doing.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 67

UPROOTING IS WORSE IN THE US

March 1, 1933–To Americans it doubtless sounds atrocious that any authority should thus uproot and disrupt homes. But the Bolsheviks reply sarcastically, “And what about your economic system, which suddenly and mercilessly cuts jobs and savings from under millions of families and throws them literally into the street or at the mercy of charity? Don’t you know that there have been more American homes thus disrupted in the past four years than in all of our removals of kulaks and other enemies? And, remember, we uproot enemies; you break the hearts of your own supporters.”
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 309

12 YEAR ADVANCE BY ALTRUISTIC BOLSHEVIKS HAS BEEN REMARKABLE

October 1, 1933–when I came to Russia 12 years ago I was prejudiced against the Bolsheviks for a variety of reasons. And in that year of famine I found conditions terrible enough. But I also found, which I had not known before, that the Russian masses had been enslaved by the tsarist regime, whose corruption and incompetence had been the chief levers of its own downfall. I found the Soviet leaders were in the main altruists–fanatical altruists, if you like–honestly trying to make a disciplined and self respecting nation out of this horde of newly liberated slaves.
During twelve years I had had no reason to change this opinion. Without holding a brief for socialism I have watched a steady progress–by zigzags, as Lenin said, but progress, nonetheless–toward the development and practice of a working socialist system. When I compare the Moscow of 1933 with the Moscow of 1921 I am amazed by what has been accomplished, and the change in the position of Soviet Russia as a factor in world affairs is no less striking than Russia’s advance from a backward agrarian state, economically dependent upon the industrial West, to a stage of industrial autonomy and the solid foundations of economic self-sufficiency.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 330

One cannot, I think, judge the Communist achievement fairly without taking full account of the stupendous obstacles which stood in the way of its realization. In a backward, semi-Asiatic peasant country, shattered by war and social upheaval, the Communists introduced a completely new system of economic administration, bound, in its first stages, to be accompanied by costly and discouraging blunders. And they installed as the ruling class of this complicated new social order the Russian workers, who were to a large extent shut out from the limited cultural opportunities afforded under the Tsarist regime and who, while full of militant revolutionary spirit, were inferior to West European and American workers in general and technical education.
If one keeps a firm mental grasp on these two facts and their manifold implications, it will be recognized that the real cause for wonder in Soviet Russia is not that so much is amiss but that so much has been achieved.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 424

Let us make a few comparisons with foreign countries so as to fix these ideas in our minds.
In 1933 the United States figures were 110.2% of the pre-war figures, France 107.6%, England had reached 85.2%, Germany 75.4%, and the USSR 391 percent.
In agricultural machinery and locomotive construction the USSR today (1935) holds the world record (in agricultural machinery alone her annual production represents a value of 420 million gold rubles, against that of 325 million in the United States).
If we endeavor to visualize the titanic highway that would be made by the great factories of the world placed end to end, we would see in that evocation of the supernatural: Magnitogorsk (metallurgy), not yet quite completed, and which, when it is completed, will equal the American Gary Works which holds the record for size at the moment, Cheliabinsk (heavy tractors), the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow, Kramatorsk, in the Dombass region, (heavy machinery), the Kaganovich factory in Moscow (ball bearings)–which are giants of their species in a world of giants. The Lugansky locomotive factory is the most powerful in Europe, and masses of other factories (machinery which makes machinery and works metal) bear the numbers two or three in world magnitude.
Some other comparisons with foreign conditions:
Unemployment– During the period of the Plan, when unemployment was eliminated from the USSR, the number of unemployed rose, in England from 1,290,000 to 2,800,000 and in Germany from 3,376,000 to 5,500,000…. In the United States, according to the Alexander Hamilton Institute, the number of unemployed in March 1933 was 17 million. In Italy there were 1,300,000 unemployed. In Spain, there were 6,500,000 unemployed in September 1934.
We are told that in many of these countries unemployment has decreased. Let us observe that in the same places in which they talk of the reduction of unemployment they also talk of the reduction in the total amount of wages. But it should be particularly observed that there is no bluff or deception in the world more shameless than those which surround the official figures of unemployment in all capitalist countries. It is impossible to humbug the public more deliberately than the competent authorities do in juggling with words and figures to disguise the true situation. No capitalist country admits its unemployed. Entire categories of workers, and of industries not having a certain proportion of workers, are “forgotten,” and whole districts are “neglected.” After performing the operation which consists in cutting working hours in two so as to give the half-day obtained to an unemployed man, this unemployed man is removed from the list, whereas no change has really taken place at all, for twice 1/2 still makes 1.
Let us pass over the enormous assistance given to scholars and to scientific institutes and to their many-sided activities, and let us merely say a few words on the subject of public education…. Every enterprise is a center of culture, every barracks is a school, every factory a factory for molding men’s minds–let us merely observe that in the USSR there are 60 million pupils of all sorts whose education is financed by the State–one-person out of every three in the Union. As for the Republics, I will quote one or two among the many: in Tatary the number of schools, which was 35 in 1913, was 1730 in 1933. The Cherkesses possessed 94 percent of illiterates in 1914; nowadays there is not a single one–0%. There were 26 times as many schools in Daghestan in 1931 as there were in 1914 and 38 times as many in Kazkistan. Seventy different languages are cultivated in the USSR. Twenty of these were not written and had to be stabilized by being given alphabets.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 201-205

The increase in fixed assets between 1913 and 1940 gives a precise idea of the incredible effort supplied by the Soviet people. Starting from an index of 100 for the year preceding the war, the fixed assets for industry reached 136 at the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928. On the eve of the Second World War, twelve years later, in 1940, the index had risen to 1,085 points, i.e. an eight-fold increase in twelve years. The fixed assets for agriculture evolved from 100 to 141, just before the collectivization in 1928, to reach 333 points in 1940.
L’Office central de statistique pr�s le Conseil des ministres de l’U.R.S.S. Les Progr�s du pouvoir soviEtique depuis 40 ans en chiffres: Recueil statistique (Moscow: ƒditions en langues Etrang�res, 1958), p. 26
For eleven years, from 1930 to 1940, the Soviet Union saw an average increase in industrial production of 16.5 per cent.
L’Office central de statistique pr�s le Conseil des ministres de l’U.R.S.S. Les Progr�s du pouvoir soviEtique depuis 40 ans en chiffres: Recueil statistique (Moscow: ƒditions en langues Etrang�res, 1958), p. 30
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoor 2straat 25-27 2600, p. 51 [p. 42 on the NET]

In the early 30s it [ Moscow] was a rapidly expanding modern city, as well as the traditional capital of the Soviet empire. Its growth was indeed spectacular. At a pace unthinkable in other countries it changed physically, clearing slums, expanding; whole blocks of old houses were replaced by splendid buildings, narrow winding lanes were straightened and broadened into magnificent thoroughfares. Today Moscow has no less than 2260 libraries (with a total of 65 million books), sixty museums, 100 colleges, 30 theaters–some of them world-famous–the largest Academy of Science in the world, an Academy of Medicine with 25 large research centers, an Academy of Agricultural Science with 13 research stations, an Academy of Architecture, an Academy of Pedagogy and, among many others, an Academy of Ballistics.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 127

We could also boast some remarkable accomplishments in our lives. In spite of muddles, mistakes, and blunders, tens of millions of people became literate, general secondary education was introduced, higher education and health care were provided free of charge, formerly backward peoples on the outskirts of the czarist empire were introduced to the best in the national and world cultures. And the low rents, cheap city transport, low crime, and full employment–all this was taken for granted.
Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin’s Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 387

COMMUNISTS ARE THE MOST ENERGETIC AND SACRIFICING

The Party Purge (Chistka)–Lenin’s rule that no drones or sluggards might remain in the party has not been forgotten, and it is not always pleasant to pay the heavy party dues and give up any salary over 225 rubles monthly.
One often hears a man or woman, even communists themselves, say:
“I would never marry a communist. They are so busy that home life scarcely exists.”
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 359

SU CHILDREN AND PIONEERS ARE THE GREATEST

The Pioneers have a sort of honor system of self-government and discipline at school and are the freest, most upstanding, and intelligent children I have ever met anywhere. They are clean, which Russians used not to be; they play games for fun and think their country is the greatest ever. They know about sex at an early age and it does not worry them–in this respect all Russians are singularly natural and matter of fact–and they think it is a disgrace to be rich and have other people work for you. They do not care a rap about what Americans call comfort, but they know the joy of united effort and have an opportunity to take part in national life in drives or campaigns or investigations or what not to a degree enjoyed by no other children in the world. The girls are just the same as the boys and they are “swell,” and hard as life is here in Russia this correspondent is willing to go on record that no youngsters anywhere have a better time or are likely to make more useful citizens.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 361

STALIN OPPOSES EQUAL WAGES

July 5, 1931–Stalin’s “PROGRAM SPEECH”
“In many of our factories the wage system is such as to leave no difference between the skilled and unskilled worker and between hard and easy labor,” he said. “This leads to unskilled workers showing no interest in raising their qualifications, and skilled workers move from factory to factory in search of a place where their qualifications will be more valued. To give this shifting a free hand would undermine our industry, wreck our plan of production, and stop improvement in the quality of manufactured goods. We must destroy such equal wages. It is unbearable to see the locomotive driver receiving the same wages as the bookkeeper.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 387

But, it may be asked, why did Stalin stress greater wages for greater service?…
What Stalin saw and wished to correct was an overhasty tendency to equalize wages in pursuit of “100 percent” communism at a time when, in fact, the collectivist system could not yet assure the masses of an adequate return for their labor or assure dominant individuals adequate recognition.
Stalin said there was no communism yet and even the penultimate step to communism–namely, socialism–was barely established. It is, therefore, necessary to maintain for some time to come direct monetary rewards to stimulate individual effort.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 390

At the same time as the new peasant policy in 1933, the official class came clearly and unmistakably to the fore in the State and in all official life. Now it was explained that the old principle of the revolution requiring equal distribution of all necessaries and luxuries, and the attempt to give the same payment to all occupied persons, were simply a Trotskyist heresy. With the completion of the first Five-year Plan, Socialism had been built up in the Soviet Union. But that did not mean equal pay for all and universal equality.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 211

Piece-work, bonuses, Taylorism and individual competitive stunts were organized by factory directors throughout the USSR under different names and with different objectives….
The murmured complaints of those who condemned this process, because it enabled some workmen to earn more than others, received a sharp rebuke from the General Secretary himself: “By equality we do not mean the leveling of personal requirements and conditions of life, but the suppression of classes; that is to say, equal enfranchisement for every worker after the overthrow and expropriation of the capitalists. It is the duty of everyone to work according to his capacity, and the right of everyone to be paid according to the work he does. Marxism starts from the fact that the needs and tastes of men can never be alike, nor equal either in quantity or quality.”
As usual, in spite of Stalin’s eminently sane way of looking at such controversial points, many of his subordinates carried the schemes to such excesses….
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 77

Three reproaches have been leveled at Stalin and his Soviets: that they are antipatriotic, that they take away everyone’s property, and that they repress every individual’s intelligence in a universal equalization. All three are false.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 153

As regards the fable of equalization, we find that it had been derided by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin alike. In the land which has raised science to the status of a divinity, superior talent, higher education, and greater application are better rewarded in money and honor than anywhere else in the world. As the Western world has taken pleasure in reproaching the Soviets successively that they applied too much or too little equalization, I asked Stalin how the newly introduced piecework, implying an uneven wage scale, could be reconciled with Marxian principles. He answered:
“A completely socialized state, where all receive the same amount of bread and meat, the same kind of clothes, the same products, and exactly the same amounts of these products–such a Socialism was not recognized by Marx…. So long, then, as the distinction of class is not entirely obliterated, people will be paid according to their productive efficiency, each according to his capacity. That is the Marxist formula for the first stage of socialism.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 154

Stalin is similarly undogmatic regarding Marxian theories. They must stand the test of use. For instance, in the early days of the Russian Revolution, wages were much more uniform than they are today. It was found that bonuses to workers and managers brought better results. Wide differentials in pay exist today….
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 12

A different system has also brought different incentives into play in the Soviet Union. The powerful profit motive does not exist. Soviet citizens cannot dream of becoming millionaires through having others work for them. This does not mean, however, that Sovietism makes no appeal to self interest. Stalin believes that self interest is not harmful as long as it can be synchronized with the public welfare. He has tried to build a system of rewards for achievement without private monopoly and private profit.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 65

Wages are determined by results. The more a worker produces, the more he is paid. A truck driver I met in Moscow in 1944 had been getting as high as $600 per month. A certain norm is set for every job, and the more the worker exceeds this, the more he is paid. This inequality has been greeted with cheers and groans, according to the point of view, as a departure from socialist principles. Stalin has denied this when he said, “These people evidently think that socialism calls for equality, for leveling the requirements and the personal lives of all members of society. Needless to say, such an assumption has nothing in common with Marxism…. By equality Marxism means not equality in personal requirements and personal life, but the abolition of classes, i.e. (a) the equal emancipation of all toilers from exploitation, after the capitalists have been overthrown and expropriated, (b) the equal abolition for all of private property in the means of production, after this has been transformed into the property of the whole society, (c) the equal duty of all to work according to their ability, and the equal right of all toilers to receive according to their requirements. And Marxism starts out with the assumption that people’s abilities and requirements are not, and cannot be, equal in quality or quantity, either in the period of socialism or of communism.”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 65

This does not mean that in setting to work with these purely moral incentives there can be no exaggerations and no mistakes. Stalin himself has emphasized this point insofar as concerns despotic measures– too childishly despotic in a blissfully unconscious way at present–such as the mathematically equal distribution of salaries and the strict leveling of everyone–measures having a somewhat clumsy and demagogic character which make them more harmful than useful in the development, still so immature, of individual and collective social personality.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 145

In order to put an end into this evil we must get rid of equalitarianism and break down the old wage scales. In order to put an end to this evil we must set up a wage scale that will take into account the difference between skilled labor and unskilled labor, between heavy work and light work. It cannot be tolerated that the rolling mill hand in a steel mill should earn no more than a sweeper. It cannot be tolerated that a locomotive driver on a railway should earn only as much as a copying clerk. Marx and Lenin said that the difference between skilled and unskilled work would continue to exist even under socialism and even after classes had been abolished, that only under communism would this difference disappear and that, therefore, even under socialism “wages” must be paid according to labor performed and not according to need. But our industrialist and trade union equalitarians do not agree with this and opine that that difference has already disappeared under our Soviet system. Who is right, Marx and Lenin, or our equalitarians? We may take it that Marx and Lenin are right. But if so, it follows that whoever draws up wage scales on the “principle” of equality, and ignores the difference between skilled and unskilled labor, is at loggerheads with Marxism and Leninism.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 131

But the Socialist movement did not promise that immediately industry and agriculture became socially owned and controlled, the unskilled laborer, irrespective of the service he was rendering to society, would get the same wage as the works manager. It promised to rid both laborer and manager of the necessity of carrying an exploiting class on their backs. It did not promise that they would get the same wage in return for the service they were rendering.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 93

Perhaps the most important aspect of his [Stalin] social policy was his fight against the equalitarian trends. He insisted on the need for a highly differentiated scale of material rewards for labor, designed to encourage skill and efficiency. He claimed that Marxists were no levellers in the popular sense; and he found support for his thesis in Marx’s well-known saying that even in a classless society workers would at first be paid according to their labor and not to their needs.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 338

Somewhat later I brought the conversation round to the surprising change of front that communism had made in abandoning the old theory of equality and introducing piece-work in its place, thus giving the energetic worker a chance to earn more than his companion. “We were astonished,” I concluded, “when you yourself characterized equalization as the remains of middle-class prejudice.” Stalin answered: “A completely socialized State where all receive the same amount of bread and meat, the same kind of clothes, the same products in exactly the same amount of each product–such Socialism was not recognized by Marx. Marx merely says that so long as the classes are not entirely wiped out and so long as work has not become the object of desire–for now most people look upon it as a burden –there are many people who would like to have other people do more work than they. So long, then, as the distinction of class is not entirely obliterated, people be paid according to their productive efficiency, each according to his capacity. That is the Marxist formula for the first stage of Socialism. When Socialism has reached the complete stage everyone will do what he is capable of doing and for the work which he has done he will be paid according to his needs. It should be perfectly clear that different people have different needs, great and small. Socialism has never denied the difference in personal tastes and needs either in kind or in extent. Read Marx’s criticism of Stirner and the Gotha programme. Marx there attacks the principal of equalization. That is a part of primitive peasant psychology, the idea of equalization. It is not Socialistic. In the West they look upon the thing in such a primitive way that they imagine we want to divide up everything evenly. That is the theory of Babeuf. He never knew anything about scientific Socialism. Even Cromwell wanted to level everything.”
Although I thought him wrong in regard to Cromwell it was not my business to enter into a historical argument with Stalin.
Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 382

HOW INVENTORS SHOULD BE TREATED

November 13, 1931–the whole force of the dominant Bolshevik party, which in practice is intensely autocratic and organized with military discipline, is bent upon putting over collectivism and crushing individualism in the sense in which individualism implies personal gain by making others work for one, not, however, in the sense of personal reward for one’s own good work.
Take, for instance, the hypothetical case of Thomas Edison under the present Soviet system. He would get from his own inventions not only honor but monetary award. He would be placed in charge of an invention department at a high salary, receive quarters for his own use, an automobile, and the like on privileged terms and get credit for the work produced by his staff.
He would be a figure of national prominence, but he would not be allowed to make a cent of personal profit from the inventions produced in his own office.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 389
It is often said that under a socialist economy there will be no rewards for inventors. Stalin, however, enacted a law providing that from the moment that an invention is recognized as useful the inventor will be paid. He does not have to wait until it is actually utilized.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 79

HOW ARE THE MOST ENERGETIC PEOPLE TREATED IN SU

What, then, it may be asked, becomes of the exceptions to the average in Russia, of the dominant type that is not content to except the lot of his fellows and wants and is able to get ahead? I made bold to say that in no country in the world are there such opportunities for this type as in the Soviet Union; that is, to get what this type wants–leadership, power, and the esteem of others.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 389

STALIN’S SU WAS REAL SOCIALISM

Foreigners seem to think because Karl Marx demanded the possession and control of production and means a production for his Socialist state, that this was the beginning and end of socialism. Theoretically of course, it is true, but in practise the thing which distinguishes a real working socialist system from a pseudo-socialist system is the abolition of the power of money and the profit motive and of the possibility for any individual or group of individuals to gain surplus value from the work of others. This and this alone is the true foundation of socialism. It does not exist in Germany and it does not exist in Italy, but in Soviet Russia today it is a cardinal principal which is absolute and definite and supported by the harshest of laws and rules and regulations. No less an expert in foreign affairs than David Lawrence suggested in hand article in the Saturday Evening Post of July 20, 1935, that there was no great difference in the systems of the USSR, Germany, and Italy, and said, “in none of these countries is there any semblance today of socialism.” This is sheer ignorance.
Duranty, Walter. I Write as I Please. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935, p. 339

(Sinclair’s comments only)
I could go on at length to cite criteria and to pass such judgments. I give you one simple method, as certain as litmus paper in a test-tube, to determine whether the Soviet Union has now become counter-revolutionary, as you claim. I am sure that Hitler has better sources of information about Russian affairs than you or I have; and when Hitler learns that the Soviet Union has become counter-revolutionary, he will reduce the ardor of his crusade against it. So also will the big business press of Paris, London, and New York. When that happens I will admit that Stalin has sold out the workers. In the meantime, I must hold to my position: not that the Soviet system is Socialism, not that it is a “utopia,” but that it is one of history’s great experiments, entitled to be studied and understood, and to be defended against those reactionary forces which are now arming and combining to destroy it.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia? Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 63

Today, Stalin still calls the USSR a socialist state. This it is, in the sense that the State, after absolutely abolishing all private property, has ended by appropriating, as its exclusive property, the factories, the subsoil, the means of transport, the mechanism of commerce, the land, and all that the Marxists, in their jargon, call “the means of production.”
Delbars, Yves. The Real Stalin. London, Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 408

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIALISM AND INDIVIDUALISM

It is no longer a question of what I do or what I get but of what we do and what we get. I venture to suggest that there could be no simpler definition of the difference between socialism and individualism.
Duranty, Walter. I Write as I Please. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935, p. 340

The “Market” and the “Centrally Planned” economies–the terms used by the UN–have exactly opposite problems. The great problem in the “West” is the threat of demand not keeping up with supply; for the entrepreneur or manager to sell his goods or services, and for the worker to sell his labor power; in the “East” the problem is supply not keeping up with demand. In the “West” the managers fear bankruptcy of their firms because they cannot find a market, and the workers fear losing their jobs. In the “East” managers fear their inability to fulfill the plan, because they cannot find the required inputs of goods and of workers, and the workers fear not finding the goods they need or want. In the “East” the
lines form at the retail outlets; in the “West” they form at the labor office and the factory gate.
Every person who has worked in both the “East” and the “West,” mostly emigrants, to whom I have presented this definition of the difference between the two economic systems has immediately agreed with it….
To me capitalism is unacceptable on moral grounds. It is based on the principle of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market–which implies that the other fellow has to sell in the cheapest and buy in the highest market. It is the exact opposite of the principle “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 289

MASSES SUPPORT BOLSHEVIKS AND STALIN’S SU

Nothing that may be said abroad about the tyranny and high-handedness of the Bolshevik regime can alter the fact that the Russian masses think and speak of “our” Rodina,” “our” technicians, “our” successes and “our” failures.
Duranty, Walter. I Write as I Please. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935, p. 341

Russian workers complain, and loudly, about many things–mainly bureaucracy and petty graft–but never that the entire system is run primarily in the interests of someone else. In general there is to be found a genuine spirit of cooperation.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 65

But peasant sentiment as a whole supports the Soviet regime for the simple reason that the peasants know any other possible regime would bring back the landlords–just as did the White regime in the civil wars.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 39

Attempts to explain Stalin’s popularity have often foundered on the obstacle of partisanship. Everyone admits that, in some way or another, he enjoyed mass support: “Although its nature and extent varied over the years, it is clear that there was substantial popular support for Stalinism from the beginning and through the very worst.
Nove, Alec, Ed. The Stalin Phenomenon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 113

…yet the question still rises of why he [Stalin] was so popular?
One reason may be that, despite the enormous moral failure and physical sacrifice, society as a whole did not become degraded, and quite a few achievements were accomplished in the economic, social and cultural spheres….
Major changes were wrought in industrial development. The statistics, though exaggerated, indicate that Lenin’s electrification plan for industry was fulfilled. By 1935 average gross output from heavy industry exceeded the pre-war level by 5.6 times. Having lived through the industrial breakdown caused by the First World War and the civil war, the people could not but be amazed at the huge energy and creative drive unleashed by the October Revolution. They could proudly tell themselves, “We can do a lot! Let’s complete the five-year plan in four!’ As if to confirm Stalin’s words, ‘Life has become better, life has become more joyful!’, by the end of the 1930’s hundreds of new factories and plants, roads, towns, palaces of culture, rest homes, hospitals, schools and laboratories had appeared, transforming the landscape.
The statistics for education are more impressive. There were nearly seven times more specialists [in the 1930’s] who had had higher education than in 1913, while those with secondary education increased by almost 28 times. Illiteracy fell dramatically.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 263-264

The great transformation that the country had gone through before the war had, despite all its dark sides, strengthened the moral fiber of the nation. The majority was imbued with a strong sense of its economic and social advance, which it was grimly determined to defend against danger from without.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 485

While the Russian government thus certainly is not a government by the people, it may claim that it is a government for the people, if not for the living then for the future generation. It may also claim that it possesses, in fact, the consent of the people to this dictatorship and its aims. For proof of this we do not rely on election figures and votes of confidence in the State and Party leadership, the value of which must be regarded as extremely doubtful.
The real proof comes from Russia at war, Soviet Russia at her supreme test. As we all know, Hitler was not the only one to be mistaken when he expected that the Stalin regime would crack up under the impact of the onslaught, that the Ukrainians and other nationals would cut loose and the Soviet State collapse. Even the Nazi Front reporters admit now that they have never come across anything like the courageous and dogged defense of the Russian troops who went on fighting even when retreating or surrounded, men and women, soldiers and civilians alike.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 41

CLERGY ARE MOSTLY REACTIONARY

… the clergy had been nothing but loyal servants of the Tsar. It was pointed out that the clergy had blessed guns and troops and had incited soldiers to attack although their religion said ‘Thou shalt not kill’.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 244

The Bolsheviks had three reasons for hostility towards the Church, two of which were obvious but the third more subtle. First, they regarded it as one of the principal pillars of the Tsarist regime, to which it was bound by ties that were centuries-old. It was also owner of vast wealth, and therefore by interest and tradition opposed to the Bolsheviks and their system.
Second, religion itself advocated the exact antithesis of Bolshevik teaching. The Bolsheviks wished to stir up the masses, to spur them to revolt, to make them think for themselves and to capitalize their discontent. Religion, they thought, was, as Marx put it, “opium for the people,” to keep them satisfied “in that state of life in which it pleased God to place them” here on earth, so that their submission and obedience would later win them a place in Heaven, as the parable of Lazarus and Dives suggests. But it was precisely this apathetic acceptance of misery and oppression that the Bolsheviks were most anxious to destroy, so that on these two counts they and the Church were immediately locked in conflict.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 45

RELIGION IS BEST FOUGHT BY IMPROVING THE LIVES OF PEOPLE

Stalin launched a new slogan: ‘Life has become easier and more cheerful!’ This was to define the style of living from then on. In the same speech Stalin declared that all opposition to religion was purposeless. Life had not yet been made so good or so carefree that men and women no longer needed to seek for consolation. So long as there continued to be distress and anxieties, there would always be people who hoped to find consolation in religion. If it was desired to combat religion, the way to do it was to work harder and to provide better satisfaction for human needs.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 245

STALIN DEFENDED THE CLERGY’S RIGHT TO VOTE IN 1936

Stalin himself proposed the draft constitution of 1936 at the Congress of Soviets…. There were several motions proposing that the clergy should not be entitled to civil rights or the franchise; it was urged that there was a danger that the clergy would carry on anti-Soviet agitation. The proposer of one of these motions contended that the granting of the franchise to the clergy might result in anti-Soviet members gaining admittance to the representative bodies. Stalin defended the grant of the franchise to the clergy. It was impossible, he contended, to make exceptions; all must have equal rights. It did not matter so very much if the clergy agitated; that would merely spur on the local Communist organizations to work harder and improve their propaganda. They had to learn to combat hostile propaganda…. Stalin’s defense of the rights of the clergy actually brought him popularity among the peasants.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 272

It is a fact that many leading Communists opposed granting secret and universal suffrage. They feared that the backwardness among certain sections of the people might make this dangerous. Stalin strongly supported the voting provisions and they were adopted. So far they have proved to be dangerous only to officials who were neglecting their duties–and this is what Stalin had hoped for and wants more of in the future.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 34

STALIN’S VIEWS OF NAZISM AND FASCISM

Lenin did not live into the period of Fascism…. Threatened by the Revolution, the decaying capitalism, in the countries in which the danger of revolution is greatest, throws off the mask of bourgeois democracy and sets up an undisguised dictatorship. According to Stalin, Fascism and Nazism are nothing but the form of State set up by capitalism when it is in mortal danger. As it is a matter of life and death, the powerful capitalist groups can give no further consideration to their fellow-capitalists. The center of the capitalist class, ‘monopoly capital’, assumes all economic and political power, against the smaller capitalists as well as the other classes.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 320-321

“I am referring not only to fascism in general, but, primarily, to fascism of the German type, which is wrongly called national socialism–wrongly because the most searching examination will fail to reveal even an atom of socialism in it.”
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 13, p. 299

Many try to take advantage of the ideas and slogans of socialism, which are popular among the masses. Leaders of petty-bourgeois movements are especially given to this tactic. German fascism, for example, masked its archreactionary content with the term “National Socialism.” Of course there was not a grain of socialism in either the ” Christian Communist Republic” in Paraguay or the “National Socialist” state in Germany.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 854

“But today? Where is the German sense of order today? Where is the respect for the law? The National Socialists break the law whenever they find it in their way. They shoot and bludgeon all round.
Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 380

And so they called to power the fascist party–which in order to hoodwink the people calls itself the National-Socialist party–well knowing that the fascist party, firstly, represents that section of the imperialist bourgeoisie which is the most reactionary and most hostile to the working-class,…
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 302

STALIN AND THE BOLSHEVIKS HAVE GREATLY REDUCED CLASS DIFFERENCES

Nevertheless, the Stalinist era has achieved something permanent for Russia herself–and this is interesting because Stalin himself, like all the other Russians, has helped to achieve the general advance. The division of the Russian people into two unequal classes, aristocrats and the common people, has entirely disappeared, so much so that today in Russia a man or woman of 30 can no longer recall it. All social barriers have fallen,….
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 399

STALIN’S BANK EXPROPRIATIONS ARE NECESSARY AND SUCCESSFUL

Whatever Lenin and Krassin calculated on obtaining as a result of the new tactic, they certainly were not prepared for the tremendous results of the efficacy of Stalin’s methods which soon appeared. It is customary in most biographies of Stalin to omit all mention of his directing part in the celebrated “expropriations,” or at best to gloss over them hurriedly as a rather discreditable episode. To take this course is to fail to understand the character Stalin, who never hesitated to call a spade a spade and never feared to except responsibility for his actions, irrespective of whether or not they met with general approval. If Lenin agreed and the ultimate success of the revolution was brought nearer, no other factors had any bearing on the problem.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 28

STALIN HAD AN EFFECTIVE ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROGRAM

The old reactionary control which the church maintained on spiritual and intellectual life, had been broken officially in 1917, by 1934 it was being replaced by modern educational methods directed at both children and adults.
With such stirring events going on around them, it becomes understandable why the provincial peoples lauded Stalin to the skies. For them he was, in sober fact, a deliverer and a savior.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 91

“Nevertheless,” Stalin went on, “the question of religious beliefs must be kept well in mind, must be handled with great care, because the religious feelings of the people must not be offended. These feelings have been cultivated in the people for many centuries, and great patience is called for on this question, because the stand towards it is important for the compactness and unity of the people.”
Hoxha, Enver. The Artful Albanian. London: Chatto & Windus, 1986, p. 130

Reviving some Russian traditions, Stalin slightly curbed party efforts to combat another: religion.
…The anti-religious campaign was relaxed in 1934. The League of Militant Atheists went into decline, its newspaper Bezbozhnik (The Atheist) closed down, and its membership dropped precipitously in numbers. At Easter time in 1935 the government authorized renewed sale in the markets, and later in state stores, of the special ingredients needed for the traditional Russian Easter cake. Toward the end of that year, the traditional Russian Christmas tree, proscribed after the revolution, made–unquestionably with Stalin’s approbation– an officially sponsored comeback as “New Year’s tree.” Since Russian Christians observe Christmas according to the Orthodox Church calendar, on 7th January, the eve of the new year was an appropriate time for the religiously inclined to set up the tree. Stalin wanted the populace to identify him with the policy of easing up a little on religion. That became clear when Komsomol delegates met in Moscow in April 1936 for the organization’s Tenth Congress. One principal speaker, Fainberg, revealed in his report that Stalin, in preliminary discussion of a draft of the new bylaws, rejected a clause that would have obliged the Komsomol to combat religion “decisively, mercilessly.” All it should do was to “explain patiently the harm of religious prejudices.”
…Soon afterward, in his speech before the Eighth Congress of Soviets on the draft new Constitution, Stalin opposed two suggested anti-religious amendments. One, which would have prohibited religious worship outright, was “not in accord with the spirit of our Constitution.” The other would have deprived not only ex-White Guardists and “former people” not engaged in useful work, but also clergyman, of voting a rights, or, alternatively, of the right to be elected. In opposing this proposal (in both forms) Stalin said the time had come to repeal the long-standing Soviet law depriving nonlaboring and exploiter elements of voting rights. “In the first place, not all former kulaks, White Guardists, or priests are hostile to the Soviet regime,” he said.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 327

MOST WORKERS ARE IRRESPONSIBLE AND TRANSIENT

In a letter around September 15, 1930, Stalin said to Molotov, “As the situation now stands, some of the workers labor honestly in accordance with socialist competition; others (the majority) are irresponsible and transient, yet the latter are as well provisioned as the first (if not better), enjoy the same privileges of vacations, sanatoria, insurance, etc. as the first. Is this not an outrage?”
Naumov, Lih, and Khlevniuk, Eds. Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1995, p. 219

WEALTH OF PEOPLE IN STALIN’S SU IS RELATIVELY EQUAL

No one can live very long in Russia without gaining an impression of leveling in the everyday life of the people. Not that absolute material equality, or anything like it, has been achieved. There are marked variations in the standards of living, not only among the people as a whole, but among the members of the Communist Party. But, whereas in other countries there is a tendency to display wealth, in Russia there is every impulse to hide it. The Communist or Soviet official who is observed to spend more freely than his modest salary would seem to permit is likely to be called on for an explanation, either by some Party tribunal or, in especially serious cases, by the secret police. Flaunting of wealth by the harassed private trader is likely to invite new visitations by the tax collecting authorities.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 50

Who owns the world? That is the basic question conditioning all hopes of social change. What is wrong with the world today, according to Marxists, is private ownership of the great productive processes which are socially operated. The way out is not backward to subsistence farms and handicraft; it is forward to social ownership. Not “share the wealth,” but jointly owned wealth, jointly organized by and for all who work…. From this economic equality, all other forms of equality will grow.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 17

PARTY DOES NOT MAKE EVERY DECISION FOR LOCAL SOVIETS AND COOPS

“In the Soviet Union…no important political or organizational problem is ever decided by our Soviets and other mass organizations without directives from the Party.” [Problems of Leninism by Stalin, page 33]
This does not mean that the local branches of the Communist Party attempt to decide every petty detail of the work of the Soviets, trade unions, and cooperatives. As a matter of fact they are expressly warned not to do this, but to leave to the above-mentioned organizations the maximum liberty and spontaneity of action consonant with the carrying out of the general lines of Party policy. But these general lines must always be carried out.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 58

VERY DIFFICULT TO BECOME A PARTY MEMBER

It is no easy matter to gain admission to the ruling Party in the Soviet Union. Workers are preferred above other classes of the population as candidates for membership; but even a manual worker, the aristocrat of Soviet Russia, must obtain two recommendations from old Party members and pass through a period of six month’s probation before he may be admitted to full-fledged membership. For peasants, employees, and intellectuals a larger number of sponsors and longer periods of probation are required.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 62

It seemed to be about as difficult to pass a camel through the eye of a needle as to bring a non-proletarian into this Communist local branch. On the other hand, worker candidates for membership were apt to pass even when serious criticisms were voiced against them.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 63

POLITBURO IS THE SUPREME AUTHORITY IN THE SU

The actual highest governing authority in the Party, and hence for the whole country, is not the large unwieldy Central Committee, but an inner steering group of nine members and eight alternates, elected by the Central Committee and known as the Political Bureau (Politburo).
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 63

… the present members of the Politburo of the Communist Party Central Committee, which is the ultimate repository of power in the Soviet Union.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 101

Stalin’s chief post is not in the government, but as general secretary of the Communist Party, which would certainly remove him if his policy and actions should ever discredit him with the people; at present he is by far the most popular man in the country.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 69

The Political Bureau has full responsibility and power in the interims between meetings of the Central Committee, and is thus the most important single party body.
In my talk with Stalin in 1926 I put the following question: “conservatives claim that the Communist Party and the government are one and the same because they are all controlled by the Political Bureau. How far is this true?”
Stalin’s eyes flashed with a characteristic twinkle and his face lighted with a smile as he said, “The only difference between our party control and that of foreign countries is that we do things in the open whereas abroad they do them secretly. The conservatives in England have a shadow cabinet and in most of your states in America there are political bosses who sometimes have more power than your elected officials.
“What grounds have foreigners to criticize our Political Bureau which is openly elected by the Party and known to everyone, when in Europe there are shadow cabinets and in the United States bosses who are not elected by the people, but rule nevertheless. It is humorous!
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 36

It has been argued that in these years basic decisions were made in the Politburo of the Central Committee, and the Committee itself was bypassed. There may be some truth to this, but it is not the essential truth. In fact, it harbors a distortion of the truth, for it implies a basic dictatorship in a nation which–in 1936–adopted a constitution giving citizens a broader spectrum of rights–not only political but economic–than any in world history. What the USSR achieved, was a new form of democracy, a mass democracy and the fact that mass democracy does not follow all the structures (and charades) of bourgeois democracy does not mean it is not democracy. On the other hand, it is certainly true that in a socialist government–or any government—some decisions, both substantive and executive, must be made by a small top body. Whether that body is responsive to the mass of the population, and has open channels for that response, is the question. In these years this was certainly so in the USSR….
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 77

To another critic, who demanded more freedom of discussion in the party, Stalin replied that the party was no debating society. Russia was ‘surrounded by the wolves of imperialism; and to discuss all important matters in 20,000 party cells would mean to lay all one’s cards before the enemy ‘.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 258

Somebody mentioned the need for more democracy in the Party. Did he mean, wondered Stalin, that important and urgent decisions should be made not by the Politburo, but through discussions in 20,000 primary Party organizations? If that were the system, the class and foreign enemy would rejoice at knowing in advance all Soviet plans, strengths, and weaknesses. The position of the Soviet Union unfortunately required secrecy to surround decisionmaking: “You must remember that you are surrounded by enemies, salvation may be in your ability to strike a sudden blow, to execute an unexpected maneuver, in speed.”
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 226

HIGH QUALITY OF PARTY MEMBERSHIP

It is my personal impression that the best Communists, as a rule, are to be found in two classes: the intelligentsia whose revolutionary activity began in pre-war times, and the more earnest and sincere manual workers, especially those who fought on the various fronts of the civil war.
Is never possible for a large ruling group to maintain the uniformly high standards of devotion and sincerity which usually characterize a small persecuted sect…. Today a worker may join the Communist Party because he thinks this will be an insurance against dismissal; an employee may put in an application for membership because he hopes this will be the stepping stone to a higher post; a student may become a Communist because this will enhance his chances of being admitted to the university.
The Communist Party leadership is quite alive to these inevitable dangers of internal deterioration and tries to guard against them by enforcing a rigorous disciplinary code through the agency of the Control Commission, which has among its members many Old Bolsheviks with a stern attitude toward any yearning after bourgeois fleshpots on the part of the younger Party recruits.
Functioning with the aid of a network of local commissions established all over the country, the Control Commission every year excludes from the Party a little over 2 percent of its total membership. Expulsion is the supreme penalty; milder forms of punishment, such as reprimands and demotions, are more commonly applied. The most familiar causes of expulsion from the Party are drunkenness, embezzlement, heretical political views, and what is rather quaintly called in Russian “connection with an alien element.” This last phrase means that the person concerned has too many close associations, through marriage or otherwise, with “bourgeois” circles, in which no self-respecting proletarian is supposed to move.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 67-68

It is the aim of the Communists to induce everyone who is outstanding in any respect to become a member of his Party. In this respect the Party is like a fraternity in college. It tries to attract the best leaders. But there are many millions in Russia who sympathize with the Party but do not join. Membership brings few if any privileges and imposes heavy duties. Each member must pay the party treasury an income tax on his salary. Every member must devote at least several evenings a week to volunteer Party work. A communist is expected to set an example to others in daily life and work. If he works in a factory he must turn out more goods and be absent fewer times than the non-party worker. If he is at the front he must display more bravery than the others. If he fails to perform a duty or breaks a law, the punishment is more severe because of the higher obligation resting upon a member of the party.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 37

For ordinary members, membership meant no privileges, only some duties. Party members, in addition to being expected to be models both in their work and in their private life, had to assume a nagruska (load), voluntary work assigned to them by the Party with their consent.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 137

THEY TRY TO GET MOSTLY WORKERS IN THE PARTY

As has already been pointed out, there is a systematic effort to maintain a predominance of manual workers in the ranks of the ruling Communist Party.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 163

SU PRESS MORE RELIABLE THAN FOREIGN REPORTERS

I think a comparison of the news dispatches from Moscow and those sent about Russia from Riga, Helsinki, Berlin, and other places outside the country would demonstrate beyond any doubt that, despite the handicaps which are implicit even in the mildest censorship, Russia can be reported more reliably, more accurately, and more intelligently from Moscow than from any foreign city.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 395

In reporting trials in Britain the journalist–in order to avoid contempt of court–has to keep closely to the facts. In dealing with the Moscow trials he could use his imagination to the full.
It would be an instructive exercise for the reader to peruse the verbatim report of the trial of the Metro-Vickers Engineers, the Radek-Pyatakov, or the Bukharin-Rykov-Yagoda trials, and then compare these records with the press reports. He would have very great difficulty in realizing that he was reading about the same events, for ever since the trial of the Shakhty wreckers in 1928 the press has labored unceasingly to create a prejudice against Soviet justice.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 237

FOREIGN PRESS FREE TO ROAM THROUGHOUT SU

The assertion is often made that correspondents and foreigners in general in Russia are so subjected to official supervision that they are unable to make any independent investigation or to form any correct idea of actual conditions. I am convinced from personal experience that this assertion is baseless….
But for the correspondent who wishes to take the time and trouble, working-class and peasant Russia, the Russia of 90 percent of the population, lies open to explore as he wishes. Except for Soviet Central Asia (which was also a restricted zone for foreign travelers before the War, on account of the proximity to India and the fear of British spies), one can travel anywhere in the Soviet Union. I have repeatedly struck off the main lines of communication to visit factory settlements and peasant villages and talked freely with the people without encountering any evidences of official espionage or obstruction; in fact it is a general rule that the further one goes away from Moscow the less one sees and hears of the GPU.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 395

Friends back in the States had told us that in Russia they only show you the good things that they want you to see. Already we had found our friends wrong. They showed us around, of course, but we were always free to go where we wanted to.
Dykstra, Gerald. A Belated Rebuttal on Russia. Allegan, Mich.: The Allegan Press, c1928, p. 62

PEOPLE ENTER THE US FOR THE DOLLAR NOT FREEDOM

There are of course people in the U.S.A. who openly and courageously carry on the struggle for equality, who do not bow down to the dollar, but they are very few. Once upon a time, before the name of Abraham Lincoln had dimmed, fighters for freedom sought refuge in America from foreign oppression. But today it is seldom fighters for freedom who seek refuge there anymore; it is those who want to get closer to Mr. Dollar.
Gromyko, Andrei. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, c1989. p. 74

CAPITALIST SAYS THE SYSTEM MUST CHANGE RATHER THAN CHANGING INDIVIDUALS

Whenever I ask myself what brings increasing visitors to Moscow, what they want here and what they find, and why the eyes of the world turn more and more to the Soviet Union with a questing hope that hardly yet dares call itself belief, there flashes into my mind the remark made to me in 1930 at Dnieprostroy by the young and disillusioned son of a Wall Street millionaire.
Dnieprostroy in those days was the first of the famous giants of the new Soviet Russia, “the largest power dam in the world.” … It was then that my companion said: “I think that Dnieprostroy has answered the question that brought me to Russia.”
What question? I asked.
Whether the world is to be changed by trying one at a time to improve human beings or by changing the social environment that makes human beings.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 3-4

WHAT IS FASCISM

For fascism is the last stand of a desperate capitalism which can no longer use the fruits of science and machine production, which dare no longer permit either peace or democracy, since it must brutally refuse to its victims that abolition of poverty which is already technically possible in the world.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 10

HONESTY COMES FROM THE RIGHT SYSTEM NOT PREACHING

In a world whose economic structure fails to reward honesty and altruism, a Marxist would not spend his efforts preaching these virtues, but in creating an economic system were honesty really prospered, where each man’s success must be built on the success, rather than the ruin, of others.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 14

CLASSES EXIST WHETHER US PEOPLE WANT THEM OR NOT

Millions of Americans resent the very idea of classes, and are indignant at “inflaming class consciousness” where it does not yet exist. But Marxian classes are not epithets inciting to riot; they are categories in a scientific analysis.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 18

WHAT IS A REAL DICTATORSHIP

Most Americans shrink from the word “dictatorship.” … the word dictatorship arouses for them the utterly incredible picture of one man giving everybody orders?
No country is ruled by one man. This assumption is a favorite red herring to disguise the real rule. Power resides in ownership of the means a production–by private capitalists in Italy, Germany and also in America, by all workers jointly in the USSR. This is the real difference which today divides the world into two systems, in respect to the ultimate location of power. When a Marxist uses the word “dictatorship,” he is not alluding to personal rulers or to methods of voting; he is contrasting rule by property with rule by workers.
The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I’ve talked with many of them, from the President down. Some of them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government, legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the reason. The difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of millions….
Power over the means of production–that gives rule. Men who have it are dictators. This is the power the workers of the Soviet Union seized in the October Revolution. They abolished the previously sacred right of men to live by ownership of private property. They substituted the rule: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”
Strong, Anna L. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 39-41

WORKERS OVER 18 CAN VOTE AND RUN FOR OFFICE

All “toilers” over the age of 18 may elect and be elected; the word is interpreted to include students, housewives, old people who have passed the age of work as well as those more formally known as workers. Voting thus extends to a younger age than is common elsewhere, and there are no disqualifications for transient residents, paupers, migratory workers, soldiers, sailors, such as exist in most countries; even non-citizens may vote if they work in a Soviet industry. There are no restrictions for sex, creed, or color, not even for illiteracy. The only significant restriction relates to “exploiting elements, but the steady decrease of privately owned enterprises has cut the disfranchised to 2.5 per cent of the population in the 1934 elections; by 1937 it is expected that all will have the vote.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 59

CENTRAL COMMITTEE IS THE SUPREME RULER OF THE SU

There have been statements by Stalin that ushered in great changes, as when he told the agrarian Marxist conference that the time had come to “abolish kulaks as a class.” Yet he only announced the time for a process which every Marxist knew was on the program. His famous article “Dizziness from Success” which called a sudden halt on March 2, 1930, to widespread excesses of Communists in rural regions, was regarded by foreign correspondents and peasants alike as an “order from Stalin.” Stalin at once disclaimed any personal prestige therefrom accruing, stating in the press: “Some people think that the article is the result of the personal initiative of Stalin. That of course is nonsense. The Central Committee does not exist to permit personal initiative of anybody in matters of this kind. It was a reconnaissance undertaken by the Central Committee.”
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 110

HUMAN NATURE IS NOT STATIC

Unlike those who justify ancient abuses with the formula, “You can’t change human nature,” the Marxist knows that human nature is constantly changing.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 250

ENVIRONMENT IS PRIMARY, TEACHING IS SECONDARY

For men in all ages have desired to change, to become in some direction “better.” Moral teachers have urged them to effect this by an emotional decision to be good, honest, industrious. But this is a struggle in the dark with forces which the human being does not understand. His emotional conversion lasts as long as he can focus will and attention. But if the old environment continues, the old habits reassert themselves.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 251

Can a prostitute change her environment so that street-walking will become unnecessary? Only if an honest job is somewhere accessible. And gangsters reform? Only if honesty is really the best policy; for him who would prosper under capitalism there is a time to be honest and a time to steal, and the criminal is the unlucky or stupid person who stole at the wrong time and in the unaccepted manner. Only a social system which insures to ordinary honest labor greater rewards than can be obtained by even the luckiest dishonesty will produce instinctively honest men.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 252

For crime, in the Marxian view, arises from the conflicts of a class-exploiting society and will follow classes and exploitation into oblivion….
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 264

PEOPLE IN THE SU ARE FREE AND INDIVIDUALS

To many persons in capitalist countries these words will be only partly intelligible. They have been so accustomed to considering that their own life is “free” and Soviet life “regimented” that they cannot at once grasp a viewpoint which holds the exact opposite. Yet even the casual observer of human beings today in the Soviet Union notices that while they have certain characteristics in common they are by no means regimented into uniformity, but show a vivid individuality at least as great as is found anywhere in the world.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 287

STALIN: You say that in order to build our socialist society we sacrificed personal liberty and suffered privations. Your question suggests that socialist society denies personal liberty. That is not true. Of course, in order to build something new one must economize, accumulate resources, reduce one’s consumption for a time and borrow from others. If one wants to build a house one saves up money, cuts down consumption for a time, otherwise the house would never be built. How much more true is this when it is a matter of building a new human society! We had to cut down consumption somewhat for a time, collect the necessary resources, and exert a great effort. This is exactly what we did and we built the socialist society.
But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home, and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Stalin, J. The Stalin-Howard Interview. New York: International Publishers, 1936, p. 13

We are taught to believe that the freedom allowed in a democratic nation is better than anything else in the world, including the freedom in a socialist republic. How can this be true when there is always a ruling class who controls the wealth and has the power to order what is to be taught in the schools, suppress the press, dictate politics, and even sway the courts? A student who criticizes the teachings in a capitalistic university unless his professor is broad-minded, is in danger of flunking. If a journalist writes a truthful article directed against the status quo he runs chances of losing his job. If a politician votes against measures favorable to the “financial interests” he will be defeated in the next election. And if a worker is hauled into court–guilty or not guilty–and has no money to hire a shyster lawyer or bride a judge, he goes to prison. Wherein lies the freedom or justice of such an order? The difference between a socialist republic and a democratic capitalist country, is that in the former the worker is really free and the capitalist is suppressed, whereas in the latter the worker is educated to believe in the wonderful so-called liberties which he is lucky to have a taste of, and the capitalist is really the free man. The worker in the Soviet Union does not have to be afraid of complaining to his “boss” or of criticizing factory conditions to the “shop committee,” but if a worker did this same thing in a capitalist industry it would cost him his job. The Soviet newspapers frequently receive letters from Russian workers presenting their objections to this or that. These letters are not only printed, but the suggestions are welcome, contrary to general opinion. Whereas the “Voice of the People” columns here are merely the feeble moan of a selected few.
Wright, Russell. One-Sixth of the World’s Surface. Hammond, Ind., The Author, c1932, p. 118

FREEDOM IS DIFFERENT FOR DIFFERENT PEOPLE

When the means a production became the factory, the meaning of freedom slowly changed. Freedom became to the owner the right to fix prices and wages, to the worker the right to drift from job to job, seeking an easier boss. Freedom in government became the “right to choose one’s rulers,” not the right to own and rule.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 289

THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE 1936 CONSTITUTION CAME ABOUT AND MASS SUGGESTIONS

One fruit of those happy days remained for history–the new Soviet constitution was born in those years.
The USSR has always claimed to be democratic; this the West has always denied…. Whatever Americans thought of Soviet elections Soviet people took part in them at least as energetically and hopefully as we. They not only voted for candidates; they wrote their demands into the “Nakaz,” the “People’s Instructions,” which became the first order of business for incoming governments.
In the 1934 elections, my husband spent every evening for a month as a precinct worker, visiting every person in his precinct and stimulating them not only to come out but to list things they wanted the government to do….
Since the 1922 Constitution, however, great changes had taken place. The basic wealth of the land was publicly owned; the people were no longer illiterate. Indirect, unequal voting from the place of work no longer fitted; people everywhere knew of their national heroes and could vote for them directly. On February 6, 1935, the Congress of Soviets decided that the Constitution should be changed to conform to the changed life of the nation. A commission of 31 historians, economists, and political scientists, under Stalin’s chairmanship, was instructed to draft a new Constitution, more responsive to the people’s will, and more adapted to a socialist state.
The method of adoption was highly significant. For a year, the commission studied all historic forms–both of states and of voluntary societies–through which men have organized for joint aims. Then a proposed draft was tentatively approved in June 1936 by the government and submitted to the people in 60 million copies. It was discussed in 527,000 meetings, attended by 36 million people. For months, every newspaper was full of people’s letters. Some 154,000 amendments were proposed–many, of course, duplicates, and many others more suitable for a legal code than a constitution. Forty-three amendments were actually made by this popular initiative.
In the great white hall of the Kremlin Palace, 2,016 delegates assembled, in December of 1936, for the Constitutional Convention….
The Constitution reflected the changes in the country. It began with the form of the state and the basic types of property. Land, resources, industries were “state property, the wealth of the whole people.” Cooperative property of collective farms, and “personal property” of citizens in their income, their homes, and chattels, were “protected by law.” Elections were to be by “universal, direct, equal and secret ballot for all citizens over 18.”
The section on “rights and duties of citizens” was cheered section by section; it was the most sweeping list of rights any nation ever guaranteed. The right to life was covered by four headings: “the right to work, to leisure, to education, to material support.” The right to liberty was expanded into six paragraphs, including freedom of conscience, of worship, of speech, of press, of assembly, demonstration and organization, freedom from arbitrary arrest, inviolability of home and of correspondence, “irrespective of nationality or race.”
The Constitution was a direct challenge to Nazi-Fascism, then in power in Germany. The Nazis called democracy outworn; all Soviet speakers hailed democracy and socialism as “unconquerable.” Hitler preached “superior and inferior races.” Stalin challenged him in one of the most sweeping statements ever made of human equality: “neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness nor the stage of political development can justify national and race inequality.”
Tens of millions of people poured into the winter streets of the USSR to hail the event with bands. Progressives around the world hailed it. “Mankind’s greatest achievement,” said Mrs. Sun Yat-sen in faraway China.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 55

By November 1936, 1,651,592 people in Leningrad, Smolensk and their environs had made comments or suggestions. A sampling of 2,600 a these shows that two of the four most common suggestions were the requests that local village soviets be given the right to arrest people without the sanction or participation of the state procurator (which the constitution had demanded), and that former nobles, Tsarist gendarmes, kulaks, priests, and other “class alien” elements not be given the right to vote. A collective farmer from the Leningrad region believed (contrary to law and to Stalin’s orders) that ideally, “any citizen of our country can arrest such persons who wreck construction.” A peasant from Kaluga warned that “Kulaks and priests must not be given electoral rights,” and at one collective farm meeting, everyone who spoke wanted to limit or deny electoral rights to priests, former gendarmes, pomeshchiki, and policemen. Stalin himself had to publicly intervene to defend the idea of suffrage for the class-aliens.
Other remarks from the masses suggest the prevalence of the popular attitudes that made Stalinism possible. The worker Kombarov from Leningrad said that “Using free speech, meetings, and so forth to oppose the socialist state constitutes a betrayal of the country and should carry heavy punishment.” Another peasant, showing the traditional Russian genealogical approach to things, thought that “relatives having connections with traitors should face the full severity of the law.”
Nove, Alec, Ed. The Stalin Phenomenon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 126

The film changed, and now it was the Bukharin of 1936 that I saw before me. The moment was the drafting of the famous “Stalin Constitution,” of which he [Bukharin] in fact was the real author.
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 3

The composition of the Drafting Committee [of the 1936 Constitution] was a stroke of genius on Stalin’s part: here sat representatives of non-Russian republics and here too sat the leaders of the oppositionists themselves!
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 282

The discussions occasioned by the draft of a new Soviet Constitution provided an opportunity for Soviet citizens to express their views on a broad range of issues. The published record of these discussions, replete with statistics on the number of meetings, speakers and proposals, and accounts of labor enthusiasm, not surprisingly presented a picture of overwhelming support for the principles embodied in the Constitution.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 15

Two months after Kirov’s assassination, on Feb. 6, 1935, the 7th Congress of the Soviets passed a motion on the need for a new constitution and elected a commission which was to draft it. The commission, headed by Stalin, included men like Bukharin, Radek, Sokolnikov, as well as their future prosecutor Vyshinsky. In the course of the next year and a half the commission frequently met in Stalin’s presence. Bukharin and Radek were the chief authors of the new constitution, which they often discussed in the columns of Pravda and Izvestia. The constitution was to be adopted by the next congress of the Soviets, in November 1936, several months after the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 359

STALIN’S SOCIAL PROGRAMS ARE FAR BETTER THAN THE NAZIS

In Germany, before the outbreak of the war, Hitler permitted 60,000 young people to attend the institutions of higher learning; in Russia, Stalin gave permission to 600,000 recruiting young workers and peasants alike as students in newly founded military academies which are today the pride of the country. Hitler drove distinguished scholars out of the country because their fathers had inherited a religion different from the one which he himself does not even believe in. Stalin invited these scholars to his country and gave them important tasks and high salaries. When we consider the care of the aged in Russia, we need only set by its side the answer which a Berlin doctor gave over the telephone to a friend of mine who called for help. He asked how old the patient was, then said: “Seventy! It’s no longer worth while! I’m not coming!”
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 137

SU FOSTERS CULTURE

Books, radio, and film educate the Soviet citizen, who is kept away from banalities and, above all, from obscenities.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 139

The nation has, nevertheless, advanced far in most fields of its existence. Its material apparatus of production, which about 1930 was still inferior to that of any medium-sized European nation, has so greatly and so rapidly expanded that Russia is now the first industrial power in Europe and the second in the world. Within little more than one decade the number of her cities and towns doubled; and her urban population grew by 30 millions. The number of schools of all grades has very impressively multiplied. The whole nation has been sent to school. Its mind has been so awakened that it can hardly be put back to sleep again. Its avidity for knowledge, for sciences and the arts, has been stimulated by Stalin’s government to the point where it has become insatiable and embarrassing. It should be remarked that, although Stalin has kept Russia isolated from the contemporary influences of the west, he has encouraged and fostered every interest in what he calls the ‘cultural heritage’ of the west. Perhaps in no other country have the young been imbued with so great a respect and love for the classical literature and art of other nations as in Russia. This is one of the important differences between the educational methods of nazism and Stalinism. Another is that Stalin has not, like Hitler, forbidden the new generation to read and study the classics of their own literature whose ideological outlook does not accord with his. While tyrannizing the living poets, novelists, historians, painters, and even composers, he has displayed, on the whole, a strange pietism for the dead ones. The works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Belinsky, and many others, whose satire and criticism of past tyranny have only too often a bearing on the present, have been literally pressed into the hands of youth in millions of copies. No Russian Lessing or Heine has been burned at an auto-da-fe. Nor can the fact be ignored that the ideal inherent in Stalinism, one to which Stalin has given a grossly distorted expression, is not domination of man by man, or nation by nation, or race by race, but their fundamental equality. Even the proletarian dictatorship is presented as a mere transition to a classless society; and it is the community of the free and the equal, and not the dictatorship, that has remained the inspiration. Thus, there have been many positive, valuable elements in the educational influence of Stalinism, elements that are in the long run likely to turn against its worst features.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 568

Many times in the Kremlin, the Central Committee would see new films that were shown. They were shown English films by the Cinematographic Committee under the head of Bolshakov. After seeing this “cultural film”, Stalin said:
Did you buy this film with our gold?
No, it was in exchange–meekly said the chief of the committee.
You have “Chapaev”?
Yes
Give us this film. These are the kind of films to show our youth and future generations.
Some of the people in the audience, members of the Politburo, started to shout: Bravo, Stalin, Bravo!
After the film ended, Stalin was agitated and told those who performed this “Bravo” event:
This is not called for at all. I certainly do not appreciate or want these “bootlicking” words to be said in my name!
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 27-28

RICH ARE NOT KIND GOOD GUYS

The patriarchal benevolence of the big landlords is nothing but a fairytale. Even count Tolstoy, the humanitarian and poet towering so high above his class, let the peasants on his estate live in squalor. Masaryk, who told me this fact, remonstrated with Tolstoy himself on this account when visiting him in the eighties.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 146

1936 SU CONSTITUTION AMONG THE GREATEST CONSTITUTIONS

The third great document of modern humanity, after the Declaration of Independence and the Paris Rights of Man, is represented by the Soviet Constitution of 1936….
History will call this new constitution by the name of Stalin, though he did not head the Soviet Union, but only the Communist party at the time of its inception, and though its main thoughts had been already formulated by Lenin in his first two constitutions of 1918 and 1924.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 163

The Russians consider their Constitution the most advanced and democratic in the world–and they feel that Stalin more than any other man was responsible for it.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 34

The Constitution of the USSR [1936] was entirely the creation of Stalin. He supervised and directed the drafting. It was worked out according to his plan under his direct, continuous leadership.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 202

…Stalin edited the Constitution; he headed the commission; everything was in his hands.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 205

Neither was Stalin the author of the Constitution, though it was called the “Stalin Constitution.”
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 823

“…To be sure, elections to the Soviets became more democratic from a formal point of view. Deputies to local Soviets had been elected by open voting in factories and other institutions; after 1936 they were elected in polling places scattered through territorial districts, with the entire adult population casting secret ballots. Before the voters elected deputies directly only to local soviets, the local soviets elected deputies to the next higher soviets, and so on. After 1936 all elections became direct, and the voters of each district elected deputies to the local soviet, the city soviet, the oblast soviet, the republic soviet, and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 837

It will be seen that the difference between the usual constitutions of the [bourgeois] democracies and the Constitution of the Soviet Union lies in the fact that, all the former admittedly proclaim the rights and liberties of the citizens, they specify no means of substantiating them, whereas the Constitution of the Soviet Union stipulates the very physical conditions without which true democracy cannot exist, inasmuch as without assured economic independence the unhampered formation of opinion is impossible, while there is nothing so inimical to freedom as the fear of unemployment, fear for the future of children, and fear of a wretched old age.
It may be disputed whether all the 146 articles of the Soviet Constitution are operative, or whether some of them exist only on paper. But it is indisputable that the four articles which I have quoted [Articles 118,119,120,121]–and they seem to me to be the basis of practical democracy–are not just printed words, but do express realities. If you were to turn the city of Moscow upside-down, you would discover hardly anything inconsonant with these articles.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 30

The most outstanding feature in the first section of the constitution and upon which the whole constitution is based is the specific fact that the exploitation of man by man must cease. In addition to this a great many of its parts pertain strictly to economics. When it speaks of equality it means economic equality and not that of birth and mentality. The Russians did not tack on a Bill of Rights to their constitution like we did, but began with those rights. Their idea of a constitution is a new one to the world–stressing economics, the abolition of human exploitation for the purpose of individual profits. This is quite different from our constitution which allows exploitation to be conducted by the “financial interests.” Even those countries which have had successful revolutions in the last years did not attempt to eradicate exploitation as it exists under capitalism, but, giving it a softer tone, continued it in writing a constitution patterned after ours.
Wright, Russell. One-Sixth of the World’s Surface. Hammond, Ind., The Author, c1932, p. 16

In the middle of this earthquake, in November 1936, Stalin promulgated the new constitution in an address to the Eighth Congress of the Soviets…. The new constitution was to replace Lenin’s electoral system, which had openly and frankly favored the industrial working class, and give equal suffrage to all classes, including the hitherto disfranchised former bourgeoisie. Indirect elections were to be replaced by direct, open ballot by secret. Such an advance, Stalin said, was possible because the structure of society had changed: the first phase of communism had been achieved; the working class was no longer a proletariat; the peasantry had been integrated into the socialist economy; and the new intelligentsia was rooted in the working classes. Opposing what he claimed to be someone’s amendment to the draft of the constitution, he insisted that the constitution must guarantee to constituent republics the right to secede from the Soviet Union.
Opposing still another amendment, which aimed at investing sovereignty in the President of the Republic instead of in the many-headed Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Stalin warned his audience that a single President might become a dictator– the constitution should leave no such opening. He even insisted on the enfranchisement of the former White Guards and priests.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 381

[From Pravda Feb. 27, 1937]
The introduction of the new USSR Constitution marks a turning point in the country’s political life. The essence of this change consists in the further democratization of the electoral system–the replacement of the not completely equal elections to the soviets by equal elections, of multi-stage elections by direct ones, of open balloting by secret.
Whereas before introduction of the new constitution, clergy, former White Guards, former individuals and people not usefully employed were limited in their electoral rights, the new constitution dispenses with all limitations on the electoral rights of these categories of citizens, making the elections of deputies universal.
Whereas formerly the elections of deputies were unequal, since there existed different electoral standards for the urban and rural populations, now the need for placing limitations on the equality of elections has disappeared and all citizens have the right to participate in elections on an equal basis.
Whereas previously the elections to the middle and higher organs of the Soviet power were multi-stage, now, under the new constitution, elections to all soviets–from the village and city level all the way of to the Supreme Soviet–will be direct.
Whereas the election of deputies to the Soviets was formerly by open ballot and on the basis of lists, now the voting in the election of deputies will be secret and not by lists but by individual candidacies put forward by electoral districts.
McNeal, Robert. Resolutions and Decisions of the CPSU–The Stalin Years: 1929-1953. Vol. 3. Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974, p. 184

The 1936 Constitution, the Stalin constitution, as it was immediately baptized, did assure democratic rights to all citizens: freedom of speech, association, and the press, freedom to demonstrate, freedom to propagate both religious and antireligious ideas, and the inviolability of privacy in the home and in one’s correspondence. Freedom of movement was not mentioned, but all citizens were given the right to vote (none were disenfranchised any longer), and elections were to be secret and direct. The Stalin constitution was proclaimed “the most democratic in the world.”
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 287

No doubt about it, the document [the new 1936 constitution] was as advertised, “the most democratic constitution in the world.” Elections were to be free, equal, and secret. To the list of individual rights found elsewhere the Soviet document proudly added the right of every individual to demand that his government provide him with employment. Neither John Stuart Mill nor Thomas Jefferson could have objected to a single provision.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 403

And Stalin, sanctioned the granting of full civic rights under the Constitution to all Soviet citizens regardless of their social, religious, or political backgrounds. Universal equality of treatment was proclaimed. Soviet citizens were guaranteed pay, food, education, shelter, and employment. No other constitution in the world was so expansive in the benefits it proffered.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 319

PEOPLE CAN HAVE PRIVATE PROPERTY FOR PERSONAL USE

In the Constitution of the Soviets the corresponding article, of course greatly enlarged, says the following: the land and all it contains…are owned by the state, that is they are the property of the whole nation. On the other hand, private property is partly retained by the Soviets, for it says further on: “The personal property of the citizens derived from their work, savings made in their households, and objects for personal use and comfort are protected by law.”
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 165

Outside of the socialistic system, the law permits smaller private farms and other undertakings founded on personal work and excluding the exploitation of others.”
Where private ownership has been abolished, the privilege of the private owner to become a millionaire through low wages and high prices has been abolished, too. In this way the striving for gold as the greatest aim in life becomes impossible, while the striving for the good things of life, in recompense of diligence and talent, is retained. Where exploitation of human labor has been prohibited, but private property and savings permitted to a limited degree, life will offer a new purpose.
Thus the protection of the state is granted not only the “proletarian,” but every citizen, because no extremely rich or poor man can exist. Together with the right to work each citizen is guaranteed the following things: gratuitous education, access to all cultural advantages, paid vacations, insurance against sickness and old age.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 166

1936 CONSTITUTION WAS OVERWHELMINGLY ACCEPTED

Ninety millions voted for, but four millions against the Constitution.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 168

STALIN WAS A GREAT LEADER WHO FOUGHT CORRUPTION AND BUREAUCRACY

Shortly afterward, Mitrokhin, the director of the Yaroslavl factory, became Commissar of the Chemical Industry. I was pleased that Stalin hadn’t forgotten my high recommendation of this man and had assigned him to such a responsible post. In relation to the scale of or whole manufacturing industry, this episode concerned a minor matter, but it still had its significance for me. I’ve told this story to illustrate how Stalin was sometimes capable of a conscientious and statesmanly approach to problems. He was a jealous lord and master of the State, and he fought against bureaucracy and corruption and defects of all kinds. He was a great man, a great organizer and a leader,…
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 124

Whenever I had dealings with Eisenhower in later years, I always remembered these actions of his during the war. [Eisenhower ordered the commander of the German Army to surrender to the Russians who had defeated his army. Montgomery ignored the request and took them all]. I kept in mind Stalin’s words about him. [I frequently heard Stalin speak about Eisenhower’s noble characteristics…such as decency, generosity, and chivalry in his dealings with the allies p. 220]. Stalin could never be accused of liking someone without reason, particularly a class enemy. He was uncorruptible and irreconcilable in class questions. It was one of his strongest qualities, and he was greatly respected for it.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 222

[And Stalin said], “The exposure and expulsion from the administrative apparatus of incorrigible bureaucrats and red-tapists.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 134

The service rendered by Stalin’s leadership in strengthening the unity of the party–and of the world communist movement as well–is tremendous. Stalin was a man of integrity.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 259

In 1928 Stalin was troubled by a similar problem:
“Of course, the fact that we have a group of leaders who have risen excessively high and enjoy great prestige is in itself a great achievement for our Party. Obviously, the direction of a big country would be unthinkable without such an authoritative group of leaders. But the fact that as these leaders rise they get further away from the masses, and the masses begin to look up at them from below and do not venture to criticize them, cannot but give rise to a certain danger of the leaders losing contact with the masses and the masses getting out of touch with the leaders.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 76

It was precisely the “Stalinists’ who fought bureaucracy and excesses most consistently and who defended a correct line for collectivization.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 69 [p. 59 on the NET]

The danger of bureaucracy lies first of all in the fact that it holds back the colossal reserves concealed in the bosom of our social system, not allowing them to be utilized: it tries to nullify the creative initiative of the masses, binds them hand and foot with red tape and aims at reducing every new undertaking of the Party into a petty and insignificant business. The danger of bureaucracy lies, secondly, in the fact that it cannot tolerate having the execution of orders verified and strives to transform the principal directions of the leading bodies into a mere sheet of paper divorced from real life. The danger is represented, not only and not so much by the old bureaucratic derelicts in our institutions, as particularly by the new bureaucrats, the Soviet bureaucrats, amongst whom “communist” bureaucrats play a far from insignificant role. I have in mind those “communists” who try to replace the creative initiative and independent activity of the millions of the working-class and peasantry by office instructions and “decrees,” in the virtue of which they believe as a fetish.
The task is to smash bureaucracy in our institutions and organizations, to liquidate bureaucratic “habits” and “customs,” and clear the road for the utilization of the reserves of our social order, for the development of the creative initiative and independent activity of the masses.
It is no easy task. It cannot be settled in the twinkling of an eye to. But it has to be settled at all costs, if we really want to transform our society on socialist lines.
In its struggle against bureaucracy, the Party works in four directions: in the direction of the development of self-criticism, in the direction of organizing the verification of the execution of orders, in the direction of cleansing the apparatus, and, finally, in the direction of promoting to the state apparatus devoted members of the working-class from below.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 100

[Lev Borisovich says to Kamenev,] You see, he [Stalin] will become a man of destiny, a great figure who will occupy a permanent place in the world’s history. He will take his place in history as a nail enters the wall….”
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 94

[In a speech delivered at the 8th Congress of the Oil-Union Leninist Young Communist League on May 16, 1928 Stalin stated] Bureaucracy is one of the worst enemies of our progress.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 75

But one of the most serious obstacles, if not the most serious of all, is the bureaucracy of our apparatus. I am referring to the bureaucratic elements to be found in our Party, government, trade-union, co-operative and all other organizations. I am referring to the bureaucratic elements who batten on our weaknesses and errors, who fear like the plague all criticism by the masses, all control by the masses, and who hinder us in developing self-criticism and ridding ourselves of our weaknesses and errors.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 137

STALIN KEEPS VERY CLOSE WATCH ON PUBLIC OPINION

It would be an error to consider the Soviet leader a willful man who believes in forcing his ideas upon others. Everything he does reflects the desires and hopes of the masses to a large degree. He always has his ear to the ground, making it his business to find out what people are really thinking. Peasants and workers are encouraged to write their frank opinions. A large staff reads and reports on all the correspondence that comes in. Stalin himself takes samplings of the letters, and, in addition, sees many visitors from remote districts of the Union. There are some 20,000 full-time party secretaries scattered throughout the country who keep him constantly informed about “public opinion.” Stalin is very responsive to the state of mind of the people. This does not, however, prevent him from initiating policies he considers necessary although the populace has not asked or is not ready for them. He both leads and follows public opinion.
The forced collectivization of 1932 was an instance of something which Stalin felt simply could not wait for public opinion. At that time I asked why it would not be better to set up a model demonstration collective, equipped with modern machinery and methods, and convince the peasants by example, and by showing them the concrete benefits that collectivization would hold. The answer given me was that if the Soviets had 50 years of assured peace this would be preferable, but unfortunately, there would probably be a war within ten years and enforced collectivization was necessary if the Soviet state was to survive. There are few Russians, and few foreign observers, who would not now agree with this.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 12

Stalin took the attitude that, while he might have more education than the people he worked with, they knew more of the realities of life, and this is the key to much of his success.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 16

That Stalin listens to opinions was indicated by two changes of policy that occurred at times when he was wielding his power to maximum effect.
The first was in March, 1930, when the Communists, under Stalin’s leadership were rushing the peasants headlong to collectivization at a rate and to an extent which the peasants did not like. At that moment Stalin wrote an article called “Dizziness from Success,” in which he said that this hasty drive for collectivization was exaggerated and unwise…. This was not wholly a defeat for the collective-farm program, but it did mean that Stalin was sufficiently acute to realize that the peasant masses had been pushed too fast and far along the road of collectivization and did not like it. Later on, it is true, the farms were collectivized and Stalin won, but he had to do it more slowly and more carefully because of the pressure of public opinion….
Beria, who was devotedly attached to Stalin, had approached the Soviet leader on a mission identical to that of Kaganovich and Voroshilov, mainly to point out to him that the Purge was literally ruining the country. Stalin apparently had not realized how unpopular the Purge was and into what an intolerable fog of dismay and confusion it had plunged the Russian people. However, once he was informed of this by Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Beria, he took immediate and vigorous action, not only to stop the Purge but to correct its evils as far as possible.
Duranty, Walter. Stalin & Co. New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949, p. 23-24

WORKERS ARE EXPERIENCED FROM 3 REVOLUTIONS

Stalin stated, “The workers in the USSR grew up and received their training in the storms of three revolutions. They learned as no other workers learned, to try their leaders and expel them if they do not satisfy the interests of the proletariat. At one time the most popular man in our party was Plehanov (before the Revolution). However, the workers did not hesitate to isolate him completely when they became convinced that he had abandoned the proletarian position.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 33

SUMMARY OF THE 1936 CONSTITUTION

In 1935 Stalin was made chairman of a commission to draft a new constitution. When the draft was completed it was distributed for popular analysis and discussion. Sixty million copies in leaflet form were printed. These were issued in every one of the many languages spoken in the Soviet Union. Ten thousand newspapers with a total circulation of 37 million copies printed it in full. It was broadcast over the radio and discussed at over half a million meetings. As a result there were 134,000 suggested amendments. Every one of these suggestions was examined by the Commission and many were incorporated in an amended draft. This draft was further amended and finally approved at an extraordinary Congress of the Soviets in December 1936. Most Westerners are totally unaware that such a democratic process was ever in operation in the Soviet Union.
The Constitution provides for a federation of 16 Socialist Soviet Republics. It frankly recognizes the Socialist character of the government. A citizen may own only what he himself can use–a home, an automobile, personal belongings, and savings. He cannot own and exploit in his personal interest the mines, the oil, the forests, the factories–in other words the basic means a production and distribution. They belong to the people.
The Constitution guarantees certain fundamental rights to the citizens:
The right to work with payment according to quality and quantity.
The right to leisure–a seven hour working day “for the overwhelming majority of the workers” and “vacations with full pay.”
The right to security in old age and sickness; free medicine.
The right to free education.
Equal rights to all citizens irrespective of race.
Freedom of religious worship.
Freedom of organization–the Constitution specifies trade unions, cooperative organizations, youth organizations, sport and defense organizations, cultural, technical and scientific societies, as well as the All-Union Communist Party.
Freedom from arrest “except by order of the court or with the sanction of a state-attorney.”
Inviolability of the homes of citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by law.
Freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and of street demonstrations are guaranteed by law, but only “to strengthen the socialist system.”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 34

WORKERS ARE BABIED BY THE TRADE UNIONS

The peculiar characteristics of the Russian trade unions led some Western leaders to charge that they are not independent and are mere creatures of the state. On the other hand, Colonel Cooper, builder of the Dnieper River Dam, complained to me that the trade unions had too much power. “They babied the workers,” he said. “In America we would never think of providing the club facilities and the easy going work that they do in Russia. If a manager doesn’t get along with the workers, he may be fired. He has to agree pretty much with the trade union.”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 65

STALIN CONTENDS ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY PREVAILS IN THE SU

Stalin believes that inasmuch as all the basic means of production and distribution are owned by the nation, and that unemployment has been abolished, there is more genuine economic democracy than in the West.”
Stalin expressed this to me in the following words: “The fact that the factories and workshops of the USSR belong to the whole people and not to capitalists, that the factories and workshops are managed not by the appointees of capitalists, but by representatives of the working-class; the consciousness that the workers work, not for the capitalists, but for their own state, for their own class, represents an enormous driving force in the development and perfection of industry. It must be observed that the overwhelming majority of the factory and works managers in Russia are workingmen, appointed by the Supreme Economic Council in agreement with the trade unions and that not a single factory manager can remain at his post contrary to the will of the workers or the particular trade union.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 67

On the level of the workplace democracy did function during my years in the Soviet Union.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 151

SOVIET GOVT OPPOSED BUREAUCRACY

The Communist party has launched one campaign after another against bureaucratism and is making heroic efforts to overcome it, chiefly by drawing the workers and peasants more actively into all public functions, and by cutting out red tape.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 46

A number of criticisms can be made of Trotsky’s line of argument, including its ignoring of other possible sources of Stalinism and its characterization of the bureaucracy as conservative when it was under the auspices of this group that the ‘revolution from above’ was carried out.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 58

The party was obliged to evaluate the party- and social work of old and new members and expel or purge those who did not attain a good enough level for communists. This process did not have a given end. The struggle against bureaucracy, corruption, opportunism and abuse of power within the party and state was carried out in many different ways during the thirties, and it was not always successful or devoid of errors.
Sousa, Mario. The Class Struggle During the Thirties in the Soviet Union, 2001.

NO SOVIET PRIVILEGED CLASS

The question is often raised as to whether or not Party members occupy a privileged position in Russia as compared with ordinary citizens. The answer to that must recognize first the fact that Party membership carries responsibilities far greater than those of an ordinary citizen. A member’s life is controlled by the party. His job, salary, outside activities, are all subject to orders like a soldier in an army. Members can be counted on for service as outsiders cannot….
But the picture so often painted of a ruling political class above and over the people of Russia, enjoying the privileges of greater wealth and position, is pure invention, originating probably in a comparatively few exceptions, some of them, it is true, flagrant enough to arouse public scandal. But the Party is severe on all those who seek personal privilege in goods or position out of office or Party membership. The Party constantly cleanses its membership by expulsion, getting rid of those who are not devoted, or who try to use the Party for their private interests, or whose “ideology” is not Communist. The Communist Party is hard to get into and easy to get out of.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 59

When I first went to Russia, the managing staff in industry were underpaid according to our standards, considering the heavy responsibilities they carried. This was especially true of those who were members of the Communist Party, who at that time agreed to accept maximum salaries considerably lower than the non-party staff, as evidence of their unselfishness and devotion to the cause of communism. Nearly all the chief managers of Soviet industry at this time received very small cash incomes. Even then, however, the managing staff had perquisites which ordinary workers could not get. They had the use of automobiles, special restaurants, better “closed stores,” and better houses.
After 1930, this system was gradually changed, and managers of all kinds, including Communists, were paid according to their position, with about the same relative differences as in this country. Some people in Russia today receive from 10 to 20 times as much cash income as ordinary workers.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 209-210

The communists except nominal managerial salaries for their labor. These salaries are minuscule. Communists, as a rule, get much less than non-communist technicians whom they hire. The theory is that all fruits of production are pooled for redistribution to the common good.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 565

VERY LITTLE PARTY CORRUPTION

The scores of Communists I met all over Russia, from secretaries in the small towns and villages to the heads of departments in Moscow, struck me with few exceptions as extraordinarily able and astute men–on the whole abler, more alert, and more devoted than any official class I ever met. This youth, enthusiasm, and faith in what they are doing stand out in marked contrast to the routineers so common in most government service.
It should be noted that the Party, unlike political parties in other countries, is not subject to any outside economic pressure or control. Every other dictatorship depends for its support on some propertied class–in most cases on the great landlords, as in Poland, Italy, and Hungary. The Russian Communist Party has no master, no class propping it up. Its policies are directed in the last analysis by the class interests of peasants and workers, a control sufficient to keep it eternally watching its step in a maze of problems. The Party’s freedom from the outside dictation of a propertied class practically eliminates the corruption and big graft which marked the czar’s regime, and which, let Americans bear in mind, mark politics in the United States. Such graft as exists in Soviet Russia is petty–and the Party is exceedingly severe on offenders.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 60

WORKERS AND PEASANTS DO NOT MAKE UP MOST OF THE CRITICS

…Indeed, the charge is made by some of the emigre anarchist and socialist opponents of the Bolshevik regime that most of the political exiles and prisoners are workers and peasants–a charge which seems without basis in the light of much dispassionate evidence given me in Russia. It is doubtless true that peasants are the largest group among the several hundred Left Social Revolutionist exiles and prisoners, and workers among some hundreds of anarchists. But in the total of exiles and prisoners peasants and workers constitute a small number among the thousands, mostly from the old bourgeoisie.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 179

Equally difficult as to estimate the number of exiles is to gauge their economic class origins. The socialist and anarchist committees abroad allege that the great majority are workers or peasants. But their incomplete lists do not bear out that contention. My informants in Russia, both officials and others, stated with remarkable unanimity, whatever their political views, that the proportion of factory workers and peasants is small; that most of the political exiles are ex-aristocrats or intellectuals, students, or office employees.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 230

Under the system of secrecy maintained by the GPU it is impossible to answer with evidence the allegation that the majority of the exiles are workers and peasants. But it does not square with the interests of the Soviet regime, nor with what one sees and hears all over Russia. The Socialist and anarchist committees abroad, while asserting the preponderance of workers and peasants, show only a small number of them on their lists.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 231

SOVIET AND ITALIAN DICTATORSHIPS ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT

…The comparison of Russia with Italy, so often made, is superficial. The two dictatorships are utterly unlike. Not only are their objectives diametrically opposed, but their relations to the masses or wholly dissimilar. The Italian regime is a one-man-and-the-police dictatorship, with the overwhelming mass of the Italians against it. The Russian regime is a dictatorship of a whole party and the police, with only a minority against it.
Baldwin, Roger. Liberty Under the Soviets, New York: Vanguard Press, 1928, p. 271

BOLSHEVIK LEADERS COME FROM THE WORKING CLASS AND PEASANTRY

All these men of the Kremlin have a common background. They are almost without exception the sons of peasants or workers whose parents could not read or write. Out of their bitter impoverished youth came early revolutionary activity. Many of them spent years in political imprisonment or exile. Mastery of the science of revolution, and of the manipulation of revolutionary power, has been their goal all their lives. To that they have subordinated everything–absolutely everything.
Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 169

No member of the Politburo had an extensive formal education.
Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 172

There is a widespread assumption in America and Britain that…there is no such thing as public opinion or public or private criticism [in the SU]. If that were the case then there would be serious danger of an ever-widening gulf between government and people, until the rulers would presently be as remote as the czar was. Underground forces could then gather and assume explosive proportions before compromise measures could be enforced to divide the opposition.
The fact is, however, that public opinion does exist in Russia, and made itself felt during the war, in many overt and covert ways. First of all, remember that all Russia’s present high officials themselves rose from the peasantry or the working class. Many still consciously identify themselves with the peasants, even in their living habits; and all of them, subconsciously, react with the mentality of their own class toward given situations. Men like Kalinin and Andreyev, who spent their youth working in the village fields, and men like Voroshilov & Malenkov, who toiled over machines, probably do not need a ballot to tell them how the people feel about the way things are.
Secondly, there is, or at least is encouraged to be, a great deal of freedom of expression in local affairs. Collective farm villages do elect their own officers, and unpopular ones can be so easily sabotaged and ruined by the peasants that a party-dictated choice can seldom “stick.”
Snow, Edgar. The Pattern of Soviet Power, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 204

…The aim of the October Revolution had been to put the proletariat in power, and by 1939 most of the positions of authority in the USSR were filled by those whose social origins were either working-class or peasant.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 27

All the Soviet leaders lived pretty much like this at that time. No one cared about luxury or possessions, though they did try to give a good education to their children. They hired good governesses of the old, prerevolutionary school, mainly to teach their children German. All the wives had jobs and read all they could in their spare time. Sports had just come into style. All of them played tennis, and they had tennis courts and croquet lawns at their dachas. The women paid no attention to make up or clothes, but they looked nice just the same.
…During my mother’s lifetime we had a normal, modest life.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 32

Many of these men–who rule 1/6 the land surface of the globe–were workmen with their hands, manual laborers, 15 or 20 years ago…. Even so, a neutral diplomat in Moscow, in a position to know, told me that he thought the members of the Politburo were personally as able as any governing body in the world.
The lives of most of Stalin’s men follow a similar pattern. They were workmen who turned revolutionary, and all but the youngest of them have a history, like Stalin, of underground political activity. The most important fact in their lives was the date when they entered the communist party; as a rule, their hierarchical position depends on this. Several have been imprisoned, and their prison sentences are proud badges of distinction.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 536

It [the Communist Party] is not an antagonistic group set over against the masses, “3 million people ruling a recalcitrant 160,000,000,” as is often pictured abroad. It is rather the most energetic part of 160 million, the ones who pledge their time to the public task of creating a new social and economic system, and who make this the continuing and dominant effort of their lives.
Strong, Anna Louise. Dictatorship and Democracy in the Soviet Union. New York: International Pamphlets, 1934, p. 11

PEOPLE WORKED OVERTIME AND HARD FOR THE SYSTEM

…Many willingly worked overtime, throwing all their energies into the effort to create a new society.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 20

UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY UNDER STALIN

The chief characteristic of the social face of Stalinism during the 1930s was very high levels of social mobility. …the 1930s witnessed a real social revolution in the USSR. Throughout the entire society, members of the traditional lower classes moved into positions of power and privilege in all sectors of life. The old class structure based upon inheritance was demolished and a new social structure was emerging. …for the vast mass of those up early mobile families, the revolution meant steps towards the realization of aspirations to a more comfortable lifestyle. This social revolution, with the flow from the countryside into the towns and the percolation up into white-collar occupations of many of these new arrivals, transformed the society.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 52

The dimensions of this change are unprecedented within such a short space of 35 years.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 53

MOLOTOV SHOWS NAZIS DON’T HAVE A PROGRAM, PARTY RULES OR A CONSTITUTION

MOLOTOV: Do you have a party program? I asked Hess. I knew they didn’t. How could it be, a party without a program?
Do you have party rules? I knew they didn’t have party rules. But I decided to feel him out anyway. Hess was Hitler’s first party deputy, a party secretary. Bormann was his deputy.
I went on tripping him up. And do you have a constitution? They didn’t have that either. What a high level of organization!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 20

LIBRARY CENSORSHIP WAS REDUCED IN EARLY 1930’S

Despite the general tightening of literary “discipline,” the policy of censorship in the 1932-34 period was uneven. In June 1933 a circular letter from the Central Committee formally prescribed policies for “purging of libraries.” Back in 1930, during the ultra-Left upsurge of the “cultural revolution,” the party had insisted on removing literary and historical works by “bourgeois” and oppositionist authors from all libraries. The June 1933 circular, while approving the removal of “counter-revolutionary and religious literature,” along with the works of Trotsky and Zinoviev, took a relatively moderate line on library holdings in general. Works representing “historical interest” were to remain in the libraries of the larger towns, and closed or “special” collections were forbidden, as were mass purges of libraries.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 106

[Central Committee letter on purging of libraries, 13 June 1933]
In spite of the decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party [Bolshevik], categorically prohibiting mass purges of libraries, in many regions, territories, and republics, this decree is not being carried out. Departments of culture and propaganda have not drawn the necessary lesson from those distortions which have occurred. Instances of mass purges of libraries continue to take place right to the present day….
A] The removal of books from libraries is to be permitted only in accordance with special instructions from the Central Commission.
B] Under the leadership of the territorial commission, openly counter-revolutionary and religious literature [gospels, lives of the saints, sermons, etc.] shall be withdrawn, while literature having a historical interest shall be permitted in the large central city libraries….
D] The organization of “special” or “closed” stacks in libraries is hereby prohibited. Existing “closed” and special stacks are to be immediately abolished by entering all [works of] literature into the catalog of the libraries.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 107

Even here, the Politburo had difficulty taking control of the situation. The June 13th order was ignored by hot headed local activists, who continued to strip the libraries of books they considered counter-revolutionary. Yaroslavsky and other party leaders complained about this to the Politburo, prompting Molotov and Stalin to issue stronger strictures that characterized the purging of the libraries as “anti-Soviet” and again ordering it stopped.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 108

[October 16, 1932 Memorandum of Malstev to Rudzutak and Yaroslavski on purging the libraries]
Libraries have been purged of pernicious and outdated literature by the People’s Commissariat of Education without adequate instructions and control.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 77

STALIN WANTS INTELLIGENTSIA AND SPECIALISTS TREATED EASIER

In June 1931 Stalin’s “New Conditions, New Tasks” speech seemed to call a halt to the radical, class-based persecution of members of the old intelligentsia. The party’s policy should be “enlisting them and taking care of them,” Stalin said. It would be stupid and unwise to regard practically every expert and engineer of the old school as an undetected criminal and wrecker.” The following month, the Politburo forbade arrests of specialists without high-level permission. In the subsequent period, the Politburo intervened on several occasions to protect persecuted members of the intelligentsia and to rein in the activities of secret police officials persecuting them:…
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 109

PARTY LEADERS ADMIRED BY THE MASSES

[Nov. 29, 1935 NKVD report on an anti-Stakhanovist leaflet–Part of the leaflet said “Fight for a raise in your stipend!”]
We receive a stipend of 93 rubles [each]. If you wonder whether it is possible to live on that, the answer is “NO. Our board alone costs significantly more than that. First course–25 kopeks; second course–95 kopeks; bread–30 kopeks; for a total of one ruble, 50 kopeks; the total per month equals 4.50 x 30 equals 135 rubles. You can’t survive on that. When, oh when, will our “wisest,” “most brilliant,” “cherished” leaders understand this truism?!
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 214

HIGH TAXES WERE NEEDED TO RAISE MONEY

Stalin’s last minister of finance was Zverev…. Sholokhov called him “our iron minister of finance.”… He was derided for levying high taxes on everyone. But who to tax? Of course there were no bourgeoisie. He had to extract heavy taxes from our own, from peasants and workers. They say that orchards were destroyed–they were taxed only because fruit orchards near cities yielded supplementary incomes. You can get something out of them, so on went the tax. But just find another way. The state had to live somehow. No one would give us any money. What to do? In this matter, they say, Stalin acted badly–indeed, crudely, savagely, barbarically. But just put these “non-barbarians” in those conditions, let them ensure the life of the state and prevent its breakdown. Just find the means. They were simpletons who did not understand the most elementary things! But Zverev was stalwart. I value him for this.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 207

STALIN SAYS THE BEST WAY TO CONVERT OTHER COUNTRIES TO SOCIALISM IS BY EXAMPLE

GOLOVANOV: Stalin said that no propaganda, no agitation would be enough to unite the world proletariat around us. Instead we need to show that the people in our state live better than people live in America or in any other capitalist country. This would be the best kind of agitation, the best kind of propaganda.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 301

(Molotov picks up the party program booklet and reads Khrushchev’s conclusion that other nations will follow us once they see we live better than they)
You parrot Khrushchev’s rubbish. That’s nothing short of consumerism and even nationalism. Had the Bolsheviks waited for everyone to become literate, we would never have had a revolution. The workers in the Western countries enjoy better living conditions than we because their bourgeoisie robbed other countries as well as their own. Each Englishman used to have 10 slaves…. If we wait until we first raise our standard of living, expecting that others will then imitate us, we shall be nationalists who devote themselves solely to their own affairs, not communists. This is worse than Khrushchevism, this is utopianism.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 302

There is no denying that the regime succeeded to a considerable extent in channeling the enthusiasm of the younger generation to building up mammoth projects such as Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, Dneproges, Zaporozhe, and Stalingrad. There was widespread feeling that young Communists could (and would) “storm heavens.” The mood proved infectious: The Soviet example of seemingly lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps found increasing interest and support in the West at the very time when the capitalist world faced a severe recession. The “socialist sixth of the world” was transforming itself, and the Russian example, as many enthusiastic visitors predicted, would serve as an inspiration for everyone else.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 35

And Trotsky never seemed to realize that when Stalin said he could build socialism in a single country, the country was Russia, which is not a country at all–but a continent [of many nationalities]. Nor did it occur to Trotsky apparently that far and away the best single advertisement for world communism, in the future, would be a Russia which was successful, stable, safe.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 526

THE MAJOR PROGRESS OF THE SU WAS DONE UNDER STALIN’S LEADERSHIP

Since Stalin’s death we have lived on the reserves built up in Stalin’s time. [12-18-70]
I propose a toast–to Stalin! No one else could have borne, no one else could have endured the burden he carried on his shoulders. None but he had the iron nerve and strength it took!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 401

…Yet it is a fact that ‘Stalin found Russia working with a wooden plough and left her equipped with atomic piles’, even though the epoch of the wooden plough still persisted in lingering on all too many levels of her national existence. This summary of Stalin’s rule is, of course, a tribute to his achievement.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 624

Isaac Deutscher, the former Trotskyite and an independent Marxist author, was not uncritical of certain aspects of Stalin’s rule. But he, too, was overawed in his overall assessment of the man:…
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 17

A few pages further down, Deutscher observes:
“…it is a fact that ‘Stalin found Russia with a wooden plow and left her equipped with atomic piles’…. This summary of Stalin’s rule is, of course, a tribute to his achievement” The words quoted by Deutscher are quoted from his own obituary of Stalin published in the Manchester Guardian of March 6, 1953.
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 50

… Even Roy Medvedev, no friend of Stalin’s and the author of the thoroughly anti-Stalin Let History Judge, has been obliged to say: “Stalin found the Soviet Union in ruin and left it a superpower. Gorbachev inherited a superpower and left it in ruin.”
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 50

…However, we must give them all their due. Despite their crimes, Beria, Stalin, Molotov, and Pervukhin succeeded in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward agrarian hinterland into a superpower armed with sophisticated nuclear weapons. While committing equally monstrous crimes against their opponents and innocent bystanders, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov contributed much less to the transformation of the USSR. Unlike Stalin, they greatly weakened the state through their own power struggles. Gorbachev and his aides, governed no less by personal ambition, caused the crumbling of the state. Gorbachev and Yakovlev behaved like traditional party bosses, exploiting the name of democracy to strengthen their own power base. They were naive as statesman and under the illusion that they were capable of outmaneuvering their rivals and preserving their power. They accomplished nothing in domestic policy or in foreign affairs. In 1989 Gorbachev moved Honecker out of power in East Germany, hoping to strengthen socialism, but it backfired. He and Shevardnadze were incapable of negotiating economic concessions from the West in return for the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 428

These advances are all connected, directly or indirectly, with Stalin. Stalin’s armies paved the way for revolution in Eastern Europe and assisted it in China. Once the foundations of socialism were established under his leadership in the USSR, a model was given to the world, for socialism, although differing in specifics and in different countries, is –like feudalism or capitalism–necessarily everywhere the same in its general nature.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 136

He [Stalin] gave positive leadership and transformed a vast, backward agrarian nation into a modern industrial power.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. xi

Soviet Russia today [1979] is a superpower with a Navy probably already larger than the United States Navy, an Army certainly larger, and a weapon capacity at least equal. Stalin was the architect and creator of this military and economic might, which has been achieved within an astonishingly brief span of years.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. xv

…For such people [the urban citizenry] Stalinism provided an important means of upward social mobility, participation, and criticism. Under the Gensec’s rule, the country moved from backwardness to superpowerdom.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 232

When Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet Union was the second greatest Industrial, scientific, and military power in the world, and showed clear signs of moving to overtake the U.S. in all these areas. This was despite the devastating losses it suffered while defeating the fascist powers of Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The various peoples of the USSR were unified. Starvation and illiteracy were unknown throughout the country. Agriculture was completely collectivized and extremely productive. Preventive health care was the finest in the world, and medical treatment of exceptionally high quality was available free to all citizens. Education at all levels was free. More books were published in the USSR than in any other country. There was no unemployment.
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 8

Under his leadership, the Soviet Union had emerged as the strongest power in Europe by far and as a world power equal to the United States.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 11

Survivors of the Stalinist period reminded the public that for many people the 1930s had been a period of happiness and enthusiasm, when a feeling prevailed that great things were being achieved. A typical representative of the generation that “made it” under Stalin was Ivan Benediktov, who became the people’s commissar of agriculture in 1938 at the age of 35, remained in key government positions for many years, and eventually served as ambassador to India and Yugoslavia (1959-70). Among the main points made in Stalin’s defense are the following: Promotion under Stalin was by merit only. Many very young people (such as Voznesensky, Ustinov, Kosygin, Tevosian, and Vannikov) were appointed to key positions in their early 30s–and proved themselves. Thousands of innocents suffered, but the overall number has been grossly exaggerated; the general atmosphere was not one of fear, repression, and terror but of a mighty wave of revolutionary enthusiasm, of pride in country and party, and of belief in the leadership. Decisions taken at the top were far more democratic than generally believed; Stalin was not an extremist, but on the whole a fair and reasonable man. In fact, Khrushchev’s style was more autocratic than Stalin’s. As for the murder of the Red Army leadership, there is reason to believe that they plotted not against Stalin but against Voroshilov, who they thought was not equal to his task. Such behavior would not have been tolerated in any country.
… The 1930s had been a time of great enthusiasm, of national unity and pride, of belief in the leadership, and of a historical mission; young people had been given chances like never before, and so on.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 244

Stalin was, as we know, an abnormally suspicious, but also a sane and rational man. He had, by 1934, just succeeded, not in making the Soviet Union strong, but in putting it in the way to being so.
Snow, Charles Percy. Variety of Men. New York: Scribner, 1966, p. 261

This was a fantastic exaggeration but also a recognition of one indisputable achievement of Stalin’s reign: from the weak third-rate industrial and military country which she had been in 1924, Russia had become one of the world’s two superpowers.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 8

He [Stalin] left the Soviet Union as a world power and an industrial colossus with a literate society.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 3

DIFFICULT PERIODS LIE AHEAD

We have passed through difficult periods, but in my opinion even more difficult one’s lie ahead. [6-16-83]
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 404

EVERYTHING CONSIDERED THE BOLSHEVIKS ACTUALLY MADE FEW MISTAKES

When the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 this was the first time in history that a group with scientific understanding of the historical process had taken power and went on to change society by consciously utilizing these processes. The wonder, then is not that they made mistakes but that they made so few and that on the whole they succeeded.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 136

STALIN COULD PERSUADE WORKERS AND TALK TO THEM IN THEIR LANGUAGE

He would approach a worker, speak to him in a friendly way, and attach him to himself for ever. He would make a malcontent of one who was apathetic, and a revolutionary of a malcontent.
Sosso’s natural simplicity, his complete indifference to the conditions of personal life, his strength of character and his knowledge, which even at that time was remarkable, gave him authority, called people’s attention to him and kept it there. The Tiflis workers called him “our Sosso.”
Orakhelashvili, who was Sosso’s companion at that time, puts the matter in a nutshell: “He was neither pedantic nor vulgar.” He looked upon the militant Socialist as an interpreter who said the same things as the wisest theorist, but adapted them to the intelligence and degree of education of his listeners. How did he do this? By imagery and by giving vivid examples.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 10

“‘Our Soso,’ the workers spoke of him. It is well known that for intellectuals active in labor circles the most difficult thing was to find ‘a common language with the workers.’ In this regard Stalin was and remains to this day a rare exception. He has always been remarkably capable of explaining to workingmen the most complicated things and events in a clear, simple, and convincing manner. He was just as able to find the ‘ tongue’ of the peasants with whom he frequently came in touch in the revolutionary work in Georgia….
Yenukidze said, “Stalin never sought personal popularity. The circle of his persistent activity he limited exclusively to the working men and that of his underground coworkers. That is why the advanced workers and professional revolutionists knew him well and rated highly his qualities as an organizer and revolutionist.”
Levine, Isaac Don. Stalin. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 15-16

STALIN SAYS A GOOD LEADER MUST FIRST CONSULT THE MASSES BEFORE ACTING

And the great incentive, for those who are trying to bring about social progress, is faith in the masses. This faith in the great mass of the workers is the watch-word, the battle-cry which Stalin has uttered most often in the course of his career. “The most unseemly malady which can attack a leader,” he tells us, “is fear of the masses.” The leader needs them more than they need him. He learns more from them than they learn from him. As soon as a leader begins to make his plans without taking the masses into his conference, he is damned, as regards both victory and the cause.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 16

The older members were in favor of the distribution, in small doses, of “pure propaganda” to selected workers who should be charged with spreading the gospel. The younger members were for direct contact, for “the street.” It is hardly necessary to add that Stalin supported the latter tendency, and made it triumph.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 17

No, under no conditions would our workers now tolerate the domination of one person. Individuals of the greatest authority are reduced to nonentities as soon as they lose the confidence of the masses, and as soon as they lose contact with the masses. Plekhanov used to enjoy exceptional authority. And what happened? As soon as he began to commit political errors, the workers forgot him; they abandoned him and forgot him. Another instance: Trotsky. Trotsky also used to enjoy very great authority, although, of course, not as much as Plekhanov. What happened? As soon as he lost contact with the workers, he was forgotten…. They remember him sometimes–with bitterness…. As far as our class-conscious workers are concerned, they remember Trotsky with bitterness, with irritation, with hatred.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 245

The art of leadership is a serious matter. One must not lag behind a movement, because to do so is to become isolated from the masses. But one must not rush ahead, for to rush ahead is to lose contact with masses. He who wishes to lead a movement, and at the same time keep touch with the vast masses, must conduct a fight on two fronts–against those who lag behind and against those who rush on ahead.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 256

Even an absolute dictator – which Stalin was not – has to sell his policies to his people if he is to survive, particularly if he is asking them to risk their lives.
Read, Anthony and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace. New York: Norton, 1988, p. 328

Koba is a cynic but his knowledge of the masses is undeniable. No leader of our party, not even Ilyich, has understood the masses better than Koba…. Trotsky is but a novice in this field. He invents the masses instead of studying them.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 220

But the fact that as these leaders rise they get further away from the masses, and the masses begin to look up at them from below and do not venture to criticize them, cannot but give rise to a certain danger of the leaders losing contact with the masses and the masses getting out of touch with the leaders.
This danger may result in the leaders becoming conceited and regarding themselves as infallible. And what good can be expected when the top leaders become self-conceited and begin to look down on the masses? Clearly, nothing can come of this but the ruin of the Party.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 34

DECISIONS MUST BE MADE AFTER CONSULTING THE MASSES

He [Stalin] strongly indicts “the lack of faith in the creative faculty of the masses” (under the pretext that they are not sufficiently developed intellectually). If they are properly taught they will both lead themselves and lead you. No “aristocracy of leaders with regard to the masses,” because it is the masses themselves who are called upon to destroy the old order and to build up the new. Not to be nursemaids and governesses to the crowd: because, quite definitely, they learn less from our books than we learn from them. So that it is only by collaboration with the masses that proper government can take place.
“To be at the wheel and to stare blindly ahead until a catastrophe occurs does not mean leadership. The Bolsheviks do not understand the act of leadership in this way. To lead one must foresee…. If you are isolated, even with other comrades who are also leading, you will only see everything if, at the same time, hundreds of thousands, millions of workers are on the look out for weaknesses, discover errors and apply themselves to the achievement of the common task.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 151

STALIN BELIEVES PERSUASION NOT FORCE SHOULD BE USED WITH THE MASSES

And in dealing with the masses, persuasion, not violence, must be used. When Zinoviev defended the theory of dictatorship of the Party in 1925, Stalin rose up in arms against “this narrow point of view” and declared that there must be complete harmony between the Party and the mass of the people, and that mutual confidence should not be destroyed by any abstract and unlimited rights which the party chose to confer upon itself. In the first place, the Party may be mistaken: and even if it is not, the masses may take some time to see that it is right.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 151

In his answers to Ludwig’s questions Stalin kept his end up most creditably. He explained that force alone could not possibly keep the Communists in power and that they would have been overthrown but for the fact that they always told the truth; that he was no more than a continuation of Lenin; that in any case all decisions were taken in ‘our Areopagus’, the Central Committee.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 183

The three or four rooms and the corridors that we passed through were quite simple but efficiently furnished as offices. A carpet with wide red borders leads to Stalin’s room. He received us there immediately. My companion was a young journalist who speaks several languages excellently and translates very precisely. Stalin and Mustapha Kemal are the only men with whom I have had to converse through the medium of an interpreter. The room which we entered was long and at the far end of it a medium-sized man in a light brown jacket stood up from his chair. He was dressed with painful neatness, just as the room was arranged with the hygienic accuracy of a doctor’s consulting room. A large table stood in the middle, as in an ordinary board-room, with plain water carafes and glasses and large ashtrays. Everything was in apple-pie order. The walls were colored dark green. Pictures of Lenin and Marx and several other people unknown to me hung there, but they were all just enlarged photographs. Stalin’s desk was also in perfect order and on it was a photograph of Lenin, besides four or five telephone apparatuses, such as one finds in all these government offices.
“Good evening,” I said, in stumbling Russian. He smiled and seemed somewhat embarrassed but he was extremely courteous and began by offering me a cigarette. He assured me that I was at full liberty to say what I liked and to ask whatever questions I liked and that he had an hour -and-a-half free. But when I drew out my watch at the end of the time he made a prohibitive gesture and kept us for another half-hour. A certain degree of embarrassment is as graceful in a man of power as it is in a beautiful woman. In the case of Stalin it did not surprise me at all because he scarcely ever sees people from the West. None of the present ambassadors or envoys, and scarcely any of the great experts, have ever seen him. The only foreigner who has free access to him is little old Cooper, the American hydraulic engineer, who is constructing the cofferdam on the Dnieper. Though my interpreter holds an important position in the Bolshevik Press organizations, he had never seen Stalin before. Since he had to speak constantly through the medium of the interpreter, Stalin was looking away from me practically all the time and for the whole two hours he kept on drawing figures on a piece of paper. With a red pencil he drew red circles and arabesques and wrote numbers. He never turned the pencil round though at the other end it was blue. During the course of our conversation he filled many sheets of paper with red markings and from time to time folded them and tore them to pieces. The result was that I managed to get his glance straight into my face only for a few seconds…. His look was dour and the expression veiled. But it was not the glance of a misanthropist.
In the long pauses that were necessary for translation and re-translation I had a very good opportunity for observing his movements, especially as he speaks so slowly. Such pauses enable an interviewer to introduce a change of theme in the conversation and thus the better to search the mind of his interlocutor. Stalin’s habit of sitting absolutely immobile and of scarcely ever emphasizing a word with a gesture made this all the easier. When I am conversing with anybody I have a habit of standing up and walking about. If I had done it here it might have been considered strange.
What completed the picture of Stalin, as I have already described it, was the heavy and muffled tone of his voice. It was the kind of voice that could never speak the word of destiny “I Will” with fiery emotion. He could only let the syllables fall like heavy hammer blows. The chief impression that I got of him was that of a protector. Stalin is a man before whose name many men and women have quaked, but one could never imagine a child or an animal doing so. In a former age such a man would have been called the father of his country.
…Stalin gave me an exhaustive answer each time and I shall not shorten it here. He spoke in short clear sentences, not as a man who is accustomed to simplify things before public audiences, but as a logical and constructive thinker whose mind works slowly and without the slightest emotion. This man who is now the exponent of the whole Moscow ideology struck me as a typical disciple of Hegel…. Stalin takes the point of an argument immediately, lays it on the table, as it were, talks around it and then comes close to it and carefully brings historical data and statistical percentages to bear on it. When he spoke he seemed to me to be absolutely a contradiction of Prince Bulow. He scarcely ever gave me the merely official answer, the experience which I have had with most of the other Communists.
Although he could not have been prepared for most of my questions and although he has not had the experience of our European ministers of State who are asked the same questions week after week, and although he knew that I would publish his answers to the world, he did not correct himself once. He had all the historical data and names at his fingertips. He did not ask for any copy of what my interpreter wrote down and he did not ask for any corrections to be made. I had never before experienced the same kind of self-confidence. In all my conversations with other leaders, I have not taken down what they have said at the moment but have recorded it afterwards and submitted it to them for authorization. But here I took the stenographical text as it was taken down by another person and when I examined it I could not find the slightest omission and yet nothing had been bettered. Outside of one mere private question, he did not ask me to tone down anything or omit this or that. When I recall to mind the habits of our poor ministers, when they are preparing a parliamentary speech or having an interview corrected by the head of their press bureau, I am filled with respect for the shoe-maker’s son from the Caucasus….
“You have led a life of a conspirator for such a long time,” I said, “and do you now think that, under your present rule, illegal agitation is no longer possible?”
“It is possible, at least to some extent.”
“Is the fear of this possibility the reason why you are still governing with so much severity, 15 years after the revolution?”
“No. I will illustrate the chief reason for this by giving a few historical examples. When the Bolsheviks came to power they were soft and easy with their enemies. At that time, for example, the Mensheviks (moderate Socialists), had their lawful newspapers and also the Social Revolutionaries. Even the military cadets had their newspapers. When the white-haired General Krasnow marched upon Leningrad and was arrested by us, under the military law he should have been shot or at least imprisoned, but we set him free on his word of honor. Afterwards it became clear that with this policy we were undermining the very system that we were endeavoring to construct. We had begun by making a mistake. Leniency towards such a power was a crime against the working classes. That soon became apparent. The Social Revolutionaries of the right and the Mensheviks, with Bogdanov and others, then organized the Junker revolt and fought against the Soviets for two years. Mamontow joined them. We soon saw that behind these agents stood the great Powers of the West and the Japanese. Then we realized that the only way to get ahead was by the policy of absolute severity and intransigence….”
“This policy of cruelty,” I said, “seems to have aroused a very widespread fear. In this country I have the impression that everybody is afraid and that your great experiment could succeed only among this long-suffering nation that has been trained to obedience.”
“You are mistaken,” said Stalin, “but your mistake is general. Do you think it possible to hold power for 14 years merely by intimidating the people? Impossible. The Czars knew best how-to rule by intimidation. It is an old experiment in Europe; and the French bourgeoisie supported the Czars in their policy of intimidation against the people. What came of it? Nothing.”
“But it maintained the Romanovs in power for 300 years,” I replied.
“Yes, but how many times was that power not shaken by insurrections? To forget the older days, recall only the revolt of 1905. Fear is in the first instance a question of the mechanization of administration. You can arouse fear for one or two years and through it, or at least partly through it, you can rule for that time. But you cannot rule the peasants by fear. Secondly, the peasants and the working classes in the Soviet Union are by no means so timid and long-suffering as you think. You believe that our people are timid and lazy. That is an antiquated idea. It was believed in formerly, because the landed gentry used to go to Paris to spend their money there and do nothing. From this arose an impression of so-called Russian laziness. People thought that the peasants were easily frightened and made obedient. That was a mistake. And it was a three-fold mistake in regard to the workers. Never again will the workers endure the rule of one man. Men who have reached the highest pinnacles of fame were lost the moment they lost touch with the masses. Plechanow had great authority in his hands but when he became mixed up in politics he quickly forgot the masses. Trotsky was a man of great authority, but not of such high standing as Plechanow, and now he is forgotten. If he is casually remembered it is with a feeling of irritation.” (At that point he sketched something like a ship with his red pencil.)
I did not intend to mention Trotsky to Stalin, but since he himself had broached the subject, I asked: “Is the feeling against Trotsky General?”
“If you take the active workers, nine -tenths speak bitterly of Trotsky.”
There was a short pause during which Stalin laughed quietly and then took up the thread of the question again: “You cannot maintain that people may be ruled for a longtime merely by intimidation. I understand your skepticism. There is a small section of the people which is really afraid. It is an unimportant part of the peasant body. That part is represented by the kulaks. They do not fear anything like the intimidation of the reign of terror but they fear the other section of the peasant population. This is a hang-over from the earlier class system. Among the middle-classes, for example, especially the professional classes, there is something of the same kind of fear, because these latter had special privileges under the old regime. Moreover, there are traders and a certain section of the peasants that still retain the old liking for the middle-class.
“But if you take the progressive peasants and workers not more than 15 percent are skeptical of the Soviet power, or are silent from fear or are waiting for the moment when they can undermine the Bolshevik date. On the other hand, about 85 percent of the more or less active people would urge us further than we want to go. We often have to put on the brakes. They would like to stamp out the last remnants of the intelligentsia. But we would not permit that. In the whole history of the world there never was a power that was supported by nine-tenths of the population, as the Soviet power is supported. That is the reason for our success in putting our ideas into practice. If we ruled only by fear not a man would have stood by us. And the working classes would have destroyed any power that attempted to continue to rule by fear. Workers who have made three revolutions have had some practice in overthrowing governments. They would not endure such a mockery of government as one merely based on fear.”
“When I hear repeatedly about the power of the masses,” I said, “I am surprised at the hero worship that is more prevalent here than anywhere else, for this is the last place that one would logically expect to find it. Your materialistic conception of history, which is what separates me personally from you–for I hold that men make history–should prevent leaders and symbols from being shown in the form of statues and pictures on the street. You are the very people who, logically, ought not to revere the Unknown Soldier or any other individual. Now how can you explain that contradiction?”
“You are mistaken. Read that part of Marx where he speaks of the poverty of philosophy.”
Above Stalin’s head hung a portrait of the white-haired Karl Marx. And every time the conversation turned to the great Socialist, I had to look at the portrait.
“There,” continued Stalin, “you will find that men make history. But not in the way that your fancy suggests. Men make history rather in their reactions to the definite circumstances in which they find themselves placed. Every generation has a new set of circumstances to face. In general it can be said that great men are of value only insofar as they are able to deal with the circumstances of their environment. Otherwise they are Don Quixotes. According to Marx himself, one should never contrast men and circumstances. As far as my opinion goes, it is history that makes men. We have been studying Marx for 30 years.”
“And our professors interpret him differently,” I suggested.
“That is because they try to popularize Marxism. He has himself never denied the importance of the role of the hero. It is in fact very great.”
“May I therefore conclude that here in Moscow also one man rules and not the council. I see 16 chairs around the table.”
Stalin looked at the chairs: “The individual does not decide. In every council there are people whose views must be taken into account but wrong views also exist. We have had the experience of three revolutions and we know that out of 100 decisions made by individuals 90 are one-sided. Our leading organ is the Central Committee of the Party and it has 70 members. Among the 70 members are some of our most capable industrialists and our cooperatives and our best tradesmen, also some of our ablest authorities on agriculture and co-operative as well as individual farming, finally some men who have a first-class knowledge of how to deal with the various nationalities that make up the Soviet Union. This is the Areopagus in which the wisdom of the party is centered. It gives the individual the possibility of correcting his partial prejudices. Each contributes his own experience for the general benefit of the Committee. Without this method very many mistakes would be made. Since each person takes his part in the deliberations our decisions are more or less correct.”
“So you refuse to be a dictator,” I said, “I have found the same tactics are used by all dictators. In Europe you are painted as the bloodthirsty Czar or the aristocratic freebooter from Georgia.”
He laughed in a genial way and blinked at me as I continued: “Since there are stories going around of bank robberies and other burglaries which you organized as a youth in order to help the party, or at least countenanced, I should like to know how much of all these we are to believe.”
The peasant instinct in Stalin now came to the fore. He went across to his writing-desk and brought me a pamphlet of about 20 pages which contained his biographical data in Russian but naturally nothing in answer to my question.
“There you will find everything,” he said, obviously pleased at this debonair way of giving a negative answer. I began to laugh and asked: “Tell me if you do not feel yourself to be the follower of Stenka Rasin, the noble rapparee whose legendary deeds I have heard recounted on the Volga, where they were done.”
He returned to his constructive logical way of talking.
“We Bolsheviks,” he said, “apart entirely from our national origin, have always been interested in personalities like Bolotnikow, Stenka Rasin, Pugatschew, because they emerged spontaneously from the first elementary uprising of the peasantry against the oppressor. It is interesting for us to study the first signs of that awakening. Historical allegories, however, are out of the question; and we have not idealized Stenka Rasin. Individual uprisings, even when organized with the capacity that characterized these three leaders I have mentioned, lead to nothing. A peasant revolution can attain its ends only when it is united with the revolution of the workers and led by the latter. Only a revolution integrally organized and welded together in all its parts can lead to its goal. This you cannot have among the peasants because they alone form an independent class. Moreover, the three insurrectionary leaders that I have mentioned were all Tsarist. They were against the landed gentry but for our good Czar. That was their battle cry.”
The hands of the watch that I had placed before me on the table showed that our time was growing short. I put another question in an innocent way, as if I did not know about America in Russia: “Everywhere in this country,” I said, “I find that America is respected. How is it possible that any State whose aim is to overthrow capitalism can pay its respect to a country in which capitalism has reached its highest grade of development?”
Without a moment’s pause, Stalin gave a magnificent answer: “You are overstating things. Here there is no general respect for everything that is American. There is only a respect for the American sense of practicality in everything, in industry, in literature and in business; but we never forget that it is a capitalist land. They are sound people, or at least there are many sound people there, sound in mind as well as in body, sound in their whole attitude towards work and towards everyday facts. The practical business side of American life in its simplicity has our admiration.
Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 369-378

STALIN SAYS THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION IS THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

Tirelessly, Stalin began at the beginning, put each principle in its proper place, and once more laid it down that “the fundamental question of Leninism, its starting-point, is not the peasant question but the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the question of the conditions of obtaining it, and the conditions of its retention. The question of the peasantry as allied to the proletariat in its struggle for power, is a subsidiary question.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 177

Stalin, supported by Molotov and several others, defended Lenin’s new conception: the dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the poorest peasants, can alone assure a solution of the tasks of the democratic revolution and at the same time open the era of socialist transformations. Stalin was right as against Volodarsky, but he did not know how to prove it.
Trotsky, Leon, Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 216

LENIN ATTACKS THOSE ATTACKING THE GOVT UNDER THE GUISE OF REJECTING BUREAUCRACY

Bureaucracy? Yes, no doubt one is always right when one abuses it. It has a deplorable tendency either to become sterile and fat, or thin to mummification. But, all the same, the Administration has a broad back and very often one blackguards it with theatrical violence and with one’s eyes shut, solely because one wants, for one reason or another, to attack the government. More than 20 years earlier, in 1903, Lenin replied to the Mensheviks and to Trotsky: “It is obvious that outcries against the bureaucracy are only a method of showing one’s dissatisfaction with the composition of the central organization. You are a bureaucrat because you were elected by the Congress, not by my wishes, but in spite of them…. You are acting in a barberous, mechanical way because you take orders from the majority of the Congress of the Party and pay no heed to my desire to be personally consulted…. You are an autocrat because you do not wish to restore the power into the hands of the old group of your colleagues, which defends its own ideas all the more energetically because it objects to being disregarded by the Congress.” Thus Lenin expressed himself, and he was an amazingly good psychologist with a hundred piercing eyes.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 186

STALIN SAYS MARXISTS ARE NOT TRYING TO EQUALIZE EVERYONE

And yet, these men who are content for themselves to live a dull, often ascetic, life, are by no means fanatics on the subject of leveling, as many people think. With us, the average man–whose brain does not yet know how to digest ideas properly and whose head is filled with a strange farrago of headings of social and political doctrines–has three great grievances against the Communist, grievances such that they transform the said Communist into an ogre. They are that he is anti-patriotic, that he wants to deprive everyone of his possessions, and that he wants to turn society into a vast disciplined and equalized barracks, and to level everyone’s intelligence like paving-stones. But the Communist Internationalists are, on the contrary, all in favor of national expansion, on the sole condition that is not obtained by war, and is not put into the hands of so-called businessmen. Their general theory of the suppression of private property only harms a negligible number of social parasites and profiteers, and it brings with it enormous benefit to all the other inhabitants of the Earth. (All public evils result, beyond any question, from the moral and material chaos brought about by the general struggle to grow rich.) As for leveling, they are its avowed enemies as soon as it goes beyond that great law of justice and of equity (the basis, in fact, of Socialism) which consist in giving each human being precisely the same political power, that is to say, in effacing the artificial and pernicious inequality on the threshold of destiny. It would be easy to show that Socialism is, of all regimes, the one which cultivates individuality the most and the best.
Stalin is very insistent on this point: “By equality, Marxism does not mean the leveling of personal requirements and conditions of existence, but the suppression of classes, that is to say equal enfranchisement for every worker after the overthrow and expropriation of the Capitalists…. The equal duty of everyone to work according to his capacity, and the equal right of all workers to be remunerated according to work they do (socialist society): the equal duty of everyone to work according to his capacity and the equal right of all workers to be remunerated according to their needs (communist society). Marxism starts from the fact that the needs and taste of men can never be alike nor equal either in quality or in quantity, either in the socialist or the communist era. Marxism has never recognized and does not now recognize any other form of equality.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 236-237

Later when I turned the conversation to the astonishing volte-face in which the communism of recent years cast all its boasted equality behind it, Stalin made a long and doctrinaire reply. He described a perfectly Socialist society as an impossibility so long as classes existed, and so long as work was a burden for many, and pleasure for only a few.
“Every man according to his abilities and attainments; that is the Marxist formula for the first stage of socialism. In the final stage, every man will produce as much as he can and be paid according to his needs. Socialism has never denied differences in tastes and needs, the extent of such differences. Why, Marx attacks the principal of absolute equality! In the West, people imagine that we want first to collect everything, then distribute it in a thoroughly primitive fashion. That might do well for Cromwell, but not for our scientific socialism.”
Ludwig, Emil. Three portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. New York Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, c1940, p. 120

CRITICISM OF THE SU SHOULD FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE AS WELL AS THE NEGATIVE

…one must always give the true proportion between good and evil–which is never done, so far as the USSR is concerned, when criticism is inconsiderately leveled at it without paying the least attention to the point of view of the other side.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 239

STALIN SAYS THE SU WILL NOT SEIZE OR YIELD LAND

“We do not want one foot of anyone else’s land, but we will not yield an inch of our own.” (Stalin.)
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 247

GOODS ARE UNEQUALLY DISTRIBUTED BECAUSE OF ECONOMIC NATIONALISM

Gone, in the first quarter of the 20th century, is the time when the capitalist stomach had the Equator as its belt.
It is not over-production that should be indicted, for, actually, the world does not produce enough for its needs, but the disorder in the distribution of produce as a result of economic nationalisms.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 251

THE CAPITALIST DISGUISE OF FASCISM

Capitalism, to continue to be Capitalism, has had to disguise its aims. It has done so with a great deal of false modesty. As Stalin expressly said, some time ago, Capitalism cannot emerge from the crisis with “it’s head held high,” it can only emerge from it “on all fours.”
Faced with the progress of socialism and the advance of their own decay, the middle classes soon pull themselves together. They improved their program of conservative seizure (having the material means of doing so), and today they are rising to the surface again, carefully disguised. The capitalist system is discreetly tucked away into the background, and is no longer visible in the foreground at all.
That disguise called Fascism–which, without being a necessary adjunct to middle-class power, does in fact occur almost everywhere (and has become the new uniform of Capitalism)–has as its main objective the division of the enemy and especially the isolation of the working classes and socialism at the same stroke, by getting the workers who do not belong to the laboring classes on its side. This scheme was very carefully prepared by continuous, intensive, very carefully prepared propaganda starting soon after the end of the war [WWI], at a period at which the ruling classes were crippled and were rapidly losing their hold over the masses.
Discontent, resulting from all the disillusionment and all the hardships of post-war existence, has been fostered and exploited by Capitalism through a certain democratic demagogism and by certain ideas dishonestly borrowed from socialist terminology. Capitalism has extracted from these a compound of all the bitterness, all the disillusionment and all the anger, and has diverted it and directed it against a few cock-shies set up by itself.
One of these cock-shies (apart from socialism) is the parliamentary system which, it is declared, must be swept away, in addition to Socialism, so that the last semblance of liberty may disappear (liberty itself having already vanished). So the parliamentary system (which really thoroughly deserves it!) is accused of all the sins of Israel, thereby cunningly shifting them from the shoulders of the middle-class system itself.
And they have all the other scapegoats they need. Present-day Reaction has protested louder than anyone else against the scandals, frauds, and semi-official embezzlements with which its own methods are so filled, and it has gone out of its way to incriminate with these misdeeds of the capitalist system, not indeed all capitalists, but only those who have at length grown weary of the colossal complacency of class legislation.
And by thus playing with words (as, for instance, with the elastic word “regime”), the new-fangled Reaction has created a certain anti-Capitalism with excellent demagogic scope. It is the only means of preserving Capitalism: suppress parliament and install in its place a dictatorial government, and prosecute the villains who have committed the crime of being found out, and Capitalism becomes unassailable.
This activity in defense of Capitalism, with its rudiments of a superficial and negative programme, emanates from all sorts of different organizations only differing from one another by their titles, and forming a solid opposition group to the workers’ movement.
The peasant classes and the lower middle-classes are set against the workers; officials are set against manual laborers; and everyone is set against the officials. The taxpayers, all the ex-soldiers who do not understand the situation, and the very young men, are dazzled. The controlling idea is to gather all those who are not already organized, the floating population, in fact, into a new organization over which control can be kept, and to smother the worker in it.
Socialism–the threadbare, mangy author of all evil–is decried at the same time as the parliamentary system, by putting it in an entirely false light. People are horrified by being made to believe that Socialism is plotting their destruction.
People say: “Socialists have been in power in England and in Germany. See what they have done.” They omit to add that the people in question were perhaps socialist in name, but that they never applied the principles of Socialism. And indeed it must be recognized that this piece of sophistry is partly reinforced by the very real disappointment which certain Social-Democratic leaders, by their actions during and after the war, gave to the workers. All their pandering, whether disloyal or merely childish, and their actual betrayal of the workers, have to some extent discredited Socialism, and have appreciably weakened it among certain classes of workers which are not yet ripe for ruthless and uncompromising Communism.
So we see Mr. MacDonald, a Socialist converted to the virtues of Capitalism, being exhibited with pride, “much as a reformed drunkard is exhibited by a temperance society,” says Mr. Snowden. As for the achievements of the USSR these are hidden, and stolen from the people.
The neo- Reactionaries are particularly virulent (as is natural) against trade unionism. We know what Mussolini thinks about it, and we also know the sentiments of those who prompt Hitler with what he has to say. And not long ago, Monsieur Tardieu explicitly said: “To overcome the world crisis, all that is required is effective control of trade unions.” The Corporate State systems which flourish in Italy, in Germany, and (in disguise) in France, are based precisely on this principle. It is the system of intimidation and of new militarism –which fills Herr Krupp with enthusiasm; it transforms every worker into a soldier–a machine tool or a rifle on two legs.
But the great weapon of Fascism against Socialism is Nationalism.
National unity and greatness, prophesies Fascism, can only be acquired if Internationalism, which is the principal element of disorder, misery, and perdition, is crushed. So down with foreigners, naturalized aliens, and Jews!–down, above all, with Socialists and Communists.
Nationalism is the principal driving force of Fascism. It is a kind of chauvinistic intoxication which makes this timely re-grouping of Capitalism proceed. It is its leaven.
A powerful leaven, indeed–the simplest, the most terrible and the most dynamic of all. Its passion inflames hundreds of millions of people. The myth of national interest or national honor inflames the dullest and most apathetic of citizens–and how much more so empty-headed, loud-voiced youth! It is the most stupid of all evil instincts because, being highly contagious, it blindly paves the way for every calamity.
“Ourselves, ourselves alone!” A comprehensive formula which avoids all deep reflection and foresight. The most valuable key-formula. One which appeals to the vital interests of the rich, of military men, and of churchmen, and at the same time to the stupidity of everyone else.
Social preservation then, takes the form–for the final struggle–of so-called moral and national reconstruction trampling Socialism and the free citizen underfoot, and of a strong power which raises itself, with its soldiery, above any criticism. It is the capitalist police converted into a party.
This is the dope which Fascism has served out and is still serving out to the taxpayers–consisting of claiming to be able to put an end to the crisis and the depression by the help of the same methods that brought in about. The various forms of Fascism differ among themselves superficially; but underneath they are all the same.
However much it may establish a sort of farce of democracy, a sort of caricature of Socialism, and however loudly it gives expression to revolutionary sentiments and ideas of controlled economy–and even anti-Fascism–and however much it climbs up upon proletarian principles in order to raise itself higher, this so-called doctrine of popular reconstruction, which has installed itself in Italy, in Germany, in Hungary, in Poland, in the Balkan Peninsula, in Portugal, in Austria (where the liberators have met with the most frightful butchery and the most appalling tortures), and which at the present moment is recruiting adherents among the youth, the lower middle-classes and the faithful of the churches of France and of other countries, is no more democratic than it is new. It is the old Capitalism beplumed, tin-plated and militarized, and it consists of the same enormous fundamental contradictions running through a doctrine that is so vague that ordinary people can–at first–be made to believe that they are being pushed forward when they are really being dragged back.
It achieves nothing. Fascism is not and never will be anything but a veneer, and the only really imaginative or original things that Fascists have ever done have been to decide upon the color of their shirts and to persuade the people that one can live on smoke.
It still remains that form of society in which one only prospers in proportion as one ruins someone else, in which one only lives by killing other people, that form of society which invades new continents in order to steal weak countries and to make the natives pay for the very air they breathe, that abject form of society in which one cannot be honest without being a fool, where the elections violate the will of the people, where men exploit each other, assassinate each other, and the payment of all the great social debts is indefinitely postponed by illusive appearances of settlement, and the people are perpetually dancing over a concealed volcano.
Such a system cannot possibly put an end to the crisis; it can only make it worse, because the more Nationalism develops, the more it proceeds to its own destruction.
It produces nothing–except, perhaps, a death sentence. The “order” proclaimed by middle-class rule is that of the cemetery.
What can be the outcome of it all? Only war. And once more we shall have snout-like gas-masks, train-loads of soldiers– hearses full of living men–masses of people rushing headlong to get themselves killed, fields turned into heaps of scrap-metal, villages into stone heaps, and whole peoples asphyxiated in subterranean prisons.
But war is also social revolution scattered broadcast in the furrows of the trenches and over every hearth in the cities.
In the meantime, the chances that this spectral program, the program of blundering delusion and of annihilation, has of taking root anywhere–apart from its pretense of democracy–is that it has on its side brute force, the force of the State. Because all European and American governments are either fascist or pre-fascist.
Capitalism, dragged down in the landslide of statistics, in the melting away of figures, and economically ruined, is still strong politically. Its bankrupt partisans are armed to the teeth. They can no longer keep their feet but they possess machine guns, tanks, bombs, armies; they have crowds of policemen who would look well in an agricultural show. They control the law courts (the prisons), the newspapers, the schools, diplomacy, and aggressive alliances. Legality belongs to them alone and they coin laws as they do money, inflating them as they inflate their currencies.
They have all they need in order to sweep away men of independent thought, to plunder the weak, to exploit civilization to their own evil ends, to instill national confidence to a point of wildest enthusiasm into a part of the lower middle-classes, even to death itself, to squander the efforts of the people and to maintain for a little while longer the era of decadence and destruction.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 252-258

Fritz Thyssen was the first to shout “Heil Hitler” at the Dusseldorf meeting in February…. It means that big business has already decided to install the house painter in the Wilhelmstrasse.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 219

ABORTION WAS MADE ILLEGAL TO INCREASE THE POPULATION

Free abortion had also dramatically reduced the birthrate during the thirties, to the point where the government banned it in 1936 to increase the population.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 101 [p. 91 on the NET]

If after years of careful experiment, it is found that abortion has an evil affect on the health of women resorting to it, that it is being used as a substitute for birth control, there is nothing in Socialism which justifies the toleration of such a state of affairs.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 118

One distinguished American doctor who examined the situation with reference to abortion, came to the following conclusions:
“All doctors, however, agreed that repeated abortions affected the woman’s health in a serious way. Although it is impossible to give accurate statistical data about morbidity following induced abortion, yet there is no doubt that menstrual disturbances, endocrine troubles, sterility, and ectopic pregnancy were frequently observed as a result of repeated abortions.”
“Repeated abortion is harmful to the mother’s health and hence should be forbidden in any society that is able (1) to guarantee a job to all its members, men and women; (2) to provide medical and social institutions to care for mother and child free of charge; (3) to give adequate financial aid to large families; (4) to give contraceptive advice to all who seek it” (H. E. Sigerist, M.D.–Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union, pp. 266 and 271).
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 119

In 1936, in view of the rising standard of welfare of the people, the government passed a law prohibiting abortion, at the same time adopting an extensive program for the building of maternity homes, nurseries, milk centers and kindergartens. In 1936, 2,174,000,000 rubles were assigned for these measures, as compared with 875 million rubles in 1935. A law was passed providing for considerable grants to large families. Grants to a total of over one billion rubles were made in 1937 under this law.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 340

BOLSHEVIK PARTY WAS NOT MONOLITHIC

It is a dangerous illusion to think of the Bolshevik party as “monolithic”. It began as a fraction of another party and continued thereafter to produce further fractions and splits. Every year continuously after the Revolution some group opposed the central leadership….

Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press,1956, p. 85

STALIN ALLOWED GREATER FREE SPEECH THAN HIS SUCCESSORS

… Two writers, Daniel and Siniavskii, were arrested in 1966 for having published satirical stories abroad under pseudonyms. Their crime was “spreading anti-Soviet propaganda.” Even Stalin had not used this argument against intellectuals. Daniel and Siniavskii were sentenced to terms in a labor camp, but their convictions spurred 63 members of the Moscow Union of Writers to protest the harm such persecution could do to Soviet culture. Further arrests led to further protests, a phenomenon unknown under Stalin’s terror.

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 264

[Feb. 7, 1970, letter from Tvardovskii, the manager of Novyi Mir, to Brezhnev]

No matter how strange it may seem, Stalin showered me with decorations and medals when he was alive, while the Stalinists of today are hounding me.

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 280

AMERICAN SAYS THERE IS MORE INCORRECT INFO ABOUT THE SU THAN ANY OTHER TOPIC

[Speech given by Col. Cooper of the United States to the American section of the All-Union Western Chamber of Commerce, Sept. 14, 1928, on his impressions of the USSR during four visits lasting a total of eight months]

…When I was in America (after my visits to the USSR), I gave many lectures about Soviet Russia. I was astonished by the enormous interest in the USSR throughout America. I have to say that in America there is more incorrect information about Russia than about any other topic whatsoever.

… I am well aware that the Soviet Union will develop its own natural resources with the efforts of its own citizens and for their benefit, and I would hate to see today when these incredible natural riches were exploited for selfish purposes.

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 570

PARTY PEOPLE MUST NOT BE FAVORED OVER NON-PARTY PEOPLE FOR JOBS

Certain comrades think that only Party members may hold leading positions in the mills and factories and for that reason ignore and hold back non-Party comrades who possess ability and initiative, and advance Party members instead, although they are less capable and possess less initiative. Needless to say, there is nothing more stupid and reactionary than such a policy, if it may be called a policy. That such a policy can only discredit the Party and repel non-party workers from it, needs no proof. It is not our policy to transform the Party into an exclusive caste. It is our policy to achieve, as between workers who are members of the Party and workers who are not, an atmosphere of “mutual confidence,” of “mutual control” (Lenin)”….

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 139

CONSTITUTION PRESERVES THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

Such are the facts. And facts, it is said, are stubborn things.

I must admit that the draft of the new Constitution really does preserve the regime of the dictatorship of the working-class, just as it also preserves unchanged the present leading position of the Communist Party of the USSR. If our esteemed critics regard this as a flaw in the draft constitution, it is only to be regretted. We Bolsheviks regard it as a merit of the Draft Constitution.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 228

RELIGION IS THE OPPOSITE OF SCIENCE AND MUST BE FOUGHT

The Party cannot be neutral towards religion, and it does conduct anti-religious propaganda against all and every religious prejudice because it stands for science, while religious prejudices run counter to science, because all religion is something opposite to science.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 261

His attitude toward conventional religion is purely negative. His religion…is his work; communism is enough faith for him. Stalin has said, “The party cannot be neutral toward religion, because religion is something opposite to science.” Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that he permitted his wife an almost orthodox religious burial.

… People who know him well call him “Yosif Visarionovich”; others simply say Tovarish (Comrade) Stalin. He has no title.

Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 534

INDIVIDUAL & COLLECTIVE, SOCIALIST, INTERESTS WORK IN HARMONY NOT CONFLICT

There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of the individual person and the interests of the collective. There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, socialism, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between “individualism” and socialism.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 320

AMERICAN PRESIDENTS LIKE ROOSEVELT SERVE AT THE WHIM OF THE CAPITALIST CLASS

… I have some experience in fighting for socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another president in his place. The capitalists will say: Presidents come and presidents go, but we go on forever; if this or that president does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the president oppose to the will of the capitalist class?

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 320

STALIN PREDICTS AN ECONOMIC CRISIS IN THE US AND THE END OF WORLD CAPITALISM

I think the moment is not far off when a revolutionary crisis will develop in America. And when a revolutionary crisis develops in America, that will be the beginning of the end of world capitalism as a whole.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 324

STALIN REFUSES TO LECTURE THE CAPITALISTS ON MORALITY WHEN THEY HAVE NONE

Far be it from me to moralize on the policy of non–intervention, to talk of treason, treachery and so on. It would be naive to preach morals to people who recognize no human morality. Politics is politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 335

Actually speaking, the policy of non-intervention means conniving at aggression, giving free rein to war and consequently transforming the war into a world war. The policy of non-intervention reveals an eagerness, a desire not to hinder the aggressors in their nefarious work… Far be it from me to moralize on the policy of non-intervention, to talk of treason treachery and so on. It would be naive to preach morals to people who recognise no human morality.

Stalin, Joseph. Works. London, 1978. Vol. 14, pages 355; 368.

CENTRALIZATION AND TOTALITARIANISM DID NOT RULE IN THE SU OF THE 30’S

According to most Western views, power was transmitted from the top to the bottom, from the center to the localities…. Theoretically, every committee was completely subordinate to the one above it, and individual members had no power or control at all.

The political reality was much different. In fact, the chain of command collapsed more often than it functioned. The Communist Party, far from having penetrated every quarter of Russian life, was more an undisciplined and disorganized force with little influence outside the cities. Soviet Russia in the ’30s resembled a backward, traditional society far more than it did the sophisticated order of totalitarianism.

Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 27

The party in the ’30s was neither monolithic nor disciplined. Its upper ranks were divided, and its lower organizations were disorganized, chaotic, and undisciplined. Moscow leaders were divided on policy issues, and central leaders were at odds with territorial secretaries whose organizations suffered from internal disorder and conflict. A bloated party membership containing political illiterates and apolitical opportunists plus a lazy and unresponsive regional leadership was hardly the formula for a Leninist party. Such a clumsy and unwieldy organization could not have been an efficient or satisfying instrument for Moscow’s purposes.

Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 37

Keeping the obvious source caveats in mind, the present analysis has suggested a number of conclusions about Soviet political history in the 1930s. First, it seems that the Bolshevik party was not the monolithic and homogeneous machine both totalitarian theorists and Stalinists would have us believe. Administration was so chaotic, irregular, and confused that even Fainsod’s characterization of the system as “inefficient totalitarianism” seems to overstate the case.

Although the Soviet government was certainly dictatorial (or tried to be), it was not totalitarian. The technical and technological sophistication that separates totalitarianism from dictatorship was lacking in the ’30s. The primitive texture of the Smolensk Archive, the real weakness of the central government in key areas, and a certain degree of political pluralism argue strongly against any totalitarian characterization.

Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 198

Moscow had little information about what was really happening in the far-flung provinces, where regional satraps used distance and poor communications to insulate themselves from Moscow’s control and build their own power. There was not even a telephone line to the Soviet Far East until the eve of World War II.

The Future Did Not Work by J. Arch Getty, Book Review of The Passing of an Illusion by Franois Furet [March 2000 Atlantic Monthly]

POSITIVE CHANGES FAR EXCEEDED THE NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

It was known that party and state leaders were being arrested as “enemies of the people,” but at the same time new schools, factories, and palaces of culture were rising everywhere. Military leaders were being arrested as spies, but the party was building a strong, modern army. Scientists were being arrested as wreckers, but Soviet science developed rapidly with the party’s support. Writers were being arrested as “Trotskyites and counter-revolutionaries,” but some literary works appeared that were real masterpieces. Leaders in the union republics were being arrested as nationalists, but the formerly oppressed nationalities were improving their lot, and friendship among the peoples of the Soviet Union was growing. And this obvious progress filled Soviet hearts with pride, engendering confidence in the party that was organizing it and in the man who stood at the head of the party.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 629

Finally, the whole structure of Russian society has undergone a change so profound and so many sided that it cannot really be reversed. It is possible to imagine a violent reaction of the Russian people itself against the state of siege in which it has been living so long. It is even possible to imagine something like a political restoration. But it is certain that even such a restoration would touch merely the surface of Russian society and that it would demonstrate its impotence vis-a-vis the work done by the revolution even more thoroughly than the Stuart and the Bourbon restorations had done. For of Stalinist Russia it is even truer than of any other revolutionary nation that ’20 years have done the work of 20 generations’.

For all these reasons Stalin cannot be classed with Hitler, among the tyrants whose record is one of absolute worthlessness and futility. Hitler was the leader of a sterile counter-revolution, while Stalin has been both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution.

The better part of Stalin’s work is as certain to outlast Stalin himself as the better parts of the work of Cromwell & Napoleon have outlasted them.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 569-570

Summing up Stalin’s rule in 1948 I said that’ Stalin cannot be classed with Hitler, among the tyrants whose record is one of absolute worthlessness and futility. Hitler was the leader of a sterile counter-revolution, while Stalin has been both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory, but creative revolution.’ This remains true if the whole of Stalin’s career is assessed.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 627

THE SOVIET PEOPLE WERE UNITED AND OPTIMISTIC FOR SEVERAL REASONS

Closer examination reveals that this notorious “conformism” can be reduced to three main features: uniformity of opinion in regard to the fundamental principles of communism, common love of the Soviet Union, and the confidence shared by all that in the near future the Soviet Union will be the happiest and most powerful country on earth.

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 39

RISING STANDARD OF LIVING GENERATES GREATER PATRIOTISM

One difference there certainly is between the patriotism of the Soviet people and that of other countries. The patriotism of the Soviet Union has a more rational foundation. There the individual’s standard of living is visibly improving daily. Not only is he receiving more rubles, but the purchasing power of these rubles is also increasing. In 1936 the Soviet worker’s average wage had increased by 278 percent compared with 1929, and the Soviet citizen enjoys the certainty that this tendency must continue for many years to come (not only because the gold reserves of Germany have fallen to $25 million and those of the Soviet Union risen to $7 million). It is easier to be patriotic when the patriot gets more guns and more butter too than it is when he gets more guns and no butter.

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 43

INTELLECTUALS, ARTISTS AND WRITERS ARE PAMPERED AND GIVEN FUNDS

Savants, writers, artists, and actors enjoy definite advantages in the Soviet Union. They are appreciated, encouraged, and even pampered by the state both with prestige and large incomes. All the means they require are placed at their disposal, and not one of them need suffer any anxiety as to whether what he is doing will pay. They have, moreover, the most responsive and eager public in the world.

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 45

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SOVIET DICTATORSHIP AND FASCIST DICTATORSHIP

But carping, whining, and alarming are pursuits which many hold almost as dear as life itself. Every language contains a host of words for them, and I can well imagine that to many the restriction of the right to abuse must seem sheer despotism. For this reason many people say that the Soviet Union is the very opposite of a democracy, and some, indeed, go so far as to maintain there is no difference between the Union and the Fascist dictatorships. Their blindness is to be pitied. At bottom, the Soviet dictatorship is confined to prohibiting the propagation of two opinions in word, deed, or writing: first, that the establishment of socialism in the Union is impossible without a world revolution, and, secondly, that the Soviet Union is bound to lose the coming war. It seems to me that anyone who deduces from these two prohibitions complete identification with the Fascist dictatorships is overlooking one essential difference: the Soviet Union forbids agitation in support of the principle that twice two is five, whilst the Fascist dictatorships forbid active pursuit of the principle that twice two is four.

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 66

WRITERS MUST DECIDE WHICH CLASS THEY’LL SERVE AND WHOSE FREEDOM THEY’LL FOSTER

Expressed plainly and simply, this is the problem which today presents itself to every writer of any responsibility. Since socialist economy can hardly be established without a temporary modification of what is today called democracy, which do you prefer: that the great mass of the people should have less meat, bread, and butter and, instead, that you have greater freedom of writing, or that you should have less freedom of writing and the great mass of the people more bread, meat, and butter?
That, for a writer of responsibility, is no easy problem.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow , 1937. New York : The Viking Press, 1937, p. 146

SOVIET’S PROGRAM CAME FROM THE MASSES THEMSELVES

The Communists say: “We did not create the Soviets. They sprang out of the life of the people. We did not hatch up some program in our brains and then take it out and superimpose it upon the people. Rather we took our program directly from the people themselves. They were demanding ‘Land to the Peasants,’ ‘Factories to the Workers,’ and ‘Peace to All the World.’ We wrote the slogans upon our banners and with them marched into power. Our strength lies in our understanding of the people. In fact, we do not need to understand the people. We are the people.” This was certainly true of the rank-and-file of the leaders, who, like the five young Communists we first met in Petrograd, were flesh and bone of the people.
Williams, Albert R. Through the Russian Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 31

SOVIET STUDENTS TREATED WELL UNDER SOCIALISM

The Government does a great deal to assist the student. First, there is a State subsidy of 25 rubles a month to the students. In addition they get free rooms and tuition. They also travel home at vacation times free of charge. And their books are put out by Government publishing houses at a great reduction.
Dykstra, Gerald. A Belated Rebuttal on Russia. Allegan, Mich.: The Allegan Press, 1928, p. 102

EDELMAN LIKES BEING IN THE SU

As I looked at the town, the thought of the years that I had spent in the Soviet Union, which now I was about to leave, rose in me with a presentiment of nostalgia. Here I had spent four years, from 1933 to 1937, undismayed by shortage, happy in abundance, content among plans, hopes, enthusiasms, victories, failures, with the knowledge that I was helping to build a new society.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 13

PERSON SAYS LIFE IN THE SU MUCH BETTER THAN IN GERMANY

We stayed at the Metropole til about 1 a.m.. I told Smirnov and Liepmann in detail of my plans for my return to Germany.
“You won’t like it,” said Liepmann. “I’ve worked seven years in the USSR. Last year I went back to work in Cologne. Do you know the difference between working with comrades and working with a boss breathing down your neck? If you’ve forgotten, they’ll soon remind you. There are discomforts and pinpricks in the USSR. But give me a pinprick before a bayonet thrust!”
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 33

DEFECTIONS WERE NOT FOR IDEOLOGICAL OR POLITICAL REASONS BUT FOR MONEY

A number of Soviet officials serving on missions abroad, refused to return. Many of them took posts with foreign firms. Going back to Russia meant giving up a life of comfort, and would necessarily involve rendering an account of their behavior while out of the country. Corruption played a greater part in leading these men to act as they did than any spirit of political opposition.
Barmine, Alexandre. Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat. London: L. Dickson limited,1938, p. 242

LITERACY INCREASED DRAMATICALLY IN THE 1920’S AND AFTERWARD

By the middle of the 1920s, literacy had increased markedly. Improvement in the national republics was especially striking. Compared to 1922, in 1925 the number of literate workers in Georgia grew 15 times, in Kazakhstan five times, in Kirghizia four times, and the pattern was similar in other regions. The main sources of literacy and culture were the workers’ clubs in the cities and the reading huts in the villages. The printing of periodicals was three times what it had been in 1913. The building of libraries began on a massive scale. Film studios were built in Odessa, Yerevan, Tashkent, and Baku. More creative literature was being published.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 127

In 1940 and thereafter Stalin claimed the literacy rate in the USSR was over 99 percent, the most literate country in the world. This was incredible, but there is no reason to doubt that Stalin pushed the Soviet literacy rate to some point around 95 percent, which compared favorably with the most advanced countries. Considering the immensity of the USSR, its 175 languages in which instruction was given, the primitiveness of much of the population, and the desperate shortage of buildings, educational materials, and teachers, Stalin’s alphabetization of his many peoples was a great and staggering achievement, and one that cannot be argued away by pointing to the shortcomings of the rest of his school system. Making the USSR a literate nation was Stalin’s greatest contribution to the liberation of man.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 111

By 1939 about 87% of Soviet citizens between the ages of 9 and 49 were literate and numerate. Schools, newspapers, libraries, and radio stations proliferated. Factory apprenticeships had hugely expanded in number. The universities teamed with students. An agrarian society had been pointed in the direction of “modernization.’ The cultural revolution was not restricted to the dissemination of technical skills; it was also aimed at spreading science, urbanism, industry, and Soviet-style modernity.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 308

SU IS FIRST COUNTRY TO LEGALIZE ABORTION AND DIVORCE

Soviet divorce legislation was the first in the world to allow either spouse to terminate the marriage and to do so on the sole grounds of incompatibility….
…although it did not formally legalize abortion, in the first three years the Soviet government treated it with forbearance. Because many abortions were performed by unqualified individuals under un-hygienic conditions causing infections and death, a decree of November 18, 1920, legalized them under strict medical supervision. Discouraged as a “moral survival of the past,” they were to be available free of charge at the mother’s request provided they were performed in hospitals by physicians. This, too, was the first law of its kind.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 330

STALIN’S PROGRAM WAS BETTER AND MORE ACCEPTED THAN ROBESPIERRE’S

The deeper reason for Stalin’s triumph lay, as we have said, in that, unlike Robespierre, he offered his nation a positive and new programme of social organization which, though it spelt privations and suffering to many, also created undreamt-of openings for many others.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 383

GREAT EDUCATIONAL ADVANCEMENTS UNDER STALIN IN THE 1930’S

In the five years from 1933 to 1938 about half a million administrators, technicians, economists, and men of other professions had graduated from university schools, an enormous number for a country whose educated classes had previously formed a very thin layer of society.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 384

During the 1930-ies the cultural development of the Soviet Union advanced in leaps too. The number of students in all schools 1929 was approx. 14 millions. In the year 1938 they had increased to approximately 34 millions, and at that time students in all kinds of courses including part time, amounted to more than 47 millions. Almost a third of all citizens took part of the school system. In the beginning of the 1930-ies 33 per cent were still illiterate in the Soviet Union (67 per cent in 1913). 1938 illiteracy was totally eradicated since several years back. During this period the students at higher forms of education almost tripled from 207,000 to 601,000. The number of libraries was 70,000 in the year 1938 compared with 40,000 in 1933. The amount of books in the libraries 1938 reached the colossal figure of 126 millions to compare with 86 millions 1933.
Sousa, Mario. The Class Struggle During the Thirties in the Soviet Union, 2001.

SCOTT EXPLAINS WHY PEOPLE CAME TO MAGNITOGORSK TO WORK

Scott explained how, from 1928 to 1932, about 250,000 people came to the barren place where the Magnitogorsk giant was to be erected. Approximately 3/4 of them came there voluntarily, in search of work, bread cards, and better living conditions. The remaining part consisted of deported peasants and criminals who were placed in corrective labor colonies.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 265

STALIN EXPLAINS DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

There are two parts to the concept of socialism in one country. Emphasis is usually placed only on the part that says “one country.” Equally important is the idea that only socialism, and not communism, can be achieved prior to the time when the victory of the world revolution has been won. A Communist society would have no classes, no money, no scarcity, and no state, that is, no army, police force, prisons, and courts. There is no such society in the world, and no society claims to be Communist. A socialist society, according to Marxism-Leninism, is the transitional form on the road to communism. Classes and class struggle still exist, all the material needs of the people have not yet been met, and there is indeed a state, a government of the working-class known as the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the government of capitalist nations, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 15

Russia is not practicing communism today and never has been. The Bolsheviks do not even make the claim. The Five-Year Plan is the blueprint of a socialist, not a communist, edifice.
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 1

PRESS COULD CRITICIZE AT WILL AS LONG AS IT DID NOT ATTACK THE SYSTEM ITSELF

The Soviet press, which allowed no criticism of the State gospel, even when it changed, in every way encouraged criticism as to how it was being carried out, and it contained hair-raising accounts of the living conditions of workers, even comparing their accommodations to catacombs….
Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 130

THE SYSTEM REALLY CARES FOR THE PEOPLE

On the other hand, there could be no question at all of the care of the State for all, in the form of all sorts of social services and benefits; above all, education and medical assistance, which were absolutely cost-free for everyone in the country and every visitor to it. There was a complete system of State insurance. There was the utmost care and thought for women and children. Women, politically and economically, had complete equality with men.
Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 130

BALTIC WHITE SEA CANAL WAS A GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENT

Soon after this Stalin was able to announce the completion of the Baltic White Sea Canal. This waterway, 142 miles long, and with 19 locks, 15 dams, 12 reservoirs and 40 dykes, 25 miles of which had to be cut through rock, was ready at last and Stalin and the Soviet people had the right to be proud of this achievement.
Fishman and Hutton. The Private Life of Josif Stalin. London: W. H. Allen, 1962, p. 87

STALIN COMPARED THE PARTY LEADERSHIP TO LEVELS IN THE MILITARY

Stalin’s wishes were carried out by a huge Party apparatus of local secretaries, whom he liked to think of in military terms. In a long speech he gave at the February-March 1937 Plenum on ways to liquidate the Party’s enemies, he declared: ‘In our party, if we look at the leading strata, there are some three to 4000 top leaders. That’s what I would call the high command of the Party. Then there are about 30 to 40,000 middle leaders. That’s our officer corps. Then there are about 100-150,000 lower ranks. They are, so to speak, the Party’s NCOs.
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Autopsy for an Empire. New York: Free Press, c1998, p. 104

[At the Feb. March 1937 Plenum Stalin stated], How does the leadership in the CPSU look at this moment? The top leadership of the CPSU in the country is composed of 3-4,000 comrades. This, I would say, is the General Headquarters. There are between 30-40,000 middle rank party workers in all the Soviet Republics…our officers.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 245

Aside from the image of the cell, almost every metaphor in Communist ideology comes from military life. The world is at “war”– open or covert class warfare as the case may be–interrupted by “truces.” The war is fought by two “armies” dwelling in “camps.” Before the revolution, and sometimes after it, the Communist party is the “army” and its leaders are the “officer corps” [or General Staff]. At other times after the revolution, the whole population of a Communist country is the “army” and the party as a whole is its “officer corps.” The party fights on various “fronts”–industrial, agricultural, educational–as well as military.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 85

STALIN CLOSELY WATCHED GOVT MONEY AND HOW MUCH FOREIGN PARTIES RECEIVED

Stalin showed an abiding concern for state funds, state gold, and state valuables. As soon as he was informed of an infringement at a gold refinery, Stalin made a note to ask the NKVD chief Yezhov or his deputy about the case, adding that ‘a commissar must be appointed at the refinery without whose signature the assay mark should not be given, nor the gold released. His notes frequently refer to the need for greater gold reserves to cover the costs of the Communist movement, and after 1940 he personally fixed the sums any particular party should be given. When the ‘People’s Democracies’ came into being in the postwar period, they were expected to do their part. In a letter to Mao Tse-tung in February 1953, less than a month before his death, Stalin wrote: ‘The work of the West European Communist parties, such as the French, Italian, and English, has become difficult. They are demanding more help than before. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has decided to increase its contribution to the fund and thinks it necessary to raise it from 800,000 to $1.3 million a year. If the Communist party of China would contribute $1.1 million in 1953, we could satisfy the demands of the above-mentioned parties. We await your reply.’ Mao agreed at once: ‘We’ll transfer the cash to Panyushkin [Soviet Ambassador to China].’
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Autopsy for an Empire. New York: Free Press, c1998, p. 144

Moscow was to be especially generous in the post-war., paying out huge amounts, of which the following list is only a small part (all figures are in U.S. dollars): in 1945, to Bulgaria (Kostov)–$100,000; in 1946, to China (Chou En-lai)–$50,000; to Romania (Gheorgiu Dej)– $500,000; in 1947, to Greece (Zachariades)–$100,000) in 1948, to France (Thorez)–$258,350; to Italy (Secchia)–$40,000; to Holland (Groot)–50,000.
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press, 1994, p. 400

[In a letter to Kaganovich on 30 August 1931 Stalin stated] This is why I don’t think we should go easy at all on people (or institutions) who try to squander the working class’s hard-currency resources just for the peace of mind of their organizations’ functionaries.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 68

A SPECIAL TYPE OF BUREAUCRACY THAT IS NOT A NEW CLASS IS NECESSARY

Any planned economy inevitably involves the rise of a bureaucracy; it is not at all a necessary sign of reaction. If we rid ourselves of the habit of regarding the word “bureaucracy” as a term of abuse, we must come to the conclusion that a bureaucracy is as indispensable to a modern society as an industrial working-class. Modern development makes necessary a new stratum of leading officials, technicians, managers, etc.. The idea of a simple classless society in which everyone will have interchangeable functions and anyone can occupy positions of authority or be an “expert” has proved to be utterly illusionary.
The original idea of Marx and Lenin that, in a socialist society, the division of labor would disappear, that is to say the division into directive and managerial work, on the one hand, and work executed to instructions, on the other, can no longer be regarded as feasible. Lenin’s famous slogan–“every cook will be able to govern the State”–is not likely to be realized, at least not for some generations to come.
In fact, the need for a specialized army of technical, industrial, and managerial experts and their social importance grow in direct proportion to the general advance of technical progress and higher forms of economic organization. That is true not only for a planned society but also for modern capitalism. The difference is only that under capitalist conditions most of these experts, supervisors, managers, economists, statisticians, industrial chemists, etc., are the private employees of private enterprises who use their knowledge and skill for the benefit of competing vested interests. They do not appear therefore as a bureaucracy although their social function is a very similar one.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 45

The material privileges which the new bureaucracy enjoys as a whole, are not very considerable. The same system of differentiation has been established among the bureaucracy as among the industrial working-class, and for the same reason, i.e., as an incentive for more and better work. The lower strata of the bureaucracy earn in many cases less than industrial workers. Only about 20% of the whole bureaucracy earn considerably more than the average worker. They also enjoy a number of other material privileges.
Apart from a very small number of artists and writers who have incomes quite out of proportion to the rest of the population, the highest salaries are paid to factory managers, the so-called Red Directors. In Magnitogorsk, for instance, the salary of the Red Director Is seven times as high as the average wage and he gets 30 times as much house space as the workers.
In other words, the top layer of the bureaucracy is certainly materially privileged compared to the ordinary worker. The value of these privileges must not, however, be exaggerated for they are in no way comparable to the differentiation of income in capitalist countries….
The third argument of those who regard the Soviet bureaucracy as the new ruling class of Russia is their growing influence on all political and general decisions. There is no doubt that this also is a fact, although one that is more difficult to establish. We shall have to say more about this point in the following chapter. But this much must be said here: the growing influence on general policy of so indispensable a section of society is only to be expected. Neither this increased general influence, nor the absence of democratic control, nor the privileges which they enjoy, make the Soviet bureaucracy a class of its own. And this is chiefly for three reasons.
(a) The material privileges of the Soviet bureaucracy are exclusively confined to the sphere of consumption. They cannot use their income as private capital, that is to say as a source of profits and means of exploitation.
(b) Their children and relatives cannot inherit from them their position of power and influence.
(c) Socially they recruit themselves from the industrial workers and collective farmers, and this process of recruitment continues. There are no barriers of either money, social position or monopoly of education which could prevent ordinary workers and collective farmers or their sons and daughters from rising to the ranks of the bureaucracy.
If ever the Soviet bureaucracy became a closed, self-perpetuating social group, it would then acquire the characteristics of a class. But so long as each new generation of the bureaucracy is recruited afresh from the best available talent throughout the masses of the population, it constitutes merely a functional group–essential in any modern society.
To speak of the Soviet bureaucracy as the new ruling class of Russia is therefore a misuse of terms. On the other hand, it remains perfectly true that this bureaucracy has exercised an increasingly great influence on the development and policy of the Soviet Union.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 48-49

SPECIALISTS HAD TO BE FAVORED AT TIMES

The second argument brought forward by the “anti-democratic” critics of Soviet Russia is the privileged position of the Soviet bureaucracy. Privileges there certainly are. But one must understand the origins of these privileges. During the first years after the revolution the Soviets were in dire need of experts of all kind. They had, to a considerable extent, to be content with experts from abroad or such Russians as had received their training under the Tsarist regime and had worked for it. In order to attract these people who were either non-political or only half-hearted supporters of the Revolution, the Bolshevik Government had to grant them certain privileges, high salaries which correspond to the salaries in capitalist countries and a number of other advantages.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 47

The other difference between fiction and reality is less well known. The monopoly of the Communist bureaucracy is neither so absolute nor so unlimited as appearances would seem to indicate. Whilst on the surface of public life–in the press, at meetings, in political bodies, in the Government, and so forth–there does exist a monopoly of the Communist bureaucracy, below the surface, in the daily functioning of social life–and so on–the Communist bureaucracy is everywhere compelled to share its power, as we have seen in the course of this book, with the non-Party specialists and intelligentsia.
Science, literature, and the arts are those domains in which a division of power is spontaneously brought into existence. Thus the factory worker has two sets of masters over him: the Communist director, the secretary of the Party organization, the chairman of the trade union, etc.; and the specialist, the technician, the foreman. It is the same for the peasant on the kolkhoz; it is the same in any Soviet administrative body, in offices, in trusts, and even in the armed forces.
The strictly hierarchical organization of production and of all administrative, scientific, and social work in Soviet Russia gives these specialists enormous power over the workers, the producers. The Communist bureaucracy and the specialists thus share the power in the factories, the trusts, the Machine Tractor Stations, the kolkhoz, the schools, the law courts, and in every administrative and scientific institution. If in the political field there exists a monopoly of the Communist bureaucracy in the economic, and even more in the social domain, there is a dual power of Communist and non-Party specialists.
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 531-532

THE WIVES OF MOST SOVIET LEADERS HAD JOBS AND WORKED

Ivy Litvinov is rather untypical of Soviet women, because she has no job herself. Stalin’s wife worked. So do several other important men’s wives, and many women, quite in their own right, have established successful careers. In no country in Europe is it so easy for a woman of intelligence and character to make good outside the home.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 545

…The wife of Kalinin, president of the USSR, is manager of a state farm near Novosibirsk. Molotov’s wife was till recently head of the Soviet trust which manufactures powder, rouge, and lipstick.
Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, lived and worked in the Kremlin until her death in 1938; she was assistant commissar of education…. Kollontai is Soviet minister to Sweden.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 546

GPU ARE THE HAND-PICKED BEST MEN FOR THE JOB

The GPU numbers about 200,000 picked men, and is in a sense a superior cadre of the Red Army; it guards frontiers, patrols railways, and the like. Especially it watches affairs within the party. The law-abiding citizen who is not a party member has less to fear from it than party men.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 549

SU CONSTITUTION COMMITTEE LED BY SOME OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN THE PARTY

The Constitution, a potentially important document, was drawn up by a committee on constitutional reform which was set up in July, 1935, and of which Stalin himself was chairman. The 10 vice-chairmen comprised a formidable list of Soviet chieftains: Litvinov, Radek, Vyshinsky, Voroshilov, Molotov, Bukharin, Akulov, Chubar, Zhdanov, and Kaganovich. For a year the committee worked.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 570

Stalin appointed himself chairman of the constitutional commission and as an apparent gesture of reconciliation included Bukharin & Radek among its 30 members. In June 1936, the draft was published and the whole population invited to engage in a nationwide discussion of its contents. It was reported to have been “greeted with enormous enthusiasm and approved with one accord.” Bukharin played a central role in drafting the charter, particularly the provision for universal suffrage, direct election by secret ballot, and the guarantees of civil rights for the citizen, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of street demonstrations, and the right to personal property protected by law.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 471

When the Seventh Congress of Soviets met at the beginning of February 1935 a decision was taken to set up a Constitutional Commission. Bukharin was elected as a member of the Central Executive Committee at this Congress and was included on the Constitutional Commission as head of the sub-commission dealing with the most important aspect of the new constitution–the rights and obligations of Soviet citizens.
Medvedev, Roy & Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin. NY, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 285

INTERVIEWER: Bukharin is rumored to have been largely responsible for the Constitution of 1936. Did he have anything to say about it?
NICOLAEVSKY: It was already clear from various signs that Bukharin had played a major role in drawing up the Constitution. He was secretary of the commission that worked out the draft Constitution.
Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite; “The letter of an Old Bolshevik.” New York: Praeger, 1965, p. 22

NO MATTER WHO WINS IN A WAR BETWEEN THE CAPITALISTS THE SU WILL GAIN

In any case, no matter what happens, it would seem that the Russians are in a position to gain. If the allies lose the 1939 war, then the British empire is weakened, western capitalism is weakened. It Germany loses the war, then presumably there will be a revolution in Germany, which would also serve Russia’s ends. It would weaken or destroy Germany as a nationalist neighbor, and it might bring communism.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 575

IN LIGHT OF CONSPIRACIES THE SOVIET GOVT COULD HAVE ENDED THE NEW CONSTITUTION

For myself, I prefer to see in the present position a much more encouraging feature, namely, that the Soviet Government, undeterred by its knowledge of the conspiracies just unearthed, is going forward unperturbed in the introduction of its new Constitution because it really believes both in the principles of that Constitution, in its own fundamental stability, and in the support of the great mass of the people. I am moved indeed to wonder whether, among all the Governments in this tortured world, there are more than one or two who would not, in these circumstances, have put back the clock of progress a decade or two by announcing that the advances proposed in the draft Constitution towards freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, inviolability of the person and of the home, secrecy of correspondence, secret ballot, direct election and other advantages, are shown by recent events to have been premature and must be postponed, and that the strong arm of the executive must again be reinforced rather than weakened, in order to deal effectively with the dangers exemplified by this conspiracy. Historians may yet have occasion to praise the Soviet Union for having held steadfastly on the path to personal freedom at this time.
Pritt, Denis Nowell. At the Moscow Trial, New York City: International Publishers, 1937, p. 30

CPSU LEADER PREDICTS COMMUNISM WILL WIN EVENTUALLY

On a day when Ryzhkov was testifying on his five years as prime minister under Gorbachev, I spent the two-our afternoon recess with Ivan Polozkov, a Party chieftain from the southern Russian city of Krasnodar who in 1990 had become the leader of the Russian Communist Party and Ligachev’s successor as the conservative “dark prince.” At Central Committee meetings in 1990 and 1991, Polozkov had been openly critical of Gorbachev, but even then there was something guarded about his speech. A glimmer of traditional Party discipline, to say nothing of simple desire for self-preservation, prevented him from saying the things he was saying now.
“I am free now,” he said, “free now to vent my spleen.” Like the other Party men who came to court every day, Polozkov operated on the fuel of resentment. He was, in his mind, a great man made small by the deceptions of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
I asked him why he thought the Communist Party and the Soviet system had collapsed with such stunning speed after seeming to all the world to be unconquerable, a monolith of power and strength.
Polozkov’s eyes widened, more in surprise than in anger. “They had so much and we… we had nothing!” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “That the Communist party had nothing and the opposition had everything?”
“Precisely,” Polozkov said, with a satisfied little nod. “We know the CIA financed parties here. You gave them Japanese cameras, German copying machines, money, everything! You had your dissidents who worked for you, the liars, the diplomats, the military double agents. Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, these men were all yours, too. They were yours! Look at the book contracts they’ve gotten! Millions! One of our secretaries in the Russian Communist Party, Ivan Antonovich was in the United States and he was invited to speak at a conference. Shevardnadze was on the bill, too. Shevardnadze spoke first, and then he left. Then Antonovich spoke. Afterward they gave him a souvenir: a copper coffee cup. Someone came up to him from our embassy and said how unfair it was, that Antonovich had only gotten a mug and he spoke in English while Shevardnadze spoke in his bad Russian and got $5000!
“Look, I understand what it was all about. It was a confrontation of two systems. Reagan called us an ‘evil empire’ and other Western leaders were judged according to how anti-Soviet they could be. The putsch was just a culmination of the struggle. And I will admit this: so far you have been winning this war. But I want to emphasize–‘so far.’ Remember this: Napoleon was in Moscow , but France did not defeat us. The Nazis were near Moscow , but look what happened. But I must tell you–and listen carefully–the war is still on and, in the end, you will not be able to endure in this competition with communism.”
Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb. New York : Random House, c1993, p. 511-512

SOCIAL DEMOCRAT DAN FINALLY AGREES THAT THE BOLSHEVIKS DID IT RIGHT

Some of the Social Democrats, it is true, changed direction under the impact of international events. For instance, in 1936, in Paris, Dan recognized the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against fascism. He published Novyi mir (New World), and then after escaping in March 1940 to New York, aged 70, he retired as chairman of the Foreign Delegation and as editor of Sotsialisticheskii vestnik and launched Novyi Put ( New Way). His break with Menshevism was complete by 1943. In Novyi put he as it were rehabilitated Stalin. In his last book, The Origins of Bolshevism, published in 1946, the old adversary of totalitarianism suddenly saw something positive in the forced collectivization of agriculture, and found himself unable fully to condemn the show trials of 1930s, or the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. He even stated that “the internal organic democratization of the Soviet system was not curtailed at its emergence.”
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press, 1994, p. 89

MENDELEEV SUPPORTS THE DIALECTICAL IDEA OF QUANTITATIVE CHANGES CAUSING LEAPS

As a scientist he [Mendeleev] was one of the greatest materialists of all times;… When he formulated his Periodic Law, he testified to the truth of that principle of dialectics which occupies a central place in Marxist thought and asserts that quantitative changes, whether in natural or social processes, at certain points turn into changes of quality. According to the Periodic Law quantitative alterations in atomic weights result in qualitative differences between chemical elements.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 173

CAPITALIST GOVT OFFICIALS ARE RUTHLESS AND EGOTISTIC

Even when the Presidency is politically besieged, there’s nothing comparable to working at the White House. The pace is frenetic and the hours impossible. Intrigue. Backstabbing. Ruthless ambition. Constant conflict. Informers. Leakers. Spies (at the White House from inside the U.S. government,. Egos as big as the surrounding monuments. Battles between Titans. Cabinet officers behaving like children. High level temper tantrums. I would ultimately work in the White House or four Presidents and I saw it all. The struggles for pride and place,…
Gates, Robert. From the Shadows. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, c1996, p. 54

SU HAD A GOOD TEACHING SYSTEM WITH GOOD METHODS AND TEACHERS

Rigid discipline in the Communist school was definitely not supposed to mean harsh, loud-voiced management of the classroom or physical punishments, although the latter were kept in reserve. The teacher was told to win the confidence of his charges (most Soviet teachers were men) by friendly, helpful behavior, and to persuade them to follow the right path by exhortations, by shaming them, and by enlisting the other pupils to help reclaim a recalcitrant. Teachers were to instill obedience, unselfishness, and collective-mindedness. Individual competitiveness was to be suppressed and group spirit cultivated.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 112

By [the time of] Stalin’s death there were one million full-time students in the universities alone, the largest number in the world after America.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 114

STALIN FELT THE PROLETARIAT SUPPORTED HIS GOVERNMENT

Stalin was certainly sincere in thinking that the workers supported his government, and that they were the ultimate beneficiaries of his policies.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 184

MIKHOELS COMPLIMENTED THE SU AND FLOURISHED IN THE SU

At one Presidium [of the JAC] meeting in the fall of 1947, just three months before his death, Mikhoels proclaimed that “Jews feel more physically secure in the Soviet Union than in any other country in the world.”
…Mikhoels flourished within official Soviet culture even as he insisted on preserving the Jewish character of his theater. “If we turn ourselves into a theater of translation,” Mikhoels warned his colleagues in December 1933, “then to us, as a Jewish theater, there is nothing more to be done. Our path is unique–it is only compatible with the creative growth of Jewish theater and Jewish drama.” Mikhoels persevered and was richly rewarded. He was first honored by the regime in 1926, when he was named an Honorary Artist of the Russian Federation. In March 1935, he was given the title People’s Artist of the Russian Federation for his performance of King Lear. Four years later, in honor of the state Jewish Theater’s 20th anniversary, Mikhoels was awarded the Order of Lenin and named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union–becoming one of hardly a dozen intellectuals with that honor in the country. That year, in 1939, he was “elected” to serve on the Moscow City Council. As late as 1946, when he and the JAC were already under substantial pressure, Mikhoels was awarded the Stalin Prize in honor of the play Freylekhs (rejoicing).
Naumov & Teptsov. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. New Haven, London: Yale Univ. Press, 2001, p. 36

1936 CONSTITUTION MADE VOTING: MORE DIRECT, OPEN TO MORE PEOPLE AND SECRET

Before the introduction of the new Constitution there were restrictions of the franchise in the case of priests, former Whiteguards, former kulaks, and persons not engaged in useful labor. The new Constitution abolished all franchise restrictions for these categories of citizens by making the election of deputies universal….
Formerly, the election of deputies had been unequal, inasmuch as the bases of representation for the urban and rural populations differed. Now, however, all necessity for restrictions of equality of the suffrage had disappeared and all citizens were given the right to take part in the elections on an equal footing….
Formerly, the elections of the intermediate and higher organs of Soviet power were indirect. Now, however, under the new Constitution, all Soviets, from rural and urban up to and including the Supreme Soviet, were to be elected by the citizens directly….
Formerly, deputies to the Soviets were elected by open ballot and the voting was for lists of candidates. Now, however, the voting for deputies was to be by secret ballot, and not by lists, but for individual candidates nominated in each electoral area.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 348

SOCIAL CONDITIONS IMPROVED GREATLY UNDER SOCIALISM ESP. FOR CHILDREN

His [the American psychiatrist] second surprise will be to find that the problems he and others have been struggling with at home and upon which in 20 years they have made scarcely an impression, do not exist in Russia as major social problems, or, if they do still exist as problems, that they are rapidly losing their importance. This will be almost too much of a blow. Every city and every nation since the beginning of history has struggled with the problem of prostitution, for example, but none has ever come near solving it….prostitution continues in America while in Russia is practically a liquidated problem. Alcoholism is a serious problem in America and one that the psychiatrist understands but finds it possible to do little about. Alcoholism, always a serious problem in Russia, was a very serious problem some 10 years ago. It is still a problem but a rapidly diminishing one….
Juvenile delinquency is one of the greatest social problems in America. It is still a problem in Russia but one could hardly call it a major problem. One certainly does not find in Russia either the professional or the lay excitement over the extent, ramifications, and increase of crime that exists in America,…
The maladjusted school child in America is a problem of such increasing importance that the best skill of the best educators is taxed.
Again much is accomplished in individual instances but the problem as a whole remains untouched–there are not even the slightest signs of a change in the situation; in fact all the signs point the other way. In Russia they are not clear at first by what is meant, when one speaks of maladjusted school children and the “problem of adolescence.” Eventually, as one illustrates with case material, the children one has in mind are recognized. Of course they have such children but no “problem”–these children do not exist in sufficient numbers to constitute a problem. The Russian problem in education is not the children but how to provide adequately trained teachers for the children. The behavior of the children is the least of their troubles….
It [Soviet society] is a crazy world the American psychiatrist has got into, if there ever was one. Everything done 100% differently from the way he would do it and yet succeeding precisely where he has failed. Everything standing on its head, and yet quite successfully and comfortably….
And for the first time the American psychiatrist awakens to the fact that what has been called an economic revolution is in reality a psychological and spiritual revolution as well.
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 11-14

From the beginning the child is given a realistic view of life. The object is to prepare him so that he will be able to find pleasure and satisfaction in life itself, not in escaping from it or dodging it in romance, fancy, illusion, or neuroticism. The attempt is made to fit the child for life so that he can enjoy living, not to make him unfit so that he must flee it. During this early period the child is not surrounded by neurotic, frustrated adults–fathers, mothers, school teachers–but by essentially healthy, busy people whose outlook is outward rather than inward, who have purpose in their own lives, who are finding satisfaction in living, and who have a genuine affection and interest in him, but who see him not only as an object for personal, emotional aggrandizement but as an element in their own larger social purpose.
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 21

REBUILDING THE SOVIET FINANCIAL STRUCTURE HAS BEEN HARD BUT SUCCESSFUL

The rebuilding of Soviet Russia’s financial structure has been one of the most difficult tasks in the mammoth reconstruction project, but it has been accomplished with remarkable speed and skill. Whatever the troubles which now lie upon the financial horizon, such as the currency problem and the difficulties of collecting agricultural taxes, it must be admitted that the organization as a whole has reached and maintained a high standard of efficiency.
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 147

STALIN SAYS SELF-CRITICISM BY THE PARTY IS REQUIRED

[In a speech to the Moscow CPSU on April 13, 1928 Stalin stated] I think, comrades, that self-criticism is as necessary to us as air or water. I think that without it, without self-criticism, our Party could not make any headway, could not disclose our ulcers, could not eliminate our shortcomings. And shortcomings we have in plenty. That must be admitted frankly and honestly….
The slogan of self-criticism cannot be regarded as a new one. It lies at the very foundation of the Bolshevik Party.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 32

[In June 1928 Stalin showed he was against vulgarising the slogan of self-criticism by stating] Marx himself spoke of self-criticism as a method of strengthening the proletarian revolution.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 133

Actually, self-criticism is an indispensable and permanent weapon in the arsenal of Bolshevism, one that is intimately linked with the very nature of Bolshevism, with its revolutionary spirit.
It is sometimes said that self-criticism is something that is good for a party which has not yet come to power and has “nothing to lose,” but that it is dangerous and harmful to a party which has already come to power, which is surrounded by hostile forces, and against which an exposure of its weaknesses may be exploited by its enemies.
That is not true. It is quite untrue! On the contrary, just because Bolshevism has come to power, just because Bolsheviks may become conceited owing to the successes of our work of construction, just because Bolsheviks may fail to observe their weaknesses and thus make things easier for their enemies–for these very reasons self-criticism is particularly needed now, after the assumption of power.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 134

[In a January 17, 1930, letter to Gorky Stalin stated] We cannot do without self-criticism. We simply cannot. Without it, stagnation, corruption of the apparatus, growth of bureaucracy, sapping of the creative initiative of the working class, are inevitable. Of course, self-criticism provides material for our enemies. You are quite right about that. But it also provides material (and a stimulus) for our advancement, for unleashing the constructive energies of the working people, for the development of emulation, for shock brigades, and so on. The negative aspect is counter-balanced and outweighed by the positive aspect.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 12, p. 179

Some comrades say that it is not advisable to speak openly of one’s mistakes, since the open admission of one’s mistakes may be construed by our enemies as weakness and may be utilized by them.
This is rubbish, comrades, downright rubbish. The open recognition of our mistakes and their honest rectification can, on the contrary, only strengthen our Party, raise its authority in the eyes of the workers, peasants, and working intellectuals, increase the strength and power of our state. And this is the main thing. As long as we have the workers, peasants and working intellectuals with us, all the rest will settle itself.
Stalin, Joseph. Mastering Bolshevism. San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1972, p. 40

USSR PROGRESS ON MORTALITY UNDER SOCIALISM

Year USSR deaths per 1000 USA deaths per 1000
1913 30.2 13.2
1940 18.3 10.8
1950 9.6 9.6
1953 9.0 9.6
1956 7.5 9.4

We use 1913 as the starting date instead of 1917 when the Russian Revolution occurred. Some capitalist historians think it is fair not to blame the capitalist system for the deaths of World War I and 1913 was the last year before World War I.
In 1924 Lenin died and Stalin came to power in the USSR. In 1953 Stalin died. Khruschev denounced Stalin in 1956 in his “secret speech.” It’s been downhill to capitalism ever since in the USSR.

Year USSR infant deaths per 1000 USA infant deaths per 1000
1913 273 99.9
1940 184 47.0
1950 81 29.2
1953 68 27.8
1956 47 26.0

Source: John F. Kantner, “Basic Demographic Comparisons Between the USSR and the United States,” (1959)…paper submitted to the Subcommittee on Economic Statistics of the Joint Economic Committee, Eighty-sixth Congress, First Session, Washington, DC. in Alex Inkeles & Kent Geiger, eds. Soviet Society: A Book of Readings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961), p. 18.

FOOD WAS NEVER PURCHASED FROM ABROAD

…But we never resorted to purchasing food from abroad. We didn’t want to do that because we needed equipment and metals in the event of war…. That consideration came first, and no one could deny it.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago : I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 359

STALIN ADOPTED TROTSKY’S AGRARIAN PROGRAM BECAUSE TIME WAS RIGHT

Instead, in 1927-1928, Stalin astonished everybody by adopting much of the Trotskyist agrarian program he had recently denounced, less, he explained afterward, because it was wrong, than because it was untimely (and Stalin has a keen nose for the psychological moment),….
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 222

The Left Opposition, for example, held that the time had come for a decisive assault on the kulaks. It proposed that at least 150 million poods of grain be taken by force from the kulaks and prosperous middle peasants. In a resolution dated August 9, 1927, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee rejected this proposal as “absurd and demagogic, calculated to create additional difficulties in the development of the national economy.”
The opposition’s proposals were also unhesitatingly rejected at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, when the grain crisis was in full effect. Stalin’s report to the Congress carefully evaded the underlying difficulties, but he did speak plainly on the party’s policy toward the kulaks:
“Those comrades are wrong who think that we can and should do away with the kulaks by administrative fiat, by the GPU: write the decree, seal it… That’s an easy method, but it won’t work. The kulak must be taken by economic measures, in accordance with Soviet legality. And Soviet legality is not an empty phrase. Of course, this does not rule out the application of some administrative measures against the kulaks. But administrative measures must not replace economic ones.”
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 217

WHAT PERCENT OF POPULATION SUPPORTED AND OPPOSED COLLECTIVIZATION

The richer peasants hated collectivization. They were five percent of the total. But the poorest peasants liked it, and they were 30 percent of the total. Of the others, half — the poorer half — were rather for it. The other half were rather against it. But both sections did not care much, provided that collectivization benefited them.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 297

Yet always the communists had on their side half or more than half of the total peasant population and against them only a small minority, while the remainder just judged by the results.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 298

…In short, Stalin was not forcing lines of development on a system in which there was no support for such developments. Rather he was pursuing policy lines for which there was significant support within some sections of the regime. Under such circumstances, the interpretation that Stalin was in part responding to other forces in the system seems to have as much validity as that which attributes an initiating role solely to the leader.
Gill, Graeme. Stalinism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1990, p. 64

The peasant question is one of the most important questions in our politics. In the conditions prevailing in our country, the peasantry consists of various social groups, namely, the poor peasants, the middle peasants and the kulaks. It is obvious that our attitude to these various groups cannot be identical. The poor peasant is the support of the working-class, the middle peasant is the ally, the kulak is the class enemy–such is our attitude to these respective social groups.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 164

Stalin is giving the Russian people–the Russian masses, not Westernized landlords, industrialists, bankers and intellectuals, but Russia’s 150,000,000 peasants and workers–what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort. And communal life is as acceptable to them as it is repugnant to a Westerner.
Duranty, Walter. “Red Russia of Today Ruled by Stalinism, not by Communism,” New York Times, June 14, 1931.

Finally, what about the other 90% of peasants who did not rebel? Some peasants did not reject collectivization and even supported it. In March 1929 peasants suggested at a meeting in Riazan okrug that the Soviet government should take all the land and have peasants work on it for wages, a conception not too distant from the future operation of kolkhozy. An OGPU report quoted one middle peasant in Shilovskii raion, Riazan okrug, in November 1929 to the effect that ‘the grain procurements are hard, but necessary; we cannot live like we lived before, it is necessary to build factories and plants, and for that grain is necessary’. In January 1930, during the campaign, some peasants said, ‘the time has come to abandon our individual farms. It’s about time to quit those, [we] need to transfer to collectivization.’ Another document from January reported several cases of peasants spontaneously forming kolkhozy and consolidating their fields, which was a basic part of collectivization. Bokarev’s analysis summarized above suggests a reason why many peasants did not rebel against collectivization: the kolkhoz in certain ways, especially in its collectivism of land use and principles of egalitarian distribution, was not all that far from peasant traditions and values in corporate villages throughout the USSR. In any case, this example, and the evidence that the vast majority of peasants did not engage in protests against collectivization, clearly disproves Graziosi’s assertion cited above that the villages were ‘united’ against collectivization.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 75.

For the same reasons, all such anecdotal citations from OGPU documents of peasants refusing to work are at best problematic and often meaningless as overall indicators of their actions and the consequences of them, and no generalizations or conclusions that most or all peasants resisted work in the farms, are valid if drawn from such evidence.
In such extreme versions, the “resistance interpretation” would lead one to expect that the kolkhoz system could not have functioned: peasants would have avoided work, committed sabotage and subterfuge, and produced little or nothing. Writings in this interpretation rarely indicate that peasants actually performed any agricultural work; from these studies, it appears that virtually all that peasants ever did was show resistance…. The harvest data for the 1930s, however, demonstrate that this interpretation is not compatible with the results of the system’s work. Many if not most peasants adapted to the new system and worked hard in the crucial periods every year. When conditions were favorable, harvests were adequate and sometimes abundant; when unfavorable, the results were crop failures, and famine if harvests were especially low. Most notably, harvests were larger in the years after natural disasters and crop failures (1933, 1935, 1937), indicating that many peasants worked under very difficult conditions, even famine, to produce more and overcome the crises. This means that in addition to its problems of evidence, the “resistance interpretation,” at least in its extreme versions, is one-sided, reductionist and incomplete. Peasants’ responses to the kolkhoz system cannot be reduced to resistance without serious omissions and distortions of actual events. A more complete and accurate interpretation has to take more than resistance into account.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 78.

When one reads that peasants refused to work ‘in certain kolkhozy’ or ‘in a series of kolkhozy’, sometimes one begins to think that those phrases are euphemisms or a code for ‘everyone’, ‘everywhere’ and ‘always’. In fact, of course, OGPU personnel did write ‘everywhere’ and ‘always’ when they meant it. This focus can also lead the researcher to inflate the concept of resistance to include actions and attitudes that were understandable and temporary responses to natural disaster, mismanagement or other problems, and not attacks on the system.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 79.

First we need to address the meaning of resistance. Scholars often cite OGPU reports of peasants not going out to work, or of only a few kolkhozniki working.. These reports have to be understood in the context that in 1930, and for years afterwards, most collective farms had a labor surplus. An investigation in April 1930 found that kolkhozy in the North Caucasus would employ only 60% of their available labor, and those in the Urals only 50%;… and Ukraine even lower, from 25 to 31%…. This low labor use in 1930 does not appear to have reduced farm work done: for example, a nearly complete survey in mid-1930 in the Middle Volga found that sowings in kolkhozy increased more than six-fold over 1929, and included one-third of the region’s sown area even though kolkhozy had only 22% of the region’s households. Farms could increase crop areas despite low labor turnout because collectivization eliminated the traditional inter-stripping of allotments, the typical pattern of landholding in Soviet villages. This pattern constrained many peasants’ capabilities, particularly because the population growth in the 1920s resulted in smaller allotments. Once this basically medieval system was eliminated, many fewer peasants could cultivate all the village land. For years farms had more labor than they could employ, despite dekulakization and recruitment of peasants for industrial labor. A low turnout for work, therefore, may not have been a sign of resistance as much as a result of the real demands of work in the kolkhozy.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 79.

Then, often kolkhozniki would not show up for work because of the income distribution plans in the kolkhoz. Apparently most kolkhozy in 1930 and many in 1931 distributed income in an equalizing manner, despite directives to distribute by work done (in 1931 according to the labor-day system)…. When some kolkhozy began work with plans to distribute jobs and remuneration on an equal basis, peasants stopped showing up for work. Then the farms announced that they would remunerate on the basis of the amount each member worked, and everyone showed up for work, even (in one case) members who had submitted doctors’ notes that they were not labor-capable. Admittedly, these are anecdotal sources, but they do suggest an alternative interpretation of some of the other anecdotal sources used to document resistance.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 80.

Based on these sources, however, the peasants’ most frequent form of ‘resistance’ was to divide up kolkhozy into individual fields to harvest. These actions were stimulated in some cases by a rumor of a secret state decree to dissolve the kolkhozy; one North Caucasus peasant urged division of his kolkhoz because (he thought) kolkhozy in Ukraine had been dispersed. In this case as in many others, however, peasants’ actions did not have the quality of opposition or sabotage, of a clandestine attempt to undermine the state. Their demands were open, sometimes formalized in a petition to higher authorities, and honest: to be allowed to work in the way they thought best. In several cases peasants urged division of the kolkhozy to save the harvest and to provide higher procurements for the government. These demands and actions do not fit easily into the “resistance interpretation,” because peasants explicitly stated that they intended their actions as a means to fulfill the government’s demands to produce more and to meet the procurement quotas.
Even besides these cases, and despite or because of the crisis conditions in summer and autumn 1932, many peasants tried to work within the system. During early 1933 OGPU and other personnel investigated villages to determine the extent of the famine for relief efforts. Invariably their reports showed that while famine affected mostly peasants who did not earn many labor-days, it often struck peasants who had earned hundreds of labor-days, and highly productive, successful kolkhozy. Clearly, since many kolkhozniki were hard-working and successful until the procurement campaign of autumn 1932, resistance is far from the whole story.
By early 1933, the USSR was in the throes of a catastrophic famine, varying in severity between regions but pervasive. After efforts in January to procure more grain, the regime began desperate efforts in February to aid peasants to produce a crop. The political departments, which the regime introduced into the state arms (sovkhozy) and the machine tractor stations (MTS) in early 1933, played a crucial role in these efforts. These agencies, composed of a small group of workers and OGPU personnel in each MTS or sovkhoz, removed officials who had violated government directives on farm work and procurements, replacing them with kolkhozniki or sovkhoz workers, who they thought would be more reliable, and organized and otherwise helped farms to produce a good harvest in 1933. They were supported by draconian and coercive laws enforcing labor discipline in the farms in certain regions, but also by the largest allocation of seed and food aid in Soviet history, 5.76 million tons, and by special sowing commissions set up in crucial regions like Ukraine, the Urals, the Volga and elsewhere to manage regional-level aspects of organization and supplies to the farms.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 82.

To focus so exclusively on resistance, especially as extreme versions of the resistance interpretation do, in light of Soviet peasants’ repeated production of good harvests in the wake of serious crop failures and famines, misrepresents most peasants’ actions and omits their accomplishments, and therefore presents an incorrect interpretation of Soviet rural life….
Collectivization was thus fundamentally ambivalent as a policy, with good sides and bad. Peasants’ responses to this were also ambivalent; including of course significant resistance but also many other attitudes including significant adaptation and support. And in the peak of crisis, peasants repeatedly demonstrated their ability to put aside their objections, to overcome adversity even at great cost, and to produce harvests that ended famines.
In other words, the ‘trope’ that I propose here to encompass and understand all of the peasants’ responses to collectivization is not that of heroic but futile resistance against a totally wrong system, the noble peasants fighting with the weapons of the weak, which refers only to a fraction of the peasants, but rather one of bitter and ambivalent heroism, desperate but often successful efforts by some peasants despite natural disasters, the ineptitude and harshness of the regime, and the scorn and hostility of some of their neighbors. This conception corresponds much better to the concrete results that in most years fed the growing population of the USSR.
The “resistance interpretation” seems to be an example of theory-driven or even politically motivated scholarship, in which scholars selected evidence to fit preconceived theoretical assumptions or express their hostility to the Soviet regime, but did not consider how representative and realistic their evidence actually was. The “resistance interpretation,” in its extreme versions at least, is actually deeply unrealistic: peasants, like other people, had different attitudes and responses to the events that affected them. Just consider the wide array of views of some former peasants who came to positions of prominence in the early 20th century Russia and the USSR:… Given such a spectrum of perspectives from former peasants, we should expect and seek out a variety of views in the evidence, rather than assume that all peasants were resistant and attribute to all of them the views of a minority.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 88.

PEASANTS HAVE ACCEPTED COLLECTIVIZATION

One thing, however, is sure–the peasants have accepted collectivization and are willingly obeying the Kremlin’s orders. The younger peasants already understand that the Kremlin’s way will benefit them in the long run, that machines and mass cultivation are superior to the old “strip system” and individual farming.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 318

Beyond all question, the new kolkhoz statute was Stalin’s greatest success in his whole political life. The collectivization of agriculture in the new form satisfied the peasants, and it had the most far-reaching historical consequences. The problem of the development of agricultural technique and of the restoration of large-scale farming had been solved. More still, for a long time to come this new reform attached most of the peasants in loyalty to the regime.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 190

It is widely supposed that the Russian peasant is against the kolkhozy. That is not so. It may confidently be said that it was just the reform of 1933 that brought victory to Russia in the Second World War, and that in spite of initial failures it was just this happily formulated kolkhoz statute that prevented the collapse of the regime….
It may safely be said that it was thanks to collectivization that the Soviet Union survived the Second World War.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 191

Collectivization now protected the peasant from his rightful primeval enemies: drought, hail, pests, and cattle disease.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 193

Now a new life was introduced, and, need it be said, it seemed marvelous to the peasant. Hence his eagerness to fight for his country in the Second World War, in contrast to the first.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 194

I saw collectivization break like a storm on the Lower Volga in the autumn of 1929. It was a revolution that made deeper changes than did the revolution of 1917, of which it was the ripened fruit. Farmhands and poor peasants took the initiative, hoping to better themselves by government aid. Kulaks fought the movement bitterly by all means up to arson and murder. The middle peasantry, the real backbone of farming, had been split between the hope of becoming kulaks and the wish for machinery from the state. But now that the Five-Year Plan promised tractors, this great mass of peasants began moving by villages, townships, and counties, into the collective farms….
A few months earlier, people had argued calmly about collectives, discussing the grain in sown area, the chances of tractors.. But now the countryside was smitten as by a revival. One village organized as a unit then voted to combine with 20 villages to set up a cooperative market and grain mill…. Then Yelan united four big communes into 750,000 acres. Learning of this, peasants of Balanda shouted in meeting: “Go boldly! Unite our two townships into one farm of a million acres.”…
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 35

What would they [Middle Volga Nationalists] do with the kolkhozes, Belinsky asked. The nationalist’s reply was stereotyped: they would disband them at once. And if the majority of the peasants were against this?–No matter, they would still be disbanded. They conflicted with “national sentiments,” Other industries would remain in State hands; but there was no need to plan all this in detail, all these problems would settle themselves once there was national independence.
We were by no means so sure. We found this to be the prevalent attitude; and yet–the truth must be faced–though we revolutionary democrats detested the kolkhoz system, we were not sure that it was any longer true to say this of the majority of the land workers. The generation who had known the world of independent holdings was dying out. Even those who as small children had witnessed scenes of bloodshed when the farms were being collectivized could hardly remember the earlier order; they had grown up in a different world, with public day nurseries, state schools, state food supplies, state newspapers, magazines, books, films, plays, state training at every stage of mind and body. They had their dissatisfactions but not consciously with the social structure. To them kolkhoz life was normal, not an innovation.
In this and in other ways, plans for the overthrow of Stalinism and for what was to replace it took a different form from earlier days. The revolution had been made in the name of the workers and peasants against other social classes; today the whole ruling class of the USSR was of worker and present origin. Nor could be the Red Army be regarded as a workers’ and peasants’ army in opposition to rulers of some other class origin. Both our friends and our enemies were workers and peasants, and the Red Army had become an amorphous, classless, or rather “inter-class” mass, with an altogether different mentality. The new program had to be planned for the whole of society, not for one section. The old worker and peasants slogans have lost their validity in the USSR.
Tokaev, Grigori. Comrade X. London: Harvill Press, 1956, p. 161

The peasants turned more and more in favor of collective farming as a result of seeing the state farms and the machine and tractors stations. The peasants would visit the state farms and the machine and tractor stations, watch the operation of the tractors and other agricultural machinery, admire their performance and there and then resolve to join the collective farm. It was in this manner that the collective farm movement developed, i.e., the peasants were persuaded by superior state farms and agricultural machinery to join collective farms–not my arm-twisting or use of force as is asserted by the paid and unpaid agents of the bourgeoisie–the Trotskyites, the ‘learned’ bourgeois professors, and bourgeois intellectuals.
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 176

When in the year 1924 Stalin recognized and proclaimed that the Russian peasant had within him the possibility of socialism, that he could, in other words, be national and international at the same time, his opponents laughed at him and decried him as a Utopian. Today [1937] practice has proved Stalin’s theory to be correct: the peasant has been socialized from White Russia to the Far East.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 80

The poor peasants saw emancipation in the collective; the richer ones saw the merging of their small fortune and position.
Graham, Stephen. Stalin. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970, p. 114

COLLECTIVIZATION OPPOSED ONLY BY A MINORITY

To the London Times correspondent collectivization is one of the blackest spots in his gloomy picture. He writes: “During the last two years 70 million peasants have been driven from 14 million holdings onto 200,000 collective farms. Those who have proved themselves successful farmers, that is the kulaks, are hunted down, exiled to labor and timber camps in the North, massacred, and destroyed.” For anyone who knows the situation here, as well as the writer in question clearly does, this is a deliberate and ingenious perversion of fact. The truth is that during the past five (not two) years some 60 percent of the peasant population, which include about 70 million souls, have adopted the new system of combining their individual holdings (nearer 18 million holdings than 14 million) for collective working on modern lines. The kulaks naturally opposed the new system, which if successful would eliminate all their privileges. Generally, it is true they were the best and most productive farmers, but they were trying to hold back the clock of progress as obstinately as the “homeweavers” in England a century ago, who started riots to break the new power driven machines which ushered in the industrial age of England and gave her economics supremacy and great wealth for many decades.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 336

THE TWO OPPOSING VIEWS OF COLLECTIVIZATION

Wouldn’t you get an increased planted area and a larger harvest if you gave the richer peasants, who own more horses and machinery, greater opportunities in the way of leasing and farming land? I inquired.
Lebedev’s face grew more tense and his tired eyes flashed as he shot back:
Yes, perhaps we should. But then these richer peasants would grow in wealth and influence like bloated spiders until they had the whole district in their power. We didn’t fight through the civil war, we didn’t beat the White generals and landlords and capitalists, and Allied troops who came to help them, for this, to let capitalism creep back in veiled forms. Our policy is to unite the poor and middle class peasants in cooperatives and collective farms and raise the living standard of all the peasants gradually, instead of letting a few grow rich while the rest remain poor. As revolutionary Communists that is the only policy we can and shall pursue, no matter how many obstacles we shall have to overcome.
I left Lebedev’s office and went into a neighboring Cossack village, which had suffered so severely during the civil war that 30 percent of the homesteads were farmed by women. And one of these Cossack women, burned almost black by the fierce glare of the summer sun over the Don steppes, quite unconsciously gave me the individual peasant’s answer to Lebedev.
“What does the state mean by trying to make us all byedniaks [poor peasants]?,” she burst out. “We can’t all be equal, because some of us will always work harder than others. Let me work as much land as I can with my own arms and I’ll gladly pay rent and taxes to the state for it, and sell my grain too, if I get a fair price and some goods to buy with the money. But nothing will ever come out of this idea of making us all byedniaks and calling everyone who is a capable hard worker a bloodsucker and kulak. That sort of thing keeps us poor, and keeps the state poor too.”
Here, in a nutshell, are the two viewpoints which are competing for mastery all over the Russian countryside today.
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 416

POOR PEASANTS DETERMINED WHO WERE THE KULAKS

The most spectacular act…which occured in those years was the exile of several hundred thousand kulaks–rural property owners who lived by trade, money lending or by exploiting small mills, threshers, and hired labor–from farm homes in European Russia and the Ukraine to Siberia or the northern woods. The usual assumption outside the Soviet Union is that this exiling occurred through arbitrary action by a mystically omnipotent GPU. That organization did of course organize the deportation and final place of settlement in labor camps or on new land. But the listing of kulaks who “impede our farming by force and violence” was done by village meetings of poor peasants and farmhands who were feverishly and not too efficiently organizing collectively owned farms with government loans of machinery and credits. The meetings I personally attended were as seriously judicial as a court trial in America. One by one there came before the people the “best families,” who had grabbed the best lands, exploited labor by owning the tools of production as best families normally and historically do, and who were fighting the rise of the collective farm–which had the right to take the best lands away from them–by every means up to arson, cattle killing, and murder…. The meeting of farmhands and poor peasants discussed each case in turn, questioned the kulaks, allowed most of them to remain but asked the government to deport some as “trouble-makers.”
It was a harsh, bitter and by no means bloodless conflict, but not one peculiar to Russia. I was reminded of it again in 1933 by the cotton-pickers’ strike in San Joaquin Valley of California. California local authorities deported pickets who interfered with the farming of ranchers; Soviet authorities deported kulaks who interfered with the collectively owned farming of the poor. In both cases central governments sent commissions to guard against the worst excesses. But the “property” which could count on government support was in California that of the wealthy rancher; in the USSR it was the collective property of the poor.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 53

Of the enforced removals there have been two kinds. In 1929 and 1930 drastic measures were taken against those elements in the villages which were seriously interfering with the formation of kolkhosi, often by personal violence, and willful damage to buildings and crops. These disturbers of the peace were in many cases forcibly removed from their homes. “The usual assumption outside the Soviet Union,” writes one who witnessed the proceedings of 1930, “is that this exiling occurred through drastic action by a mystically omnipotent GPU. The actual process was quite different: it was done by village meetings of poor peasants and farm hands who listed those kulaks who ‘impede our collective farm by force and violence,’ and asked the Government to deport them. In the hot days of 1930 I attended many of these meetings. There were harsh, bitter discussions, analyzing one by one the ‘best families,’ who had grabbed the best lands, exploited labor by owning the tools of production, as ‘best families’ normally and historically due, and who were now fighting the rise of the collective farms by arson, cattle-killing and murder…. The meetings I personally attended were more seriously judicial, more balanced in their discussion, than any court trial I have attended in America: these peasants knew they were dealing with serious punishments, and did not handle them lightly…. Those who envisage that the rural revolution which ended in farm collectivization was a ‘war between Stalin and the peasants’ simply weren’t on the ground when the whirlwind broke. The anarchy of an elemental upheaval was its chief. characteristic: it was marked by great ecstasies and terrors: local leaders in village township and province did what was right in their own eyes and passionately defended their convictions. Moscow studied and participated in the local earthquakes; and, out of the mass experience, made, somewhat too late to save the livestock, general laws for its direction. It was a harsh, bitter and by no means bloodless conflict…. Township and provincial commissions in the USSR reviewed and cut down the list of kulaks for exile, to guard against local excesses.”
[From The Soviet Dictatorship by Anna Louise Strong, in, October 1934]
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 205

Today, dekulakizing is being carried out by the masses of poor and middle peasants themselves, who are carrying through mass collectivization.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 177

The procedure on which the kulaks were got rid of was peculiar. Decrees of the USSR Sovnarkom declared that the kulaks as a class were to be liquidated. Up and down the country the batraks and bedniaks, the landless and the poor peasants, with such of the seredniaks (the middle peasants) as chose to attend, held village meetings, and voted that such and such peasants of their village were kulaks, and were to be dispossessed.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 467

WHAT ARE KULAKS AND WHAT DO THEY DO

Farming, especially, was in the hands of small owners, the strongest of whom were petty capitalists, called kulaks, who profited and grew by exploiting other peasants and cheating the state.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 13

The bourgeoisie has always maintained that the Soviet collectivization `destroyed the dynamic forces in the countryside’ and caused a permanent stagnation of agriculture. It describes the kulaks as individual `dynamic and entrepeneurial’ peasants. This is nothing but an ideological fable destined to tarnish socialism and glorify exploitation. To understand the class struggle that took place in the USSR, it is necessary to try to have a more realistic image of the Russian kulak.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a specialist on Russian peasant life wrote as follows:
`Every village commune has always three or four regular kulaks, as also some half dozen smaller fry of the same kidney…. They want neither skill nor industry; only promptitude to turn to their own profit the needs, the sorrows, the sufferings and the misfortunes of others… Stepniak’s The Russian Peasantry, quoted in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? second edition (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), p. 563 [footnote]
…`The distinctive characteristic of this class…is the hard, unflinching cruelty of a thoroughly educated man who has made his way from poverty to wealth, and has come to consider money-making, by whatever means, as the only pursuit to which a rational being should devote himself.’
Stepniak’s The Russian Peasantry, quoted in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? second edition (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), p. 564
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 62 [p. 52 on the NET]

[December 1929 speech by Gelman to the First Congress of Shock Brigades]
…On the night shift a shock worker fell into the machine, and when he was being beaten by this Jagger, when his legs were being broken, when he was being boiled in the hot dye, a worker standing nearby did not stop the machine. When the matter was investigated, it turned out that [the latter] was a well-to-do kulak.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 32

Dr. Dillon, whose testimony is of unimpeachable authority, declared in 1918 that “this type of man was commonly termed a kulak, or fist, to symbolize his utter callousness to pity or ruth. And of all the human monsters I have ever met in my travels, I cannot recall any so malignant and odious as the Russian kulak. In the revolutionary horrors of 1905 and 1917 he was the ruling spirit–a fiend incarnate.”
[The Eclipse of Russia by Dillon, 1918, Page 67]
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 466 & 564

Many illustrative examples of relentless economic oppression by kulaks may be gathered from Russian sources. Yet the kulaks as a class may be said to have done no more than would have been considered “sound business” by the individualist economists of Victorian England; namely, habitually to take advantage of the economic weakness of those with whom they made their bargains; always to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market; paying the lowest wage at which they could hire the services of those who begged for employment; and extracting the utmost usury from those who voluntarily accepted their loans.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, pp. 466 & 565

TWO VIEWS IN PARTY ON COLLECTIVIZATION AND KULAKS

The Right wing of the Communist Party held that kulaks should be allowed to get rich and that socialism could win through state ownership of industries. The left wing was for forcing peasants rapidly into collective farms under state control. Actual policy shifted for several years under pressure of different groups in the Party. The policy finally adopted was to draw peasants into collective farms by offering government credits and tractors, to freeze the kulaks out by high taxes and, later, to “abolish them as a class.”…
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 35

The “Socialized property created by the revolution” could not have triumphed automatically over the capitalist elements. It could only triumph in virtue of planned leadership, carrying through a definite policy, and before that policy could be operated two rival policies had to be brushed aside.
There was the policy of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, which meant the abandonment of Socialist attack on the capitalist elements of the country, the slowing down of the rate of development in industry, reliance on the individual rather than the collective farms. If this policy had been carried out, the grain difficulties would never have been overcome, industry would have been poorly developed, and the capitalist elements would have been able to dictate to the Soviet Government.
A still more spectacular fiasco would have resulted had the Party and the Government adopted the proposal of Trotsky and Zinoviev and attacked the rich peasants before the alliance with the middle peasantry had been cemented, and before the grain production of the rich peasant could be replaced by that of the Soviet and collective farms.
If either of those variants had been accepted the “conditions of socialized property” would not have saved the country from disaster.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 82

STALIN DID NOT USE FORCEFUL COLLECTIVIZATION OR CAUSE FOOD SHORTAGES

American commentators usually speak of collective farms as enforced by Stalin; they even assert that he deliberately starved millions of peasants to make them join collectives. This is untrue. I traveled the countryside in those years and know what occurred. Stalin certainly promoted the change and guided it. But the drive for collectivization went so much faster than Stalin planned that there were not enough machines ready for the farms, nor enough bookkeepers and managers. Hopeful inefficiency combined with a panic slaying of livestock under kulak urging, and with two dry years, brought serious food shortage in 1932, two years after Stalin’s alleged pressures. Moscow brought the country through by stern nationwide rationing.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 35

Stalin, half peasant by origin, added: “the peasant is not going to be driven to Socialism by any mystical phrase, but only by his self-interest. If we show him that with commonly owned machines he can harvest more and earn more, he will accept it.”
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 151

As early as March 2, 1930, even Stalin recoiled from the chaos and wrote his famous “Dizziness with Success” article, in which he called for a halt to forced collectivization and ordered a reduction in the use of violence against peasants….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 109

In view of what followed it is interesting to note that much of his [Stalin] success in the villages, and therefore of his victory over the Opposition, was due to his obstinate refusal to put pressure too soon upon the richer peasants. Patience, willingness to bide his time and await the psychological moment, is another outstanding quality of Joseph Stalin.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 136

The basic success of the collective movement, Stalin said, lies in the fact that it is largely voluntary on the part of the peasants. To force them further would be a fatal and autocratic error and would imply a rupture between the Communist Party and the masses it controls, whereas in reality its strength and its whole reason for existence are based upon a close connection with and work for the masses.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 183

Thus it can be seen, notwithstanding the assertions to the contrary of the Trotskyites and the bourgeois intelligentsia, who are very ‘clever’ and yet stupid, it was Stalin and the Central Committee who were against any form of coercion in the matter of collectivization.
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 180

[Report from the commander of the Siberian Military District to Voroshilov, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Soviet, April 30, 1930, regarding directives forbidding use of the military in operations against the kulaks]
Based on your [Voroshilov] directives of Feb. 2 and 5 of this year, on Feb. 6 the Revolutionary Military Council of the district issued orders to divisional commanders and military divisional commanders categorically forbidding the use of military formations in the dekulakization operations.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 383

[Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party March 26, 1932]
In many regions we can observe the collectivization of cattle and smaller livestock by forcible means. This practice is a flagrant violation of repeatedly issued directives by the party’s Central Committee as well as of the provisions contained in the statute of the agricultural artel.
The Central Committee stresses that only enemies of the kolkhozes would permit forced collectivization of livestock from individual kolkhoz members. The Central Committee emphasizes that forced requisition of kolkhoz members’ cattle and smaller livestock is contrary to the party’s political program. The goal of the party is that every member of the kolkhoz have a cow, some smaller livestock, and poultry. The further expansion and development of kolkhozes should occur through breeding and raising younger animals and/or by purchasing cattle by the farmers.
The central committee of the All-Union Communist Party proposes to all party, Soviet, and kolkhoz organizations:
1. Cease all attempts of forced collectivization of cattle and small livestock belonging to kolkhoz members and expel from the party those guilty of violating Central Committee directives,
2. Organize aid for the members of the kolkhozes who have no cattle or small livestock to purchase and raise young animals for their own personal needs.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 388

[Minutes of the March 23, 1932, meeting of a Politburo commission and the final version of a resolution on the forced collectivization of livestock]
Resolved: “The practice of collectivizing cattle and small livestock belonging to individual collective farmers by means of actual coercion has been noted in several regions, in flagrant violation of the repeated directives of the Central Committee of the party and the regulation governing agricultural co-operative associations. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party most strongly emphasizes that only enemies of collective farms could allow the forced collectivization of cattle and small livestock belonging to individual collective farmers.”
The Central Committee would like to clarify that the practice of forced confiscation of cattle and small livestock from collective farmers has nothing to do with the policy; the aim of the party consists in seeing that each collective farmer has his own cattle, small livestock, and poultry. The further expansion and development of collective farms should progress only by means of allowing these collective farmers to rear young animals.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 389

A few facts.
1. The success of our collective farm policy is to be explained, among other things, by the fact that this policy is based on the collective farm movement being a voluntary one and on the recognition of the diversity of conditions existing in the various regions of the Soviet Union. Collective farms cannot be set up by force. To do so would be stupid and reactionary. The collective farm movement must lean on the active support of the basic masses of the peasantry. Forms of collective farm construction in the developed regions cannot be mechanically transplanted to the backward regions. Do so would be stupid and reactionary. Such a “policy” would discredit the idea of collectivization at one blow. In determining the speed and methods of building collective farms we must carefully take into account the diversity of conditions prevailing in the various regions of the Soviet Union….
But what do we sometimes find taking place in practice? Can it be said that the voluntary principle and the principle of taking local peculiarities into account are not violated in a number of regions? No, unfortunately, that cannot be said. It is known, for example, that a number of the northern regions of the grain-importing belt, where favorable conditions for the immediate organization of collective farms are comparatively less than in the grain-bearing regions, not infrequently endeavor to replace the preparatory work for the organization of collective farms by bureaucratically decreeing the collective farm movement, by paper resolutions regarding the growth of collective farms, by the organization of collective farms, “on paper,” farms which in reality do not yet exist, but regarding the “existence” of which there is a pile of braggart resolutions. Or, let us take certain regions of Turkestan, where conditions favoring the immediate organization of collective farms are even less than in the northern oblasts of the grain-importing belt. We know that in a number of regions of Turkestan there have already been attempts to “overtake and surpass” the advanced regions of the Soviet Union by resorting to threats of applying military force, by threatening to deprive the peasants who do not yet wish to enter the collective farms of irrigation water and of manufactured goods.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 254

What relation is there between this sergeant Prishibeiev’s [a person in one of Chekhov’s plays who has the manners of the barracks and the drill ground] “policy” and the policy of the Party, which is based on the voluntary principle and on a regard for local peculiarities in collective farm construction? It is obvious that they have nothing in common.
Who benefits by these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of the collective farm movement, this wretched threatening of the peasants? Nobody, but our enemies!
What may be the result of these distortions? The strengthening of our enemies and the discrediting of the collective farm movement idea….
The question arises: who benefits by this stupid and harmful precipitancy? Irritating the peasant-collective-farm member by “collectivizing” living premises, all the milk cattle, all the small livestock and the domestic poultry, when the grain problem is still unsolved, when the artel form of the collective farm is not yet consolidated–is it not obvious that such a “policy” can please and benefit only our sworn enemies? One such fiery “collectivizer” even went so far as to issue an instruction to the artel ordering “that within three days every single head of poultry in every household be registered,” that special “commanders” be appointed to register and supervise, “to occupy the key positions in the artel,” “to lead the fight for socialism, without quitting their posts,” and–of course–to seize the whole artel by the throat. What do you call that–a policy of leading the collective farm, or a policy of disintegrating and discrediting it?…
How could such blockheaded exercises in collectivization, such ludicrous attempts to lift oneself by one’s own bootstraps, attempts the purpose of which is to ignore classes and the class struggle, but which in practice bring grist to the mill of our class enemies, occur in our midst?… They could occur only as a result of the fact that certain of our comrades became dizzy with success, and for a while lost clear-mindedness and sober vision….
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 256

Now he [Stalin] intimated that his instructions had been misunderstood: ‘Collective farms cannot be set up by force. To do so would be stupid and reactionary.’ He railed at ‘opportunists’, ‘blockheads’, ‘noisy lefts’, ‘timid philistines’, and ‘distortionists ‘: and he called for a halt to ‘excesses’.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 330

Volodya says, “There is the question of the repressions carried out during the time of collectivization; people now put the blame on Stalin. The first thing to say is that the Party fully supported the policy of collectivization. The policy of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class was a policy which Lenin considered to be most correct; he considered the kulak the most malicious enemy of Soviet power beside the capitalist landowner. He considered that as long as the kulaks continued to exist there would be a threat of the restoration of capitalism.
… in the course of this collectivization mistakes were made. But in that case you have to look at the people who were carrying out the policy. Stalin’s business was to arrange the general direction, but it was a question of how it was organized locally that affected how it was actually carried out.
… There is probably data on how many were transported to the camps; I would think that far more were transported than perished. As for those who were transported, in the end they did have the possibility of going home! People talk a lot now about how it was not just the head of the family who was transported, but also his family and children. People consider this anti-humanitarian, but from the other point of view, to abandon the children to the vagaries of fate would be far less humane than to exile them and to provide them with a place to live in another region of the country.”
Richardson, Rosamond. Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 276

PEOPLE DIFFER WIDELY ON THEIR VIEWS OF COLLECTIVIZATION

Into these discussions penetrated organizers from the Party, sometimes farm experts giving counsel, sometimes workers ignorant of farming but aflame with zeal for collectivization…. Discussions were hot and hostile. Later, Moscow denounced the “disease of giantism.” But at first the enthusiasts called all caution “counter-revolution.” Families split; the young man followed the enthusiasts, eager for new ways. The old men doubted; they saw themselves losing control of the household along with the acres. The women worried over the fate of the family cow….
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 35

ONLY A MINORITY WERE COMPLAINING ABOUT COLLECTIVIZATION MISTAKES

Toward the end of March, I went south to meet the spring. Twenty-four hours from Moscow I found it, on the line to Stalingrad. When my train set me down after midnight, I was appalled by the crowds of peasants who surrounded me, pouring out bitter words. “A former bandit got into the Party and bossed our village.” Stalin says collectives are voluntary, but they won’t give back our oxen.”
Next morning in the township center, I heard similar complaints heaped on a tired secretary from dawn till long after dark. “The chairman isn’t here,” he explained. “He went to help a village where kulaks last night burned a barn containing 27 horses that were relied on for the sowing. He must organize emergency help.” Meantime the secretary wearily repeated to all comers that of course they would get their oxen back if they decided to leave the collective farm, but they couldn’t disorganize sowing by grabbing the oxen on a day’s notice from field-gangs plowing 20 miles away. Especially, when they kept changing their minds several times a week.
Farms seemed going to pieces under a dozen pressures–violence of kulaks, attacks by priests, official stupidities, and just plain inefficiency of medieval Russia. Yet, as soon as I left the railway and went inland, the chaos was replaced by a spectacular, mass sowing. I saw then that all journalists who judge by the railway and the township center must judge wrongly. All complaints and injustice flowed to the railroad and sought adjustment from the township center. No peasant who could plow went to the railway–he was plowing. Beyond the railroad, men were fighting for a record harvest to establish their right to land and machines.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 39-40

A REPORTER NOTES THE GRAIN SHORTAGE BUT SAYS WORKING ALONE WILL BE WORSE

Working out from Stalingrad went the Traveling Struggle, a newspaper published from three railway cars. It journeyed through the spring from township to township, investigated and published abuses, and even summoned judges from the city for special courts. Melnikov, its most energetic reporter, could digest ten shocking cases daily and find in them no discouragement but a call to battle….
Not all the anti-Soviet sheets in America could invent more “Bolshevik atrocities” than Melnikov triumphantly recorded in his routine. This Traveling Struggle had had more than two hundred officials arrested that season for crimes ranging from graft to banditry. But when I asked whether the harvest would be much less because of the turmoil, Melnikov stared as if I were crazy.
“Less? It must be much greater! Have you not seen tractors doubling the sown area? Have you not seen, even without tractors, how farmhands and peasants use kulaks horses to increase area 70 percent? The kulaks sabotaged the harvest, fearing taxes and hating the Soviet power. These new owners drive forward like madmen.”
The hunger of the poor peasants for more life was the power released in that “First Bolshevik Spring.” This power was led by Communists who, despite inexperience and excesses, were a disciplined and tireless group. I could pick them out in field brigades by their tense concern that everything go well. It is thus I recall Kovalev, Party secretary of a small Tatar district south of Stalingrad, and his talk with ten shiftless, deserting peasants.
These peasants were leaving the collective farm. One said: “I have no warm coat and they make me pasture livestock in the rain.” Another: “They work my camel hungry and he dies before my eyes.” A third: “My wife won’t live with me since I joined the kolhoz.”
The reasons seemed sound to me but not to Kovalev. “These conditions you always had,” he said. “Nobody offered a golden dish in the kolhoz. Faults of management can be corrected. Men working at night must have warm clothes. Hay is scarce from last year’s drought, but it will be no better in individual fields. Who leaves will not better himself, for the whole Soviet power helps the kolhoz. A peasant is not an independent person; his farm depends on the nation and the nation depends on his farm. Our land is surrounded by capitalist lands. We must swiftly build great industry and modern farming or we perish. That great factory in Stalingrad will this summer give tractors to our farms. That great power station, Stalgres, will this autumn give light to your homes. While these are unfinished, they need bread; there must be a great increase in grain. Can this be done if every peasant sits at home, deciding whether to plow? The task of every citizen this year is to strengthen the collective farm.”…
Melnikov guessed right. Though the seed was sown in the chaos of class war–by men who stormed their way out of the Middle Ages in a year–yet such was the drive of their awakened will that when crop returns at last came in, the Soviet Union (and the foreign powers who watched like hawks) knew that the country had achieved the widest sown area and the greatest harvest it had ever known.
That harvest changed the history of farming for the world.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 41

STALIN ARGUES FOR COLLECTIVIZATION AND CONTENDS IT WAS NECESSARY

In Stalin’s words: “The way out is to turn the small and scattered peasant farms into large united farms based on common cultivation of the soil, to introduce collective cultivation of the soil on the basis of new and higher technique. The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure, but by example and persuasion, into large farms based on common, cooperative, collective cultivation of the soil with the use of agricultural machines and tractors and scientific methods of intensive agriculture.”
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 59

“Tell me,” Churchill inquired, “for you personally is this war as much of a stress as was the burden of collectivization?”
“Oh, no,” the “father of the people’s” replied. “The campaign of collectivization was a terrible struggle.”
“I thought you would have found it rough going. You were not dealing with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landlords, but rather with millions of small landholders.”
“Ten million!” Stalin exclaimed, raising his hands. “It was fearful! For four years it went on. But it was absolutely necessary for Russia if we were to avoid periodic famines and to supply enough tractors for the countryside.”
Stalin’s figure for the number of farmers repressed during collectivization roughly tallies with the one recently published in the Soviet press. If we assume that about half of the uprooted villagers, after drifting around the country, eventually joined the kolkhozes or ended up working at construction projects, then about 5 million people perished or were purged, a number close to the 6 million that is a figure accepted by most researchers.
“Were they all kulaks?” Churchill asked.
“Yes,” Stalin replied, and after a pause repeated: “It was very hard, but necessary.”
Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin’s Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 299-300

A conversation about the kulaks which Stalin had with Churchill on Aug. 14, 1942 is instructive. The talks had come to an end and Stalin had invited the British leader to dine with him in his Kremlin apartment. Molotov and an interpreter were present during the long conversation. Churchill reproduces the occasion in his memoirs thus:
“Tell me,” [he asked Stalin], “have the stresses of this war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of the Collective Farms?”
This subject immediately aroused the Marshal.
“Oh, no,” he said, “the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle.”
“I thought you would have found it bad,” said I, “because you were not dealing with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.”
“Ten millions,” he said, holding up his hands. “It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines, to plow the land with tractors. We must mechanize our agriculture. When we gave tractors to the peasants they were all spoiled in a few months. Only Collective Farms with workshops could handle tractors. We took the greatest trouble explaining it to the peasants. It was no use arguing with them. After you have said all you can to a peasant he says he must go home and consult his wife, and he must consult is herder.” This last was a new expression to me in this connection. “After he has talked it over with them he always answers that he does not want the Collective Farm and would rather do without the tractors.”
“These were what you call kulaks?”
“Yes,” he said, but he did not repeat the word. After a pause, “It was all very bad and difficult–but necessary.”
“What happened?”
“Well,” he said, “many of them agreed to come in with us. Some of them were given land of their own to cultivate in the province of Tomsk or the province of Irkutsk or farther north, but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their laborers.”
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 167

As Stalin looked back in his later years at collectivization and the record of the collective farms, he might well have groaned as he groaned to Churchill. But he might also have had much cause for satisfaction. The agricultural settlement had been difficult, but it did work. The countryside was socialist, the threat of counter-revolution was gone, the regime was getting the lion’s share of the crops. Production was now more scientific, and it was rising, even if it did not outstrip the rise in population. The agrarian surplus appropriated by the regime had proved sufficient to support the new industrial plant that had made the defeat of Hitler possible. Stalin had in the long run secured the essentials of what he wanted from the peasants. The only sufferers were the peasants themselves. Yet theirs was the glory of having toiled and suffered for the benefit of posterity, which would be appropriately grateful to them. In the last analysis, Stalin thought the sufferings of his peasants were unfortunate, but that they were more than justified by the record of his industry, which the sufferings of the peasants had made possible.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 170

LENIN WOULD HAVE CARRIED OUT COLLECTIVIZATION THE SAME WAY

CHUEV: Some argue that Lenin would have carried it through differently.
MOLOTOV: They are opportunists. They just don’t understand. They are obtuse. They are unable to get to the heart of the matter.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 245

KHRUSHCHOV OPPOSES COLLECTIVIZATION

Personally I think Gomulka was absolutely right to oppose collectivization.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 206

BOLSHEVIKS REALIZE POWER RESTS ON A BALANCE BETWEEN THE TOWNS AND PEASANTRY

The Bolsheviks, who are the least blind of men when looking into the future, knew quite well that the future of the socialist State depended upon harmony between the productive economy of the land and that of the towns (in the same way that the Revolution itself, indeed, only succeeded because the peasants as a whole had accepted it–in some cases had even assisted it–or had let it go on).
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 124

WORKING CLASS CONTROL WOULD HAVE COLLAPSED IF THE KULAKS HAD PREVAILED

If the kulaks, who represented already 5 per cent of the peasantry, had succeeded in extending their economic base and definitively imposing themselves as the dominant force in the countryside, the socialist power in the cities would not have been able to maintain itself, faced with this encirclement by bourgeois forces. Eighty-two per cent of the Soviet population was peasant. If the Bolshevik Party had no longer succeeded in feeding the workers at relatively low prices, the very basis of working class power would have been threatened.
Hence it was necessary to accelerate the collectivization of certain sectors in the countryside in order to increase, on a socialist basis, the production of market wheat. It was essential for the success of accelerated industrialization that a relatively low price for market wheat be maintained. A rising rural bourgeoisie would never have accepted such a policy. Only the poor and middle peasants, organized in co-operatives, could support it. And only industrialization could ensure the defence of the first socialist country….
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 65 [p. 52 on the NET]

WHEN COLLECTIVIZATION IS CALLED FOR GROUPS RUSH TO HELP INSTALL IT

Once the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party had called for accelerating the collectization, a spontaneous movement developed, brought to the regions by activists, youth, old soldiers of the Red Army and the local apparatus of the Party.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 65 [p. 53 on the NET]

A Trotskyite capitulator, an engineer of the Putilov factory, mentioned an interesting case to me in which the workers took a favorable attitude towards Stalin’s policy of collectivization. One of the 25,000 had been killed; 10 volunteers offered to replace him. Among them was one of the oldest workers in the factory. My informant quoted the case to prove that the mass of the workers was supporting Stalin’s policy and that the Opposition should do the same.
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 111

POOR PEASANTS WERE THE PRIMARY IMPLIMENTERS OF COLLECTIVIZATION

Numerous anti-Communist books tell us that collectivization was `imposed’ by the leadership of the Party and by Stalin and implemented with terror. This is a lie. The essential impulse during the violent episodes of collectivization came from the most oppressed of the peasant masses.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 66 [p. 54 on the NET]

Lynn Viola continued on page 216 in The Best Sons of the Fatherland:
“The state ruled by circular, it ruled by decree, but it had neither the organizational structure nor the manpower to enforce its voice or to ensure correct implementation of its policy in the administration of the countryside…. The roots of the Stalin system in the countryside do not lie in the expansion of state controls but in the very absence of such controls and of an orderly system of administration, which, in turn, resulted as the primary instrument of rule in the countryside.”
This conclusion, drawn from a careful observation of the real progress of collectivization, requires two comments.
The thesis of `Communist totalitarianism’ exercised by an `omnipresent Party bureaucracy’ has no real bearing with the actual Soviet power under Stalin. It is a slogan showing the bourgeoisie’s hatred of real socialism. In 1929–1933, the Soviet State did not have the technical means, the required qualified personnel, nor the sufficient Communist leadership to direct collectivization in a planned and orderly manner: to describe it as an all-powerful and totalitarian State is absurd.
In the countryside, the essential urge for collectivization came from the most oppressed peasants. The Party prepared and initiated the collectivization, and Communists from the cities gave it leadership, but this gigantic upheaval of peasant habits and traditions could not have succeeded if the poorest peasants had not been convinced of its necessity. Viola’s judgment according to which `repression became the principal instrument of power’ does not correspond to reality. The primary instrument was mobilization, consciousness raising, education and organization of the masses of peasants. This constructive work, of course, required `repression’, i.e. it took place and could not have taken place except through bitter class struggle against the men and the habits of the old regime.
Be they fascists or Trotskyists, all anti-Communists affirm that Stalin was the representative of an all-powerful bureaucracy that suffocated the base. This is the opposite of the truth. To apply its revolutionary line, the Bolshevik leadership often called on the revolutionary forces at the base to short-circuit parts of the bureaucratic apparatus.
`The revolution was not implemented through regular administrative channels; instead the state appealed directly to the party rank and file and key sectors of the working class in order to circumvent rural officialdom. The mass recruitments of workers and other urban cadres and the circumvention of the bureaucracy served as a breakthrough policy in order to lay the foundations of a new system.’
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 67 [p. 55 on the NET]

To understand the Bolshevik Party’s line during the collectivization, it is important to keep in mind that on the eve of 1930, the State and Party apparatus in the countryside was extremely weak—the exact opposite of the `terrible totalitarian machine’ imagined by anti-Communists. The weakness of the Communist apparatus was one of the conditions that allowed the kulaks to throw all their forces into a vicious battle against the new society.
On January 1, 1930, there were 339,000 Communists among a rural population of about 120 million people! Twenty-eight Communists for a region of 10,000 inhabitants.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 69 [p. 56 on the NET]

The usual assumption outside the Soviet Union is that this exiling occurred through drastic action by a mystically omnipotent G.P.U.. The actual process was quite different; it was done by the village meetings of poor peasants and farmhands which listed those kulaks who “impede the collective farm by force and violence” and asked the government to deport them. In the hot days of 1930 I attended several of these meetings. They were harsh, ruthless discussions, analyzing one by one the “best families,” which had grabbed the best lands, exploited labor by owning the tools of production, as “best families” normally and historically do, and who were now fighting the rise of the collective farms by arson, cattle-killing and murder. Meetings of poor peasants and farmhands discussed them, questioned them, passed on them, allowing some to remain but listing others as “dangerous to our peaceful development–should be deported from our village.”
It was a harsh, bitter and by no means bloodless conflict. I was reminded of it again in the San Joaquin Valley of California by the cotton pickers’ strike in the autumn of 1933. The same gradations from half-starved farmhand to wealthy rancher, though the extremes in California were wider. California local authorities permitted deportation of pickets who interfered with farming of private ranchers; Soviet authorities permitted deportation of kulaks who interfered with the collectively owned farms of poor peasants and laborers. In both cases the central government sent investigating commissions, slightly moderating and
therewith sanctioning the local actions. The governor’s commission in California threw out a few of the most untenable cases against strikers. In the USSR the township and provincial commissions reviewed the lists of “kulaks for exile” and greatly cut them down, guarding against local spites and excesses. But the active winning will which could count on the backing of government was in California the will of ranchers and finance corporations; in the USSR, the will of organized farmhands.
Strong, Anna Louise. Dictatorship and Democracy in the Soviet Union. New York: International Pamphlets, 1934, p. 4-5

The traditions of the rural Russian communities and the primitive collectivism of the peasants contributed mightily to the success of collectivization. The Russian villages had never liked the capitalist peasant, the kulak, growing rich at the expense of the mir (village community).
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 101

The dispossession and dispersal of the ‘kulaks’ was, on the whole, a popular policy among proletarians and party activists, by no means something that Stalin imposed on reluctant comrades.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 313

THE KULAK CLASS WAS TO BE ELIMINATED NOT THE KULAKS THEMSELVES

The Soviet term, `liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, indicates perfectly clearly that it is the capitalist exploitation organized by the kulaks that is to be eliminated and not the physical liquidation of the kulaks as persons. Playing with the word `liquidation’, academic hacks such as Nolte and Conquest claim that the exiled kulaks were `exterminated’.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 94 [p. 80 on the NET]

In a “directive circular” Stalin declared: “One must rely entirely on the poor peasants and consolidate the alliance with the moderately prosperous peasants in order to engage in the decisive struggle to annihilate the kulaks as a social class.” Of course, to annihilate them as a social class did not mean the physical extinction of the kulaks.
Delbars, Yves. The Real Stalin. London, Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 162

It is hard and horrible, for twentieth century America to hear this, but facts are facts. Stalinism not only aims but boasts of aiming at the complete smashing of class boundaries, at the death of all distinctions save talent and State service between man and man. Rank may replace class in the Bolshevik cosmogony to satisfy human needs, but rank based on merit, not on wealth or birth.
But what, you may ask, becomes of “the Former People,” or the kulaks or engineers thus doomed apparently to perish? Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not–they must be “liquidated” or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass….
To illustrate–they take a kulak or other type of “former” individualism–a private business man or self-seeking engineer–and send him to the northern woods or Siberian construction camps. Sometimes his family goes too. More generally it remains to be absorbed by poverty into the lower proletarian surroundings.
Then they tell him: “You outcast! You man that was, and now is not! You can get back your civic rights; can be reborn a proletarian; can become a free member of our ant heap by working for and with us for our communal purpose. If you don’t, we won’t actually kill you, but you won’t eat much, won’t be happy, will remaini forever an outsider, as an enemy, as we consider it, even if ultimately you return from exile and rejoin your family….
That reduced to its harsh essentials, is Stalinism today. It is not lovely, nor, in the outside world, of good repute, and your correspondent has no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth. But truth it is–ant-heap system, ant-heap morality–each for all and all for each, not each for self and the devil take the hindmost.
Duranty, Walter. “Stalinism Smashes Foes in Marx’s Name,” New York Times, June 24, 1931.

BUKHARIN SUPPORTED THE KULAKS

The next great ideological struggle was led against Bukharin’s rightist deviation during the collectivization. Bukharin put forward a social-democratic line, based on the idea of class re-conciliation. In fact, he was protecting the development of the kulaks in the countryside and represented their interests. He insisted on a slowing down of the industrialization of the country. Bukharin was torn asunder by the bitterness of the class struggle in the countryside, whose `horrors’ he described and denounced.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 135 [p. 116 on the NET]

“Well,” said Okman, “I’ll tell you. Bukharin is the leading counsel of the Kulaks; he is always on the side of any opportunist in the communist parties abroad; he is on the side of anyone who’s drifting to the Right.”
This was a complete surprise to me. Andrey [Tokaev’s older brother] had taught me to believe that in the whole Olympus of Bolshevism there was not a man cleverer, better qualified, more honorable or more revolutionary than Bukharin. Yet here he was condemned by someone who knew him personally, and who obviously himself had a considerable standing in the Party–how otherwise would he be touring the Caucasus with his own chauffeur-driven car?
“Shall I tell you what your Bukharin is like?” cried Okman. “He will never come out into the open. He will prove to you privately that Stalin wants to be the leader of an ‘autarchic communism’–the communism of a Russia isolated from the rest of the world. He detests both Stalin and Molotov, but he will never publicly oppose their views. He wants others to fight his political battles for him, that’s what he’s like.”
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 64

TROTSKY STARTS BY WANTING TO END THE KULAKS AND LATER DEFENDS THEM

Trotsky, who in December 1925, at the 14th Party Congress of the CPSU, had tried to force on the Party the policy of immediate collectivization of the peasantry, when the conditions necessary for such collectivization were totally lacking, this same Trotsky in 1933, when collectivization was well on the way to completion, comes out in opposition to the policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class, demanding instead the establishment of “a policy of severely restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks.”

Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 36

THE PEASANTS SUPPORTED THE BOLSHEVIKS ON ONE ISSUE AFTER ANOTHER

Anyone who thinks that the Soviet peasantry “remained a sullen and disenchanted force,” that it was never won over wholeheartedly for the revolution, let him answer the following questions: How was it possible, without winning the peasantry wholeheartedly, for the Bolsheviks to come to power? How was it possible for them to defeat the combined strength of the Russian Whiteguards and the 14 imperialist and non-imperialist countries who, armed to the teeth, attacked the young Soviet Republic in the period of the Civil War and the War of Intervention? How was it possible for the USSR, possessed of such a “sullen disenchanted force,” namely the peasantry, to have such earth-shaking achievements in the task of building socialism and putting the entire economy of the country, including agriculture, on a new technical basis, the technical basis of modern large-scale production? How was it that this “sullen disenchanted force” joined the movement for collectivization with such enthusiasm? How was it possible for these “sullen”, “disenchanted” and allegedly miserable people to defeat the Nazi war machine? One has only to ask these questions to realize the absurdly counter-revolutionary nature of the charge.

Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 499

GOVT COMPROMISED ON COLLECTIVIZATION WITH THE FARMERS IN FAR EAST

During the first years after 1929, when the whole country was in an uproar from so many social upheavals occurring simultaneously, forced laborers were treated worse than they were later. The police simply couldn’t cope with the problem of handling so many people at once, and it took years to build up an efficient organization. Thousands of them didn’t have decent quarters to live in, or sufficient food. But this wasn’t deliberate, as I see it; the police simply were given more to do than they could handle properly. Later, the forced labor camps became better organized, and those I have observed in recent years were orderly and reasonably comfortable. They had schools and cinema theaters, and inmates didn’t live a very different life from ordinary Soviet citizens.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 134

COLLECTIVIZATION COULD ONLY WORK WHEN THE MIDDLE PEASANT WAS READY TO JOIN

There is no industry here. The building of socialism could only be carried through on the basis of decisively attacking the rich peasant, not by tickling him, or irritating him, but by eliminating him. That could only be done on the basis of ruthless class struggle on the countryside, and for the struggle the working class and the poor peasantry required a firm ally –the middle peasant. To have attacked the capitalist peasant in 1925-26 before this alliance had been strengthened would have been a despairing adventure worthy of a Trotsky.
The alliance could only be strengthened and the middle peasant turned towards collectivization when industry was able to give active support to the peasantry, by the provision of tractors, fertilizers, etc., and when the State was able to advance credits. Further, the middle peasantry had to be led, on the basis of their own experience in agricultural cooperation, to see the possibility of the collective farms. Here the State farms helped the peasantry in the transfer from the individual to the collective working of the soil. The State farm “SHEVSHENKO” established the first machine and tractor station, and helped the surrounding peasantry with the loan of machinery. The success of these and similar measures led to a powerful turn of the middle peasants to the collective farms. It was the extent of this turn and not merely the existence of difficulties on the grain front that led the Soviet Government to accelerate the process of collectivization.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 73

STALIN HOPED TO ENLIST THE LEFT OPPOSITION IN HIS BATTLE WITH THE KULAKS

Stalin needed the assistance of men of ability who would be eager to carry out an anti-kulak policy and would carry it out with conviction and zeal. He could find such men in the Left Opposition. He was therefore anxious to win to his side as much Trotskyist and Zinovievist talent as he could without yielding ground to Trotsky & Zinoviev….
…Another Trotskyist, who was still in Stalin’s diplomatic service, informed him [Trotsky] from Berlin about Stalin’s presumed plan of action. According to this correspondent, Stalin hoped to improve his difficult position by inducing influential banished Oppositionists to recant–with their assistance he expected to put the left course into effect and to give Trotsky the coup de grace.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959, p. 410

BUKHARIN OPPOSES COLLECTIVIZATION

He [Bukharin] almost always favored longer postponement of the collectivization drive, slower rates, and, in effect, less collectivization than any other major participant in a given debate. One wonders if Soviet agriculture would ever have been collectivized if Bukharin had gained power.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 148

COLLECTIVIZATION AND THE SCISSORS CRISIS PRODUCE REAL HARDSHIP

The year 1927 saw the recrudescence of these three elemental powers [the cry for bread, the emergency of war and the economic isolation]. The cry for bread went up once more. The abundance of grain in the village and the famine of goods in the city led the peasant to retain his reserves. The “scissors,” the disparity in prices of manufactured articles and rural produce, grew wider than ever. The state was deprived of its greatest medium of exchange abroad–the export of grain. The city workers suffered intensely. The peasants had no incentive to surrender their bread. The grain collection program of the government showed an enormous deficit. The winter of 1927-28 was ushered in with all the appearances of an internal catastrophe.
“We had but two or three months left before the spring thaw,” declared Stalin several months later in an address delivered at Leningrad. “We therefore faced this alternative: either to make up the losses and reestablish the normal rate of grain collections for the future, or be confronted by the inevitability of a serious crisis in our entire national economy.”
…The grain question, the specter of starvation, was defying all peaceful theories.
Levine, Isaac Don. Stalin. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 366-367

The crisis atmosphere of the late 1920s precluded moderate approaches to socialist construction.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 26

STALIN SAID JOINING KOLKHOZ COLLECTIVES WAS TO BE VOLUNTARY

We had been taught in the Lenin School, and the same had been preached at all the Comintern’s informational gatherings as well as in the press, that joining a collective farm was voluntary; no one was forced to do so. During the early period of setting up the kolkhozes an error admittedly had occurred in that a few polit-commissars had used strong-arm methods and threats, but as soon as Stalin had heard about it he had given the strict order that such threats and force had to be discontinued. The entire kolkhoz system, in other words, was based on volunteerism.
Tuominen, Arvo, The Bells of the Kremlin: Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983, p. 112

INTELLECTUALS SYMPATHIZE WITH THE KULAKS

For the most part, our Russian intellectuals were closely linked with the well-to-do peasants who had a pro-kulak mentality. Ours was a country of peasants.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 309

STALIN REIGNS IN COLLECTIVIZATION EXCESS

At no time did Stalin lose control of the situation.
It had been estimated that by the end of the First Five-year Plan some 30 percent of the farms would be collectivized, but suddenly towards the end of 1929 and in 1930 the process of transformation developed into a mass rush of the poor and middle poor peasants into collectivization, a rush that entirely out-stripped the capacity of the still developing industry to supply the requisite technical equipment. With the characteristic Russian flare for making “the sky limit,” collectivization at all costs and by all means, including compulsory methods, became a universal craze…. Stalin put on the breaks. Standing firmly on the cumulative decisions of the Congresses, he published an open letter telling the Bolsheviks they had become “dizzy with success,” and brought them back to the line of voluntary collectivization.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 177

Kulak opposition is often no less ruthless than the communist hot-heads whom Stalin denounced during March 1930.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 381

0n March 2, 1930, there appeared in all the papers his [Stalin] famous article ‘Dizzy with Success!’ The newspapers were then reporting the complete collectivization of agriculture in European Russia. In this famous article Stalin declared that the success of collectivization had intoxicated the party and government officials in the villages, so that they had lost all sense of proportion. They had shot far beyond the target. It was an entire mistake to aim already at the agricultural commune; it was success enough to have attained the agricultural co-operative, the artel. Associations for common use of the soil would also suffice. In this article Stalin quite openly mentioned the dangers, especially the possibility that the majority of the peasants might turn against the Soviet State.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 185

On March 2, 1930, when the basic grain areas had their “seed collections” made, Stalin issued his famous statement: “Dizziness From Success.” He said that the speed with which peasants joined collective farms had made “some comrades dizzy.” He reminded everyone that membership was voluntary and that the type of collective farm recommended for the present period socialized only the land, draft animals, and larger machinery, but left as personal property such domestic animals as cows, sheep, pigs, chickens. Every paper in the land published the statement in full; millions of copies circulated as leaflets. Peasants road to town and paid high for the last available copy, to wave in the face of local organizers as their charter of freedom. Stalin suddenly became a hero to millions of peasants, their champion against local excesses. Stalin quickly checked this hero-worship by publishing Answers to Collective Farmers, in which he stated: “Some people speak as if Stalin alone made that statement. The Central Committee does not… permit such actions by any individual. The statement was… by the Central Committee.”
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 39

How did Stalin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party react to the spontaneous and violent collectivization and `dekulakization’ tide?
They basically tried to lead, discipline and rectify the existing movement, both politically and practically.
The Party leadership did everything in its power to ensure that the great collectivization revolution could take place in optimal conditions and at the least cost. But it could not prevent deep antagonisms from bursting or `blowing up’, given the countryside’s backward state.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 68 [p. 56 on the NET]

[Letter from Stalin to Sholokhov, May 3, 1933, on sabotage by the grain growers of the Veshenskii raion]
… I am thankful to you for your letters, as they reveal the open sores in party and Soviet work; they reveal how our officials, in their ardent desire to restrain the enemy, sometimes inadvertently beat up their friends and sink to the point of sadism.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 397

In his article “Dizzy from Success” he was quite frank to admit that the collectivization of the peasants had progressed too quickly.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 517

But with all the phenomenal progress of collectivization, certain faults on the part of Party workers, distortions of the Party policy in collective farm development, soon revealed themselves. Although the Central Committee had warned Party workers not to be carried away by the success of collectivization, many of them began to force the pace of collectivization artificially, without regard to the conditions of time and place, and heedless of the degree of readiness of the peasants to join the collective farms….
It was found that the voluntary principle of forming collective farms was being violated, and that in a number of districts the peasants were being forced into the collective farms under threat of being dispossessed, disfranchised, and so on.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 307

Although the Central Committee had specified that the chief form of the collective-farm movement must be the agricultural artel, in which only the principal means of production are collectivized, in a number of places pigheaded attempts were made to skip the artel form and pass straight to the commune; dwellings, milk-cows, small livestock, poultry, etc., not exploited for the market, were collectivized….
Carried away by the initial success of collectivization, persons in authority in certain regions violated the Central Committee’s explicit instructions regarding the pace and time limits of collectivization.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 307

Take, for example, our mistakes in collective farm construction. You, no doubt, remember 1930, when our Party comrades thought they could solve the very complicated problem of transferring the peasantry to collective farm construction in a matter of three or four months, and when the Central Committee of the Party found itself obliged to curb these over-zealous comrades. This was one of the most dangerous periods in the life of our Party. The mistake was that our Party comrades forgot about the voluntary nature of collective farm construction, forgot that the peasants could not be transferred to the collective farm path by administrative pressure; they forgot that collective farm construction required, not several months, but several years of careful and thoughtful work. They forgot about this and did not want to admit their mistakes. You, no doubt, remember that the Central Committee’s reference to comrades being dizzy with success and its warning to our comrades in the districts not to run too far ahead and ignore the real situation were met with hostility. But this did not restrain the Central Committee from going against the stream and turning our Party comrades to the right path. Well? It is now clear to everybody that the Party achieved its aim by turning our Party comrades to the right path. Now we have tens of thousands of excellent peasant cadres for collective farm construction and for collective farm leadership. These cadres were educated and trained on the mistakes of 1930. But we would not have had these cadres today had not the Party realised its mistakes then, and had it not rectified them in time.
Stalin, Joseph. Works, Vol. 14, Speech in Reply to Debate, 1 April 1937, Red Star Press, London, Pravda 1978, pp. 285.

KILLING OF PRIEST WHO SUPPORTED COLLECTIVIZATION

April 4, 1930–The following is an authentic case which recently occurred in a Volga village:
The local priest was up-to-date and enthusiastic, which is not always so in Russian villages. He did not fast like many of his colleagues, despair of the church in a communist state, or attempt to engage in futile opposition, but tried to reconcile his congregation to the facts of their present existence.
One Sunday he chose as the theme of his sermon the story of Ananias and Sapphira who fell dead before Peter because they had sold a piece of land, lied about its price, and withheld part of the money from the common fund. This, the priest said, was like the peasant who before joining a collective sold his cow or his horse instead of contributing it for the common weal. He enlarged upon the communism of the early Christians and quoted texts to show the duty of obedience to authority.
The following night the priest was shot dead by an unknown person as the clergyman was entering a barn to see whether it was suitable for the storage of newly collected seed grain. A week later the church “caught fire” and burned to the ground….
No legal proceedings have followed, and the murder of the priest remains unpunished, but it is common gossip in the village that the killing was inspired by kulaks.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 381

Our situation, especially after Lenin was gone, became very dangerous.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 246

HOW KULAKS AND PRIVATE TRADERS WERE TAKING OVER

While, however, Russia had the appearance in 1924 of great prosperity, impressing foreign observers and assisting Russian foreign policy, the NEP faced the country with very serious new problems. In spite of thriving trade and industry there was a certain amount of unemployment. Still more serious was the competition between private and State enterprise. Innumerable small traders, artisans, owners of businesses, and speculative builders, had resumed their past activities in private enterprise….
Meanwhile, private industry was continually growing at the expense of state industry. It was very useful that all these new employers brought gold and securities out of their hiding places in order to open a shop or a small factory. But the capital and goods that thus reappeared were on a much smaller scale than had been expected. And in spite of this the private capitalists were applying through the banks for credits from State resources. These traders and owners of businesses knew just how to corrupt the government officials with whom they had to deal. Their aim was to secure the flow of capital from the money bags of the State into the pockets of private individuals; yet all these traders and businessman made up the typical Russian middle-class, whose initiative and energy were of particular importance in economic life. Even the Communists had to admit that there were capitalists who did good work; after all, the invitation to foreign countries had been inspired by the desire to get hold of capitalists of that sort.
The grasping private traders, however, with their corruption and their speculative business activities at the expense of the State, activities that brought no real benefit to Russia, seemed altogether undesirable as a permanent element in Russian economic life. But the more private enterprise grew fat at the expense of the State and with the resources of the State, the greater became its political demands. It was evident that in the long run private enterprise would not rest content with its lack of formally established political rights, that it would seek to attain political influence, and that to some extent it had it already in the lower ranks of officialdom. Its ambition was, of course, the breaking of its bonds….
Where the Tsarist Government had not succeeded in forming a class of kulaks in the countryside as bastions of the tsarist regime, the conditions in the Russian market now produced a development of this sort. ‘Kulak’ means ‘closed fist’, and for hundreds of years this had been the name of the village money-lender, who was usually also the village shopkeeper. The village usurer, generally a cunning and close-fisted peasant, knew no mercy, and had a whole village under his thumb. Under the Soviets the meaning of the term was extended to include not merely money lenders or shopkeepers, but every substantial farmer who was prosperous enough to employ male and female labor.
It was found after the Civil War that except for the distribution of the great estates there had been virtually no social revolution in the countryside. The soviet system was to have begun with the village soviets, but for political purposes it really began in the towns. For in the countryside sovietization had been merely a formality. In a very short time the village was entirely under the political influence of the prosperous farmers. They secured election to the Soviets and became their chairmen, thus ruling the village. Party cells were established in villages, but the prosperous farmers smuggled their sons into the cells, so gaining influence there as well. The villages threatened to fall more and more under the sole rule of the well-to-do farmers. What was still worse for the regime was that as early as 1925 it became evident that the private enterprises in the towns were becoming economic allies of the well-to-do farmer class. The peasants paid their income-tax in kind, but the prosperous farmer, the only one who had any surplus yield to sell, sold it to the private dealer, because he offered the highest prices. He preferred also to buy his manufactured goods from the private trade rather than the State or the co-operatives. This intercourse between town & country also promoted all sorts of deals and speculations which associated the private enterprises in the towns more and more closely with the villages.
Moreover, the prosperous farmer was also a voter. He had conquered local power in the village; and already he was demanding from the State not only a reduction of taxation but the abolition of taxes in kind and the introduction of a money tax, which would be greatly to his advantage and also make it more difficult to check his actual crops. This check was always difficult. Stalin said at this time that the village with individual farming bred capitalism and strengthened it every second, and there was some truth in this. If it continued, it was obvious that in time the dictatorship of the party would come to an end. Private enterprise would have achieved what all the armies of the White counter-revolutionaries had failed to achieve–the downfall of Bolshevism. Many foreign observers in Moscow also thought that inevitable. Very many Russians, even members of the Communist Party, hoped for it.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 153-156

It happened in the following way. The New Economic Policy involved a certain growth of the capitalist elements in town and country. In the towns new capitalist middlemen began to appear. In the villages the rich peasants waxed fat and kicked against the policy of the Soviet Government. They began to penetrate into the village Soviets and to win a certain influence over the middle peasants. In certain areas they passed over to the murder of Soviet officials and village correspondents.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 57

KULAKS OPPOSED COLLECTIVIZATION WITH TERROR AND DESTRUCTION

At the time of the collectivization of agriculture, the liquidation of private trade and all private enterprise, and the pushing on with industrialization at an almost intolerable pace, a fearful political slogan was shouted throughout the country: ‘Liquidation of the whole class of yeomen farmers.’ This at once provoked widespread consequences. In the war on the prosperous farmers thus declared, resort was had to devices of the civil war. At that time [during the civil war] Poor Peasants Committees had played an important part, and now these committees were called into being again. The village party cells were to have control of them. The committees were given vast powers. The Government and the party declared quite officially that in each village 2 to 3 percent of the farms were big farms.
…this new war without visible fronts was much more gruesome and horrible. The big farmers, men of a hard and cruel type, did not give up easily. They, too, had open or secret supporters in the villages. There came the first terrorist acts; Soviet officials, Communist agitators, leaders of the Poor Peasants’ Committees, were murdered openly or in secret. The weapons hidden after the First World War and in the civil war were brought out.
A counter-terror began at once, radical and merciless….
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 163-164

This was done and, as more tractors and supplies became available, more and more of the poor and middle peasants flocked to the collectives. The wealthy peasant or kulak was bitterly hostile to the collectivization movement. He was often a man who “lived off the backs of the other peasants” through granting loans, renting out machinery and implements, or by control of local trade. The collective deprived him of these advantages. A kind of civil war broke out between the kulaks and the collectives, the counterpart of the revolutionary battles which had been fought in the cities. Communist leaders of the collectives were murdered or beaten. The kulaks burned collective farm buildings and slaughtered livestock. In some places overzealous communists used coercive measures and turned entire villages against collectivization.
Davis, Jerome. Behind Soviet Power. New York, N. Y.: The Readers’ Press, Inc., c1946, p. 59

Another thing happened over and over again. Big farmers, and others of those who were determined not to go into the kolkhozy, destroyed the whole of their property and fled. They slaughtered their cattle, cut down their fruit trees, pulled their house to pieces, drove the horse away or killed it and departed.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 165

The most difficult period was from the 1932 to the 1933 harvest when kulak sabotage, added to difficulties of inefficient organization, caused a grain shortage that put the whole country on short rations.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 180

After this resolution, which announced the end of capitalist relations in the countryside, the kulaks threw themselves into a struggle to the end. To sabotage collectivization, they burnt crops, set barns, houses and other buildings on fire and killed militant Bolsheviks.
Most importantly, the kulaks wanted to prevent collective farms from starting up, by killing an essential part of the productive forces in the countryside, horses and oxen. All the work on the land was done with draft animals. The kulaks killed half of them. Rather than cede their cattle to the collectives, they butchered them and incited the middle peasants to do the same.
Of the 34 million horses in the country in 1928, there remained only 15 million in 1932. A terse Bolshevik spoke of the liquidation of the horses as a class. Of the 70.5 million head of cattle, there only remained 40.7 million in 1932. Only 11.6 million pigs out of 26 million survived the collectivization period.
Charles Bettelheim. L’Economie sovietique (Paris: editions Recueil Sirey, 1950), p. 87.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 79 [p. 66 on the NET]

Before joining the collective farms, many peasants slaughtered their livestock: cows, sheep, pigs, even poultry. In February and March 1930 alone, approximately 14 million head of cattle, one-third of all pigs, and 1/4 of all sheep and goats were destroyed.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 225

[Footnote: In 1928 on the entire territory of the RSFSR 1123 terrorist acts by kulaks were recorded.]
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 232

No one doubts that acts of sabotage did take place. Many who have been officers, manufacturers, or large farmers, but were now deposed, contrived to obtain important appointments and carry on sabotage. If, today, the supply of leather for private citizens and of shoes in particular, is inadequate, it is without question the fault of these large farmers who, at the time, sabotaged cattle-breeding. The chemical industry and the transport services, too, suffered for a long time from acts of sabotage. If, today, there is an extremely strict supervision of factories and machines, it can be justified on very good grounds.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 37

The liquidation also caused many of the kulaks to destroy their domestic animals so that now, after almost 10 years, there is still a shortage of meat and dairy products in Russia.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 82

The slaughter of the cattle by the peasants intent on sabotaging collectivization had placed leather at a premium from 1932 to 1935. In 1935 the shortage of livestock had been almost filled. The quantify of leather increased.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 32

A great deal of trouble is caused by the “kulaks” who not only try to cut down production but terrorize the middle (seredniaks) and poor (byedniaks) peasants in order to bring disaster to all government endeavors. The Soviets are striving to put over a project never before undertaken–complete socialization of agriculture. Every means possible, including large expenditures, is employed. They are counteracting the menace of the “kulaks,” who are withholding and lessening their production, by using every resource available for the completion of the collective and state farm projects.
Wright, Russell. One-Sixth of the World’s Surface. Hammond, Ind., The Author, c1932, p. 94

The slaughter of cattle, the fall in grain production are all ascribed to administrative errors of the leadership. That there were administrative errors is undoubted….
But the difficulties of carrying through the first Five Year Plan were not difficulties due to administrative mistakes, they were difficulties created by the resistance of the capitalist elements whom the plan was threatening. The aim of the plan was not merely the reconstruction of the technical basis of the country, but also the transformation of economic and social relations–the progressive elimination of the capitalist elements. To expect the Five~Year Plan to proceed without class struggle, without sabotage, as if it was a question of the new housing estate, instead of the revolutionary transformation of a great country, is indeed to adopt a bourgeois administrative point of view, which ignores the class struggle. To ascribe the relative temporary disorganization caused in certain branches of economy by the fiercely contested class struggle, to the administrative mistakes of the leadership or the lack of foresight, as Trotsky does repeatedly in his book, can hardly be called ignorance. It is calculated misrepresentation.
But because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had won the confidence of the working class, because it could mobilize the great trade unions and co-operatives, because it had a firm alliance with the middle peasantry, it was able to lead the masses of the Soviet Union in the struggle to break down the class opposition, and to realize the plan. Not by bureaucracy, not by slick administration, but by the struggle of the majority of the Russian people under Communist leadership, were the plans realized.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 80-81

From 1931 till 1932, the struggle of the rich peasants in the Soviet Union grew in intensity, and all kinds of sabotage were resorted to in order to destroy the collective farms from within. Here is a description, from the pen of a Ukrainian counter-revolutionary, of the sabotage that was practiced:
“At first there were mass disturbances in the kolkhozy (collective farms) or else the Communist officials or their agents were killed; but later a system of passive resistance was favored, which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolshevik plans for the sowing and the gathering of the harvest. The peasants and workers, seeing the ruthless export by their Bolshevik masters of all food produce, began to take steps to save themselves from starvation in the winter time and to grasp at any means of fighting against the hated foreign rule. This is the main reason for the wholesale hoarding of grain and the thefts from the fields–offenses which if detected are punishable by death. The peasants are passive resisters everywhere; but in Ukrainia the resistance has assumed the form of a national struggle. The opposition of the Ukrainian population caused the failure of the grain storing plan of 1931 and still more so that of 1932. The catastrophe of 1931-32 was the hardest blow that the Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921-22. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown. In addition, when the crops were being gathered last year, it happened that, in many areas, especially in the South, 20, 40, or even 50 percent was left in the fields and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing” (Isaac Mazeppa in Slavonic Review, January 1934).
How leaving the harvest to rot in the fields squares with a desire to take steps to save oneself from starvation in the winter time, heaven and the Ukrainian counter-revolutionaries alone know. But the description of the methods of sabotage, practiced not by the whole population as alleged, but by the kulaks with some misguided middle peasants supporting them, gives a sufficiently clear idea of the situation in some parts of the country, at the height of the resistance to collectivization.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 198

The Ukraine and several of the more distant provinces were in the throes of famine [in 1932]. Drought had nothing to do with it. Food shortage was due entirely to the breakdown of agriculture caused by collectivization, and by the policy of maximum exports.
Barmine, Alexandre. Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat. London: L. Dickson limited, 1938, p. 264

As a result of deliberations by a Politburo Commission chaired by Molotov, and under pressure from Stalin, in January 1930 the Central Committee passed a resolution “On Measures for Liquidating Kulak Farms in Areas of Full Collectivization”…. Correspondingly, kulak assaults on the Soviet regime rose, at times extending over wide areas. Actions against the better-off section of the peasantry gave rise to a wave of protest, banditry, and armed risings against the authorities.
Grain production immediately went into a slide, soon followed by a decline in stock breeding. The peasants native enterprise was cut down at the root…. The mass order of animals began in many regions: compared to 1928, livestock fell to half or a third in number by 1933.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 169

Rather than allow their cattle to fall into the hands of the state, they had slaughtered half the country’s herd. By March it was plain that disaster had overtaken the countryside.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 160

In the case of full-scale collectivization, which commenced in late 1929, resistance was massive. It ran the gamut from insurgencies and other acts of violence, to murders of collectivizers and their local collaborators, to vociferous protests by women, frequently in connection with raion soviet decisions to close churches and/or confiscate church property, to the razbazarivanie (“squandering”) of livestock and other property through slaughter and sale, the destruction of collective farm buildings, the liberation of arrested kulaks, the reacquisition of confiscated property, and the disbandment of collective farms.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism as a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 11

Once implemented, collectivization had a catastrophic effect on agricultural production. Animal husbandry suffered more than anything else because of the mass slaughter of cattle when peasants joined collective farms.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism as a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 62

…Masses of kulaks were deported to remote unpopulated lands in Siberia. Their houses, barns, and farm implements were turned over to the collective farms–Stalin himself put the value of their property so transferred at over 400 million rubles. The bulk of the peasants decided to bring in as little as possible of their property to the collective farms which they imagined to be state-owned factories, in which they themselves would become mere factory hands. In desperation they slaughtered their cattle, smashed implements, and burned crops. This was the muzhik’s great Luddite-like rebellion. Only three years later, in January 1934, did Stalin disclose some of its results. In 1929 Russia possessed 34 million horses. Only 16.6 million were left in 1933–18 million horses had been slaughtered. So were 30 millions of large cattle, about 45 percent of the total, and nearly 100 million, or two-thirds of all sheep and goats. Vast tracts of land were left untilled. Famine stalked the towns and the black soil steppe of the Ukraine.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 325

…Between January and March 1930, the number of peasant holdings brought into the collective farms increased from 4 million to 14 million. Over half the total peasant households had been collectivized in five months. And in the countryside the peasants fought back with “the sawed-off shotgun, the ax, the dagger, the knife.” At the same time, they destroyed their livestock rather than let it fall into the hands of the State.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 18

Passive resistance became the universal form of resistance. The peasants refused to join kolkhozes as long as they had sufficient strength not to yield to threats and force, and they destroyed their livestock as a sign of protest. Livestock transferred to the kolkhoz died from lack of shelter, fodder, and care.
The statistics demonstrate the disaster that struck the Soviet livestock herd. In 1928 there were 33.5 million horses in the country; in 1932, 19.6 million. For cattle the figures were, respectively, 70.5 million and 40.7 million; for pigs, 26 million and 11.6 million; for sheep and goats, 146 million and 52.1 million. In Kazakhstan the number of sheep and goats fell from 19.2 million in 1930 to only 2.6 million in 1935. From 1929 to 1934 a total of 149.4 million head of livestock were destroyed. The value of these animals and their products (milk, butter, wool, etc.) far exceeded the value of the giant factories built during the same period. The destruction of horses meant a loss of 8.8 million horsepower.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 237

The peasant thought that if the Government wanted him to go to the kolkhoz it was for the Government to look after him there and, if the stock was to be pooled, he would prefer to go in with as little as possible. There followed all over the country a colossal slaughter of livestock. There was nothing that the peasant regarded as more specially “property” than his cow; and indeed, whatever the advantages of brigades in agriculture, they can hardly replace the individual care of an owner for his cattle. The livestock of the country was reduced to one-third; half the horses, sheep, and goats. The general supply of meat and wool sank to one-third. This was in itself a public catastrophe.
Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 162

A few years of non-interference with ordinary normal farming had put money in the hands of the peasantry again, perhaps not very much but enough to be accounted wealth in impoverished Russia. The village Hamptons of Russia refused to give money to the government they detested. All the work of the Right faction of the Party was undone. Stalin sent his underlings to collect contributions by force from the richer peasants and they reverted to boycott. They cut the acreage under cultivation and sold their stock, bringing about in a very short time a food crisis in all the towns. The peasants buried their grain and their potatoes and lived on their secret food hordes while the towns starved.
Graham, Stephen. Stalin. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970, p. 109

After collectivization was put into effect, agriculture was ruined, production fell off, and there was famine.
Bazhanov, Boris. Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, c1990, p. 139

The peasants reacted by killing practically all their livestock which, after 1930, resulted in a new period of famine for Russia.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 35

The kulaks responded–fighting against collectivization with an organized campaign of large-scale destruction. The struggle swept through the countryside, approaching civil war scale in many areas, with devastating results particularly in Ukraine.
Frederick L. Schuman, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government at Williams College at the time of writing, states that he and thousands of other tourists traveled in Ukraine during the famine period. He writes:
“Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30 million to less than 15 million; of horned cattle from 70 million (including 31 million cows) to 38 million (including 20 million cows); of sheep and goats from 147 million to 50 million; and hogs from 20 million to 12 million. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering lost by 1941.
… Some [kulaks] murdered officials, set the torch to the property of the collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grain. More refused to sow or reap, perhaps on the ´assumption that the authorities would make concessions and would in any case feed them.
The aftermath was the Ukraine “famine” of 1932-33 … Lurid accounts, mostly fictional, appeared in the Nazi press in Germany and in the Hearst press in the United States, often illustrated with photographs that turned out to have been taken along the Volga in 1921…. The “famine” was not, in its later stages, a result of a food shortage, despite the sharp reduction of seed grain and harvests flowing from special requisitions in the spring of 1932 which were apparently occasioned by fear of war with Japan. Most of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books, 1987, p. 93

The struggle around collectivization was not limited to kulaks. A considerable number of middle peasantry were wrongly treated as kulaks. Instead of being won over to supporting collectivization, they resisted collectivization. Louis Fisher observed: “In my book I quote a violently anti-Bolshevik source to the effect that the difficulty was due to the widespread passive resistance of the peasants, as a result of which “whole tracts were left unsown’ and between 20 and 50 percent of the crop deliberately allowed to rot in the fields. I myself saw, all over the Ukraine in October 1932, huge stacks of grain which the peasants had refused to gather in and which were rotting. This I write ‘was their winter’s food. Then those same peasants starved.’ Mr. Chamberlain has falsely interpreted the famine and some Americans have accepted his interpretation. If the famine was “man-made’ the peasants were the men who made it.”
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 93

Anna Louise Strong writes (New Republic, August 7, 1935), “There was a serious grain shortage in the 1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines.”…
… The point is that the Soviet government was engaged in a tremendous, epochal struggle to socialize the land, for what they claimed to be the eventual good of the peasants; the peasants, however, resisted and–terribly enough– suffered. To balk the government, they refused to harvest grain. Therefore they did not have enough to eat. And died.
The real story of the famine is briefly this. The Five-Year plan included “collectivization” of the peasantry. Russia, overwhelmingly an agrarian country, contained in 1927 almost 25 million peasant holdings; Stalin’s plan was to unite them into socialized collective farms. The peasants would turn over implements and livestock to a farm manager, and work in common on comparatively large rather than very small holdings, assisted by tractors furnished by the state. This was the idea. On it, the future of socialism in the USSR depended.
What happened was that the peasants, bitterly indignant, staged two major resistances to the immense forcible process of collectivization. First, they slaughtered their livestock, rather than turn it over to the collectives. It was an extraordinary and tragic event–though not so tragic as the human starvation later. There was no organization among the peasants, no communication; yet in hundreds of villages, separated by hundreds of miles, a simultaneous destruction of animals began. Rather than turn over their precious pigs, sheep, cattle, to the collective authorities, the peasants murdered them.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 527

[In the Introduction by Adam Ulam]
Unable to counter force with force, the peasants turned to passive resistance. One, and from the government’s point of view the most dangerous, manifestation of it was the villagers slaughtering their livestock rather than surrendering it to the kolkhoz. In 1928, the USSR had 32 million horses; by 1934 the figure stood at 15.5 million. In January and February 1930 alone, 14 million head of cattle were destroyed.
In 1930, with the harvest of 83.5 million tons, the regime extracted from the peasants 22 million and exported 5.5. In the next year the country, largely for reasons already adduced, produced 14 million tons less [69.5], but the regime squeezed out of the… peasantry 22.8 million and exported 4.5.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. ix-x

A complete turnover of livestock ownership was affected by the collectivization of agriculture. As the farmer joined the collective farm, he was expected to contribute his stock to it. Naturally, he preferred to enter the collective farm with as few animals in his possession as possible. Many, embittered by the policy of collectivization, slaughtered their livestock prior to their forced joining of the kolkhoz`. Others attempted to trade or sell their animals.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 116

The rich, and many abused (as well as paranoid) peasants in the winter of 1930 responded by fighting against the organized poor peasants and Party cadre; many Communists and poor peasant leaders were assassinated. In the words of a leading anti-Soviet historian of the CPSU: “There was open war in the villages and the desperate peasants did not hesitate to kill any Communists, regarding them as natural enemies.” Other acts of violence were committed against government and Party buildings and personnel; and some riots and small-scale insurrections had to be suppressed by the Army. In response to the massive economic sabotage which occurred over the course of a couple of years, as well as violence against the Party and its supporters in the countryside, the Party again adopted extraordinary measures–measures not seen since the Civil War period of 1918-20.
Rich peasants were classified into three categories: (1) ‘active counter-revolutionaries’ who were subject to criminal proceedings, which sometimes resulted in execution; (2) ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ who were exiled and re-settled after the confiscation of most of their productive property; and (3) ‘those who had to be drawn into socially useful labor and who were given the opportunity for re-education through socially useful production,’ a category which covered most of the rich peasants. The total percentage of those classified as kulaks was not to exceed 3-5% in grain areas and 2-3% in non-grain areas. About 20% of kulaks were to be classified in categories (1) and (2).
… Economic sabotage by the rich peasants continued. As a result of these serious problems the great promise of collectivization–the development of a modern efficient agriculture with a rapidly expanding output– remained unfulfilled. By 1932 ‘vast tracts of land were left untilled. Famine stalked the towns and the black steppe of the Ukraine.’
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 223

The kulaks, and many “middle” and even poor peasants, were implacable in their hatred of the “commissars.” Arson and killings of party agents and agitators were daily occurrences in the villages.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 69

While the peasants were being rapidly reduced to this state, they still took a fiercely insane plunge into dissipation. In the first months of collectivization they slaughtered over 15 million cows and oxen, nearly 40 million goats and sheep, 7 million pigs, and 4 million horses; the slaughter went on until the nation’s cattle stock was brought down to less than half what it had been. This great shambles of meat was the main dish at the feast with which the smallholder celebrated his own funeral. The kulak began the carnage and incited others to follow suit. Seeing that he had lost all, that he, the nation’s provider, was to be robbed of his property, he set out to rob the nation of its food supply; and rather than allow the collectivizers to drive away his cattle to communal assembly stations, he filled his own larders with the carcasses so as to let his enemies starve. The collectivizers were at first taken aback by this form of “class warfare” and watched with helpless amazement as the “middle” presents and even the poor joined in the butchery, until the whole of rural Russia was turned into an abbatoir.
…an epidemic of orgiastic gluttony spread from village to village, from volost to volost, and from gubernia to gubernia. Men, women, and children gorged themselves, vomited, and went back to the fleshpots. Never before had so much vodka been brewed in the country–almost every hut became a distillery–and the drinking was, in the old Slav fashion, hard and deep. As they guzzled and gulped, the kulaks illuminated the villages with bonfires they made of their own barns and stables. People suffocated with the stench of rotting meat, with the vapors of vodka, with the smoke of their blazing possessions, and with their own despair. Such was often the scene upon which a brigade of collectivizers descended to interrupt the grim carouse with the rattle of machine-guns; they executed on the spot or dragged away the crapulous enemies of collectivization….
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 118

Since it was rapidly known that most of the crops and animals would be seized by the regime for its collective farms, most peasants who had such wealth ate as much as possible before it should vanish. Even a kulak can only eat so much, so he often prepared breads from his grain, slaughtered many of his animals, and gave mad, hysterical, gargantuan feasts for family, friends, and often the whole village. These feasts often combined elements of a potlatch, of Nero’s banquet while Rome burned, and of an apocalyptic holy communion table. To Stalin’s men, however, not only the givers of the feasts but the poorest banqueters were saboteurs, knowing destroyers of the people’s food supply.
There was an enormous amount of intentional sabotage as well, especially after the collective farms had actually been formed. Collective fields were fired, collective animals were murdered wholesale by enraged, vengeful, self-destructive peasants. In many villages more than half the grain crops from 1929 to 1932 were destroyed. In the whole USSR, collectivization meant the destruction by peasants of roughly 40 percent of the cattle and hogs, half the horses, and two-thirds of the sheep and goats. The grain losses had a cumulative effect, since seed grains were also involved. All this contributed mightily to the ghastly famine of 1933, which killed perhaps one million people in the Ukraine alone.
Not all animals are merely economic assets to peasants. Many are prized and beloved pets, fellow workers, and friends. The pathos of the peasant who lost his dear horse to the kolkhoz, or who killed it to save it from the Communists, was repeated many thousand times, and often hurt as badly as starvation or arrest.
The course of collectivization was wildly unsteady. An often-published allegation in 1929 was that the regime planned to collectivize 20 percent of the villages during the First Five-Year Plan. In October, 1929, after the harvest, when the big drive began, only some 4% of Russian agriculture seems to have been in any form of socialist farm. By the end of January, 1930, almost 15 percent of the peasants of the USSR were already herded into kolkhozes. In the next five mad weeks, more than another 40 percent of the peasants were gunned into forming collective farms–a rate far more intense than anyone had planned, and one that provoked the major peasant resistance and reprisals that Stalin and other high Communist had feared.
On March 2, 1930, Stalin published his famous editorial in Pravda, “Dizzy with Success…,” in which he blasted the Communist organizers of collective farms for using hasty, coercive, and violent methods when they should have persuaded the peasants to join voluntarily on a much slower schedule. Stalin has often been accused by his enemies of blaming his agents for atrocities which he himself had secretly ordered. Certainly Stalin had set forth no detailed schedules, and had made no effective administrative provisions against letting the collectivization drive get out of hand. Yet he certainly felt himself sincerely aggrieved at the incompetence of his agents–he did not yet suggest treason as the explanation. Stalin’s dim view of the peasants had led him into authorizing the most forceful measures against them when necessary. But his Bolshevik optimism had led him to expect that these measures would not be so invariably necessary…. He sincerely blamed others.
Stalin’s blast sent the entire collectivization drive into chaotic reverse. By May Day, 1930, the percentage of Soviet peasants in collective farms has gone from 58 percent down to 24 percent. Then this wild stampede out of the collectives was reversed by force. Those who had left were made to return, and the formation of new kolkhozes was resumed. The decollectivization of the spring of 1930 was more than made up for by the end of 1932, when roughly 60 percent of the peasants were supposed to be in collectives.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press, 1965, p. 159-161

The answer turns on an ominous phenomenon that had already begun in the last quarter of 1929: the mass slaughter of livestock by peasants who were being pressured into joining collective farms….
To various officials, both local and at the center, a logical countermeasure appeared to be to go at once to the “higher forms” of collective farm in which even small animals, poultry, and the family milk cow would be appropriated for the collective before they could be slaughtered by the peasants.
…the peasants’ already apparent tendency to slaughter their stock rather than turn it over to the collectives. To strike out the Politburo commission’s stipulation on retention of some animals was therefore the only course that Stalin could think of taking.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 144-145

In this his [Stalin] revolutionary motivation was doubtless stiffened by a sense of desperation over incoming information on the spreading peasant slaughter of livestock. By the beginning of 1930, for example, the number of horses in the country–and in the continuing absence of large numbers of tractors, horses were as essential to collective farming as they had been to private farming– had sharply declined due to slaughter, disease, and lack of feeding.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 178

More serious still, the livestock slaughter begun by the peasants in the last quarter of 1929 continued on a steeply rising scale in early 1930, and the regime’s frantic effort to forestall it by preemptive seizure proved unavailing: it only turned the collective farm into the thrice-dreaded commune and hardened the peasant’s solemn resolve to enter it, if he must, without his livestock….
I [a rural Communist leader] told the people that they had to join the collective, that these were Moscow’s orders, and if they didn’t, they would be exiled and their property taken away from them. They all signed the paper that same night, every one of them. Don’t ask me how I felt and how they felt. And the same night they started to do what the other villages of the USSR were doing when forced into collectives– to kill their livestock. According to the official account, it was during the two months of February and March 1930 that the great bulk of the slaughter of the following totals of livestock lost in the 1929-30 economic year took place: one quarter of all cattle, a third of the country’s pigs, and more than a quarter of its sheep and goats. Over the whole period of peasant collectivization (1928-33), the statistics of peasant livestock slaughter, revealed after Stalin died, are: 26.6 million head of cattle, or 46.6% of the total; 15.3 million head of horses, or 47% of the total; and 63.4 million head of sheep, or 65.1% of the total.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 182

There were things the peasants could do in protest, and they were doing them. They were slaughtering their livestock, consuming it, and giving it away rather than surrendering it to the kolkhoz. In January and February alone 14 million head of cattle were destroyed. In 1928 the USSR had 32 million horses; in 1934, after the regime had made some concessions on this issue and the situation improved, the figure stood at 15.5 million. For cattle, the figures are 60 and 33.5 million; for pigs 22 and 11.5 million; for sheep 97.3 and 32.9 million. The peasants’ resistance assumed ominous proportions also in a more direct sense–riots and terrorist acts against officials were reaching epidemic proportions.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 331

That many people died in the 1930s is of course certain, but by far the largest number died as a result not of the Stalin purges proper but of the collectivization of agriculture during the earlier part of the decade. In the liquidation of the kulaks many were killed, since they desperately and often violently resisted collectivization, but a far greater number were deported, together with their families, to timber camps. This deportation in itself would not have bought about many deaths had it not been for the deliberate slaughter by the peasants (and not only the kulaks) of an immense proportion of the country’s livestock. Together with the chaotic state of agriculture during the few years that followed the collectivization drive (aggravated moreover by some severe droughts), this produced perhaps the worst famine Russia had ever known. It reached its peak in 1931-32 and as a result several million people died of hunger or acute undernourishment, and not just in the timber camps to which the kulaks had been deported, but in the country generally. The consequences of the mass-slaughter of livestock were to be felt for many years after, and by the time the war broke out in 1941 meat and dairy produce were still lamentably short….
Even long after the war, in 1959, there were many fewer cattle in the Soviet Union than there had been in 1916, before the Revolution, and today [1971] their number scarcely exceeds the 1916 figure. This is, of course, in fantastic contrast with industrial production, which, since the Revolution, has increased about 70 times. During the intervening period Russia had developed from a near-undeveloped country to the second-largest industrial power in the world.
Werth, Alexander. Russia; the Post-War Years. New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1971, p. 29

The peasants believed they could force the government to stop by destroying their own livestock; the despair that could lead a peasant to kill his own animals, the equivalent in our world of burning down our own house, gives a hint of the scale of desperation; 26.6 million head of cattle were slaughtered, 15.5 million horses. On 16 January 1930, the government decreed that kulak property could be confiscated if they destroyed livestock.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 47

And, in fact, the resistance of the kulaks became increasingly stubborn. They refused en masse to sell to the Soviet state their grain surpluses, of which they had considerable hoards. They resorted to terrorism against the collective farmers, against Party workers and government officials in the countryside, and burned down collective farms and state granaries.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 292

Furthermore, the kulaks instigated the peasants to slaughter their animals before entering the collective farms, arguing that “they will be taken away anyhow.”
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 307

The middle peasants, feeling themselves condemned to a merger that was repugnant to them, in many instances slaughtered, in 1929-1930, their cattle and horses, sheep and pigs, rather than bring them into the common stock. So widespread was the outcry that the central committees were driven to instruct Stalin to issue his manifesto entitled “Dizzy with Success,” in which the zeal of the government agents was rebuked; the voluntary character of membership of the collectives was emphasized; permission to withdraw was conceded; and proper consideration of the varying stock brought in by different members was insisted on. Nevertheless the animals continued to be slaughtered and the total membership to fall off. Partial failures of crop in 1931 and 1932 deepened the discontent.
Footnote: The magnitude of this holocaust of live-stock is seldom realized. The following table shows that in one year, 1929-1930, more than 60 million animals were slaughtered, being one quarter of the whole; and in the course of the next three years 1931-1933, over 80 million more. In 1933 the total livestock was less than four ninths of the total in 1929.

This colossal slaughter, repeated in successive years– has been subsequently excused as having been due to lack of wheat or oats for fodder, owing to government exactions. But why did they slaughter sheep and pigs, and even goats?…
The whole organized movement for an independent Ukraine was, we are told, from 1928 onwards, directed towards stimulating the peasants to resist collectivization. The forms taken by this resistance, it has been frankly stated by one of the Ukrainian emigres, “have greatly varied. At first there were mass disturbances in the kolkhosi, or else the communist officials and their agents were killed; but later a system of passive resistance was favored, which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolshevik plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest….
The peasants are passive resisters everywhere; but in Ukrainia the resistance has assumed the character of a national struggle. The opposition of the Ukrainian population caused the failure of the grain-storing plan of 1931, and still more so, that of 1932. The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that the Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921-1922. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracks were left unsown. In addition when the crop was being gathered last year, it happened that, in many areas, especially in the South, 20, 40 and even 50% was left in the fields and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing.”
Towards the close of 1932, when the extent of this continuous deliberate sabotage had become manifest; when the two persistent rains of the summer had ruined the prospect of an abundant harvest, even where the agricultural operations had been loyally carried out; and when it was realized that the reserves had been specially depleted owing to the measures taken in order to stave off a Japanese invasion, the food situation again looked desperate. There is reason to believe that those in authority did not know where to turn. Finally, in January 1933, Stalin announced an administrative campaign, designed to reach the nerve-centers of every one of the 225,000 collective farms; a campaign which for boldness of conception and vigor in execution, as well as in the magnitude of its operations, appears to us unparalleled in the peace-time annals of any government. The desperate situation had to be saved. And, aided fortuitously by good crops in 1933 and 1934, it was saved. How this was accomplished will appear in the following pages.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 189-191

In 1930, the Soviet government was driven in its desperate quest for capital to export commodities badly needed at home and to issue paper currency, according to the official figures, six times the amount provided for in the Five-Year Plan.
Levine, Isaac Don. Stalin. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 382

During 1930, the country was stripped of its elementary food reserves, which were dumped abroad in the frenzied search for capital. At the end of the year, the meager gold reserves of the state were being exported.
Levine, Isaac Don. Stalin. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 390

The peasants refused to be accommodating and preferred to slaughter their beasts rather than to deliver them up to the kolkhosi. From the new arrivals we learned that both bread and meat were lacking in the towns, especially in Leningrad and Moscow.
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 187

Draft forces declined drastically directly or indirectly as a result of collectivization. In response to collectivization and the socialization of their property in the kolkhosi, many peasants sold or slaughtered their livestock, for a variety of reasons: as a protest against collectivization; because they did not want to surrender their animals to the new collective farms without compensation; because of local officials’ unrealistic promises about mechanization. During the initial campaign of 1930, these actions most affected animals used for consumption, especially cattle and pigs. Afterward, when most peasants had already been collectivized and subjected to the procurement demands of 1931, the number of draft animals, especially horses, declined rapidly. Animals were the immediate victims of shortages in 1930-33 since starving peasants had no choice but to feed themselves first from the dwindling reserves, and because peasants frequently expressed their resentment of collectivization by neglect and abusive treatment of socialized livestock. Also, as discussed above, the main grain forage for horses, oats, suffered substantial losses from rust in 1932.
As a result, the number of horses declined drastically by 1932. Soviet factories were producing tractors in the early 1930s, but not in sufficient quantity to compensate for the losses of horses.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 21

On the other hand, in some actions peasants clearly expressed outrage and aimed to take revenge on the regime by reducing the harvest. The most obvious such actions were arson attacks on kolkhoz buildings and fields. In the Middle Volga, Nizhni Novgorod, Ivanovo, and Northern regions, arson destroyed thousands of hectares of unharvested grain and hundreds of tons of harvested grain, in addition to hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, cut timber, housing, and fuel. In some places peasants attacked officials and other peasants involved in harvest work and destroyed harvest machinery, according to the OGPU, with the goal of hindering the harvest.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 31

I do not mean to imply that all the OGPU reports, such as those on agriculture cited above, were falsified. Most of those descriptions can be confirmed in other archival and published sources. Many sources, for example, document efforts by peasants to dismantle kolkhosi and restore traditional farming practices during the process of collectivization in 1929-1930 and repeatedly thereafter; the OGPU reports on this cited above confirm these reports and provide important details.
Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001, p. 41

According to the research reports insofar as they deal with the kulaks, the rich peasants, there were 381,000 families, i.e., about 1.8 million people sent into exile. A small number of these people were sentenced to serve terms in labour camps or colonies. But what gave rise to these punishments?
The rich Russian peasant, the kulak, had subjected poor peasants for hundreds of years to boundless oppression and unbridled exploitation. Of the 120 million peasants in 1927, the 10 million kulaks lived in luxury while the remaining 110 million lived in poverty. Before the revolution they had lived in the most abject poverty. The wealth of the kulaks was based on the badly-paid labour of the poor peasants. When the poor peasants began to join together in collective farms, the main source of kulak wealth disappeared. But the kulaks did not give up. They tried to restore exploitation by use of famine. Groups of armed kulaks attacked collective farms, killed poor peasants and party workers, set fire to the fields and killed working animals. By provoking starvation among poor peasants, the kulaks were trying to secure the perpetuation of poverty and their own positions of power. The events which ensued were not those expected by these murderers. This time the poor peasants had the support of the revolution and proved to be stronger than the kulaks, who were defeated, imprisoned and sent into exile or sentenced to terms in labour camps
Of the 10 million kulaks, 1.8 million were exiled or convicted. There may have been injustices perpetrated in the course of this massive class struggle in the Soviet countryside, a struggle involving 120 million people. But can we blame the poor and the oppressed, in their struggle for a life worth living, in their struggle to ensure their children would not be starving illiterates, for not being sufficiently ‘civilised’ or showing enough ‘mercy’ in their courts? Can one point the finger at people who for hundreds of years had no access to the advances made by civilisation for not being civilised? And tell us, when was the kulak exploiter civilised or merciful in his dealings with poor peasants during the years and years of endless exploitation.
Sousa, Mario. Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union, 15 June 1998.

KULAKS OPPOSED THOSE BRINGING IN COLLECTIVIZATION

When the harbingers of such revolutionary ideas arrived in the villages, their observations soon aroused the opposition of the kulaks, who had formerly, by virtue of their wealth, exercised much authority in local affairs. They endeavored at first to smooth out the difficulties, on the ground that Collectivization was a step forward to true Socialism, but soon became aware that the kulaks were far more concerned with defending their own privileged position than pursuing abstractions for the general good.
In many districts the local proprietors took the offensive against the proposals of the Five Year plan and used their money to obstruct the scheme as much as possible.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 83

[A May 8, 1933, decree by Stalin and Molotov halting mass arrests states] …the class struggle in the countryside will inevitably become more acute. It will become more acute because the class enemy sees that the kolkhozy have triumphed, that the days of his existence are numbered, and he cannot but grasp–out of sheer desperation–at the harshest forms of struggle against Soviet power. For this reason there can be no question at all of relaxing our struggle against the class enemy.
Getty & Naumov. The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 115-116

Contradicting all his recent statements, Stalin now asserted that, by withholding grain from the government, the ‘kulak was disrupting the Soviet economic policy’. In June 1928 new emergency measures were announced; and in July Stalin called upon the party ‘to strike hard at the kulaks’. Such injunctions were not willingly followed by Bolsheviks in the countryside: for in the last three years the importance of the ‘alliance with the peasantry’ had been impressed upon them and they had been taught that hostility toward the muzhik was the distinctive mark of the Trotskyist heresy.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 313

The cost was terrible. Stalin–four years late–admitted it. The agrarian economy of the Soviet Union suffered a blow from which it cannot fully recover till about 1940; it’ll take till then to replenish the slaughtered stock. For, once the killing began, it progressed till about 50 percent of the animals in the Soviet Union were killed. Official figures admit that the number of horses in the country diminished from 33,500,000 in 1928 to 19,600,000 in 1932; the number of cattle from 70,500,000 to 40,700,000; sheep and goats from 146,700,000 to 52,100,000; pigs from 25,900,000 to 11,600,000.
The peasants, stunned by this catastrophe, sank into temporary stupor. The government–when the worst of the damage was done–retreated hastily. Probably Stalin had not realized the formidable extent of the slaughter until it was too late…. The tempo of collectivization had been far too rapid. The plan called for full collectivization only after 10 years, but within two years, in 1930, 65 percent of all the farms had been collectivized. So the pace was toned down.
Even so, in 1932, the peasants, stiffening into a final vain protest, rebelled again. As if by government agreement, another psychic epidemic spread through the rich fields of the Caucasus and Ukraine. The farmers, those still outside the collectives, were paid miserable prices; either they could buy no manufactured goods at all, or goods only of indifferent quality. They hit on a plan. They had sowed the crop, which was abundant; but they decided not to harvest all of it. They harvested exactly what they calculated they would themselves need during the winter, and left the rest to rot. “What was the use of slaving to produce a handsome crop, if the state simply seized it all?”
This was, of course, mutiny. But it was not only defiance of Stalin; it was a threat to starve him into submission. The Soviet government needed grain to distribute to the industrial regions, the great cities; it needed grain for export, to pay for the machinery it had to import for the Five-Year plan.
Even the farmers already in the collectives let their grain rot. There were few communist overseers, few trained and loyal farm managers. Word got to Moscow that the harvest, which should have been handsome, was largely lost. Stalin saw that this was a major crisis. If the peasants were permitted to get away with this, the revolution was beaten. (“Obsolete classes don’t voluntarily disappear,” he told Wells). He had to act. And he acted.
Government grain collectors descended on the farms, tall with weeds, and seized that small share of the crop that the peasants had saved for their own use! One by one, they visited every holding, and took every lick of grain due the government in taxes. If a man’s normal crop was, say, 60 bushels, the tax might be 20 bushels. But the farmer had only harvested, say, 25 bushels. So when the government took 20, the farmer and his family had only five–instead of 25–to live on the whole winter and spring.
Russian economy is still extremely primitive. The question of grain, of bread, is a matter of life and death. When there was no grain left, the people began to die. The government might have diverted some grain from the cities–though that was a pinched, hungry year everywhere–to feed the peasants. But the government did not do so. Stalin decided that the peasants must pay the penalty for their rebellion. They had refused, blindly, stupidly, to provide grain; very well, let them starve. And they starved….
The famine broke the back of peasant resistance in the USSR….
The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 528-529

STALIN ONLY REACTED AGAINST THOSE OPPOSING COLLECTIVIZATION AS A LAST RESORT

Guerrilla bands roamed the country districts robbing the new Collectives, destroying their buildings and burning their crops. Without any clear objective they descended into thinly disguised banditry, raiding and killing in the way their Mongolian and Tatar ancestors had done under Tamerlane.
For a long time Stalin remained patient. He knew from bitter experience in Georgia, how difficult it is to bring new ideas to a backward people, and he had a sympathetic regard for the sturdy individualism which resists any active authority by force. When finally action was forced upon him, he moved with his usual firmness but not until every other avenue had been exhaustively explored.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 84

STALIN HAD GREAT PATIENCE BUT IT WAS FINALLY EXHAUSTED BY ANTI-COLLECTIVISTS

Where resistance persisted in spite of all efforts, the State began the wholesale deportation of treasonous elements and, if necessary, did not hesitate to remove whole villages to Siberia and the northern wastes.
As had been done many times before, Stalin’s training gave him strength to carry on through this period. The man who could pardon Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had three times betrayed him; the leader who let Bukharin live in freedom, though Bukharin had openly proclaimed a determination to kill him, would stop at nothing where his faith was concerned.
Cole, David M. Josef Stalin; Man of Steel. London, New York: Rich & Cowan, 1942, p. 85

KULAKS SPREAD RUMORS ABOUT THE COLLECTIVES AND USE VIOLENCE

Kulaks and priests clouded the issue with rumors, playing on the emotions of sex and fear. Everywhere, I heard of the “one great blanket” under which all men and women of the collective farm would sleep! Everywhere, rumor said that babies would be “socialized.” In some places, kulaks joined collectives–to rule or ruin. Elsewhere, they were being expelled from collectives as undesirable. Some collectives took in kulaks horses but not kulaks, as had been done with landlords’ equipment in the revolution. Kulaks fought back by burning the collective barns and even by assassination. The trial of 12 kulaks for the murder of a Party secretary was closing in Atkarsk. “He died for all of us,” declared the prosecution; the peasant audience wept. The storm of collectivization rose higher as farms were named in the martyr’s honor.
As I left the area, I asked a local official. “What does Moscow say about this, about that?” He replied, hurriedly but proudly: “We can’t wait to hear from Moscow; Moscow makes its plans from what we do.”
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 35

COLLECTIVIZATION WENT TO EXCESS AT TIMES

The winter of 1929-1930 was a time of considerable chaos. The precise form of the collective was not yet clear. Stalin, also making his plans from the peasants’ actions, stated on December 27, 1929, that the time had come “to abolish kulaks as a class.” This merely authorized what poor peasants were already doing, but with the authorization they began doing more. Cruel tales came of the unroofing of kulaks’ houses, of chaotic deportations. Meantime, organizers, eager for a record, forced peasants into farms by threat of deportation as “kulaks”; they “communized” cows, goats, chickens, even dishes and underwear. Kulaks grossly exaggerated these excesses and incited peasants to kill and eat their livestock and “go naked into the collective where the state supports you all.”
“Why doesn’t Stalin stop it?” I asked a communist friend. “Has a kulak no rights? This is chaos!”
“There is really too much anarchy,” he answered. “It comes from division in the Party; we Communists must take the blame. Stalin has stated the ‘line’–‘to abolish kulaks as a class.’ The Right-wing elements, who control the government apparatus”–I knew he meant Rykov–“delay the formulation in law. So the Left-wing elements among our local comrades, having no law as a guide, do what is right in their own eyes and the eyes of farmhands and poor peasants. This is anarchy. We expect government decrees soon; then there will be more order.”
The first decree appeared February 5, 1930–it authorized deportation of kulaks in areas where collectivization was “total” and where peasants meetings asked for the deporting of definite people after hearings. The list must then be checked by the provincial authorities, and arrangements made for the districts to which the kulaks should go. These were usually construction jobs or virgin land in Siberia. After the decree, the anarchy lessened,….
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 38

Problems inherent to the massive introduction of a new, collective system of farming further complicated the situation. The very scale and speed of collectivization was astounding: in the space of four years, over 14 million farms were collectivized, including 70 percent of the farms in Ukraine. Collectivization took place at rates and with methods subject to extreme swings depending on the abilities and attitudes of local and the regional authorities. Careful planning gave way to confusion as even at the top level collectivization schedules and targets were subject to drastic changes and revisions. With limited historical experience to draw upon and in a countryside renowned for backwardness and age-old peasant traditions, millions of small strips and holdings were amalgamated into a few hundred thousand collective farms. Peasants long used to manual labor and working with draught animals were now introduced to tractor ploughs, tractor-drawn seeders, mechanical combines and threshers. Against this background and widespread sabotage, a smooth transition was impossible.
Added to this were errors and excesses committed in the course of collectivization. Contrary to what Nationalist ideologues and “experts” would have us believe, Soviet historiography does not ignore this period, nor does it gloss over errors committed.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 95

That property expropriated from kulaks was assigned to the new collectives together with the over-zealousness of many Party cadre led poor peasants to take aggressive action against the rich peasants, and treat many recalcitrant middle peasants as kulaks; in some areas 15-20% of peasants were treated as if they were kulaks, contrary both to Party policy and common sense.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 221

Some rich peasants slaughtered their animals rather than contribute them to the collectives, more because the fodder to keep them alive was appropriated to feed the cities. Between spring 1929 and spring 1930 the number of farm animals in the USSR fell by 25%. To have continued the hectic measures of January and February would have resulted in famine and possibly collapse of the regime.
On March 2, 1930, summing up those measures, the Central Committee of the Party issued a statement criticizing its local cadre and poor peasant supporters for becoming ‘dizzy with success,’ ignoring the basic rule that peasants must join the collectives voluntarily, and alienating the majority of middle peasants who, until the winner of 1930, had been undecided about whether or not to join (thus pushing them into the arms of the kulaks). The Party also emphasized that the collective farm socialized only the land, draft animals and larger machinery, leaving cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, and other personal property in the hands of the individual peasants. The decree read in part:
“The Kolkhoz must not be imposed by force. That would be stupid and reactionary. The Kolkhoz movement must be based on the active support of the main mass of the peasantry….
What can these distortions lead to? To the strengthening of our enemies and the complete discrediting of the idea of the Kolkhoz movement….
As a result of the March 1930 decree, the errors of the previous two months were largely corrected and pressure on the rich, especially the middle, peasants considerably relaxed. More than half the peasants who, in January and February, had been induced to join the collectives, left them within a few weeks. By September 1930, the percentage of peasants in collectives had dropped to 21% of the total (from a peak of about 58% in early March).
Subsequently subtler incentive structures (and a balance between collective and individual interests) were employed to induce the middle peasants to join the collectives. Private plots, from which peasants could sell their produce on an individual basis, were institutionalized; profit-sharing, rather than set wage payments, became the norm. Most state farms were disbanned and their land and resources given free to the collectives. This more moderate approach after 1930 resulted in a fairly rapid pace of collectivization. By 1933 about 60%, by 1934 about 75%, and by 1940, 97% of peasants were organized in collective or state farms….
The slaughter of farm animals by rich and middle peasants in the winner of 1930 together with the continuingly serious problems of organization of the collectives and motivation of the peasants meant, in Isaac Deutschers’ words, that ‘Rapid mechanization of agriculture now became a matter of life and death.’ The food crisis continued unabated. In 1929 the average Soviet urban dwellers annual consumption of meat, poultry and fat was 48 pounds, in 1930 it was 33, falling to 27 in 1931, and less than 17 in the famine year of 1932.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 221-222

… since Stalin said he desired a smooth transition to socialist agriculture, the government put out vague and shifting schedules for collectivization, which supposedly spread the process out over 10 years or more. But the local Communist organizers in fact went ahead far more quickly and disruptively, not because Stalin had given them secret hurry-up orders (as his enemies charge) but because schedules were hopelessly vague, and because both idealism and careerism pressed the Communist organizer ahead as fast as possible.
To Stalin the enemy in the villages was above all the kulak, while the poor peasantry and even most of the middle peasantry were merely coerced or misled by the kulaks.
Randall, Francis. Stalin’s Russia. New York: Free Press,1965, p. 157

Curiously enough, collectivization which was at first forced has now become more of a response to the exigencies of the situation. Peasants are flocking into the kolhozi as into arks of safety. It is largely a matter of expediency and to that extent voluntary. Thus all Soviet expectations have been surpassed. It was planned to collectivize only as machinery could be supplied and to have 15% of the small-farm holders organized by 1933. But once the backbone of opposition was broken and it became expedient to join, the collectives increased so rapidly that four times the quota has already been reached.
… The crisis that compulsory socialization created in 1930 is forgotten, but its effects are not repaired. When the peasants saw what awaited them, they ate up or killed their livestock rather than let it be collectivized, and by midsummer 1930 from 1/4 to 1/2 of the farm animals had disappeared. The confiscation of grain and property together with the ruthless policy of the proletarian collectivizers had two consequences. It caused acute hunger and dissatisfaction in the cities and rebellious outbreaks in the country. Partisan zeal was jeopardizing the dictatorship. Thereupon Stalin, in the famous letter of March, 1930, called a halt, saying there was “giddiness from success” among the organizers. They were ordered to desist from coercive methods and roundly scored for their excesses. Collectivization was declared to be purely voluntary. Thus a “strategic retreat” was negotiated and the crisis successfully passed with the result that subsequently a policy of modernization has prevailed and socialization has been secured by inducement rather than force. However, the war upon the kulaki has not ceased.
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 58

STALIN WAS LESS STRINGENT TOWARD THOSE OPPOSED TO DEKULAKIZATION THAN OTHERS

In some cases, local militants’ zeal outstripped the plans of the center, and Moscow often had to rein in excessive dekulakizations, forcible collectivization, and ultraleftist zeal in persecuting religion.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 43

Kuibyshev’s terms were tough. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Stalin’s lieutenants took a more aggressive stance toward the opposition than he did. One month before Bukharin and Kuibyshev spoke, a Politburo meeting had considered punishments for two high-ranking Central Committee Members (Syrtsov and Lominadze) who had taken a “right-opportunist” line against the excesses of collectivization. In the Politburo, Stalin proposed demoting them to the status of candidate members of the Central Committee. The majority, however, “strongly” disagreed and voted to expel them from the Central Committee.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 52

TOUGH LAWS PASSED AGAINST DESTROYING KULAKS ARE WEAKLY ENFORCED

[Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR on August 7, 1932]
…The number of complaints concerning violence and threats directed by kulak elements at kolkhoz members who do not wish to leave the kolkhozy and who are working honestly and selflessly for the consolidation of these kolkhozy has similarly increased….
Based on these considerations and in order to meet the demands of workers and kolkhoz members, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR decree:
…2. To apply as a measure of judicial punishment for the plundering of rail and border transport cargo the highest measure of social protection, namely, execution with confiscation of all property, with computation of execution under extenuating circumstances to deprivation of freedom for a term of not less than ten years with confiscation of all property.
…2. To apply as a measure of judicial punishment for the plundering (theft) of property belonging to kolkhozy and cooperative societies the highest measure of social protection, namely, execution with confiscation of all property, with computation of execution under extenuating circumstances to deprivation of freedom for a term of not less than 10 years with confiscation of all property.
…1. To wage a resolute struggle against those antisocial, kulak-capitalistic elements which apply violence and threats [of violence] or preach the use of violence and threats against kolkhoz members for the purpose of forcing the latter to leave the kolkhozy, for the purpose of bringing about the violent destruction of the kolkhozy. These criminal acts are to be put on a footing equal to crimes against the state.
2. To apply as a measure of judicial punishment in matters concerned with the protection of kolkhozy and kolkhoz members against violence and the threats on the part of kulak and other antisocial elements, the deprivation of freedom with imprisonment in a concentration camp for a term ranging from 5 to 10 years.
Despite the Draconian nature of this law, its application was uneven and confused. The following month, September 1932, the Politburo ordered death sentences mandated by law to be carried out immediately. Nevertheless, of those convicted under the law by the end of 1933, only 4% received death sentences, about 1000 persons were actually executed. In Siberia, property was confiscated from only five percent of those convicted under the law.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 110

In spite of Stalin’s strictures in the original decree against leniency, by August 1936 a secret decree had ordered the review of all sentences under the law of August 7th 1932. Four-fifths of those convicted had their sentences reduced, and more than 40,000 of these were freed at that time.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 110

THE LESSER PUNISHMENT FOR THE FAMILIES OF KULAK SUBVERSIVES

[June 2nd, 1935 extract from Protocol No. 46 of the buro session of the Azov-Black Sea Territorial Committee of the Communist Party]
2) Deporting from our territory 1500 kulaks, counter-revolutionaries who continue to carry on their anti-Soviet, anti-kolkhoz activities and sabotage. The members of their families, on the other hand, may, if they so desire, remain in place.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 180

In many cases the kulak alone was arrested and sent to a labor camp or jailed or shot, while his family was not touched at first. Agents only made an inventory of the property, leaving it in the family care, as it were….
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 237

POLITBURO ORDERS THAT JUSTICE BE DONE TO KOLKHOZ MEMBERS

[Protocol #39 of the Politburo on May 20th 1936]
The Procuracy and the Supreme Court of the USSR are instructed to verify the correctness of rejections of requests to dismiss criminal cases against kolkhoz members in the Ivanovo and Leningrad regions and in the Northern Caucasus Region and to take all necessary measures to rectify any improper decisions made locally….
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 220

COLLECTIVIZATION SOMETIMES REQUIRED HARSH METHODS OF PERSUASION

MOLOTOV: On January 1, 1928, I had to go to Melitopol on the grain procurement drive. In the Ukraine. To extort grain.
CHUEV: From the kulaks?
MOLOTOV: From everyone who had grain. Industrial workers and the army were in a desperate situation. Grain was all in private hands, and the task was to seize it from them…. We took away the grain. We paid them in cash, but of course at miserably low prices. They gained nothing. I told them that for the present the peasants had to give us grain on loan. Industry had to be restored and the army maintained.
…All kinds of rather harsh methods of persuasion had to be applied. We started with the kulak.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 241

We never knew what they hid away, but often they did hold back stocks of grain. “Come on! Give it up! Quick!” Those drives were well warranted then. To survive, the state needed the grain. Otherwise it would crack up–it would be unable to maintain the army, the schools, construction, the elements most vital to the state. So we pumped away. Of course, we did not always succeed. We were sitting targets for criticism. They would say, Look, the center is demanding the impossible. Such talk was rife. Only the overwhelming authority of the center, with Stalin at the head, enabled us to fulfill the plans.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 243

But this does not mean that the proletarian state used no force against the kulaks and their agents, the saboteurs and wreckers who resorted to murder and terrorism to oppose the building of socialism and who wished to restore capitalism. The dictatorship of the proletariat did exercise its dictatorship over the kulaks, over the minority of exploiters, in the wider interests of the majority of the Soviet people–the workers and peasants–in order to make sure that the vanquished capitalists would not come to power again. The proletarian state exercised its dictatorship because that exactly is the specific purpose for which it does exist. Would we not have complete justification for reproaching it if it did not perform this, one of its main functions?
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 176

KULAKS REFUSED TO HAND OVER THE GRAIN FOR TWO YEARS

Back then our position was restriction of the kulak, not liquidation. Not until the autumn of 1929, in October or November, did Stalin launch the slogan of liquidation of the kulaks as a class…. You see, we would say to the peasants that the grain was needed, neither the working-class nor the army could get along without it. But the kulak would not hand it over. What were we to do? So, a year passed, then another, by which time the liquidation of the kulaks as a class had been prepared. There was no other way.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 245

SOVIET GOVT TRIES TO SAVE FROM EPIDEMIC THE CHILDREN SENT INTO EXILE

Stefan Merl, a German researcher describes the percarious conditions in which the first kulaks were sent to Siberia, during the first wave of collectivization in January-March 1930.
“With the beginning of spring, the situation in the receiving camps aggravated. Epidemics were widespread, leaving many victims, particularly among the children. For this reason, all children were removed from the camps in April 1930 and sent back to their native villages. At that time, some 400,000 persons had already been deported to the North; until th summer of 1930, probably 20,000 to 40,000 persons died.”
Merl, Stefan, “Ausrottung” der Bourgeoisie und der Kulaken in Sowjetrussland? Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987), p. 376
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp , Belgium : EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 96 [p. 80 on the NET]

MANY DEPORTED PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE PARTY DIRECTIVES WERE IGNORED

…Others, whose case was reviewed, were allowed to return home. An undetermined number, that we have estimated at 100,000, died during the travels, mainly because of epidemics. The considerable number of deaths during displacements must be seen in the context of that epoch: a weak administration, precarious living conditions for the entire population, sometimes chaotic class struggles among the peasant population overtaken by leftism. Of course, for each death during displacement, the Right affirms that the guilty party is the Party, is Stalin. But in fact the contrary is true. The Party’s position is clearly stated in one of the numerous reports about this problem, this one dated 20 December 1931 by the person responsible for a work camp at Novossibirsk.
`The high mortality observed for convoys Nos 18 to 23 coming from the North Caucasus—2,421 persons out of 10,086 upon departure—can be explained by the following reasons:
`1. A negligent, criminal approach to the selection of deported contingents, among whom were many children, aged over 65 years of age and sick people;
`2. The non-respect of directives about the right for deportees to bring with them provisions for two months of transfer.
`3. The lack of clean water, which forced the deported to drink unclean water. Many are dead of dysentery and of other epidemics.’
Werth, Nicolas, “Goulag: les vrais chifres’. L’ Histoire 169 (September 1993, p. 44.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 98 [p. 81-82 on the NET]

All these deaths are classed under the heading “Stalinist crimes’. But this report shows that two of the causes of death were linked to the non-respect of Party directives and the third had to do with the deplorable sanitary conditions and habits in the entire country.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 98 [p. 82 on the NET]

RUTHLESS STRUGGLE GAINING MIDDLE CLASS SUPPORT WAS NEEDED FOR COLLECTIVIZATION

Capitalist elements in the countryside–the kulaks–could only be eliminated by a ruthless class struggle. For this class struggle, the proletariat needed a firm alliance with the middle peasantry. This alliance could only be strengthened by turning the middle peasant to collectivization. This in turn could only be accomplished when industry was sufficiently developed to give real, active support to the peasantry by the provision of tractors, other agricultural machinery, fertilizers, and when the state was able to advance credits. Last, though not least, the middle peasantry had to be persuaded on the basis of their own experience, and by example–not by coercion or force–to turn from individual farming to collective farming.

Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 168

EARLY REPORT SAYS OPPOSITION TO GRAIN REQUISITIONS CAUSED BY GOVT INEPTNESS

[Party memorandum of May 1929 reporting on resistance in the countryside to grain requisitioning, food shortages, and the closing of religious institutions]

… In his letter Comrade Khataevich arrives at the following conclusions:

“An investigation of the role of local party and Soviet organizations in all the aforementioned incidents which provoked mass uprisings has revealed that, in most cases, party and Soviet organizations were guilty of tactlessness, egregious blunders, and a lack of skill and proficiency in their preparations for vital efforts. This made the anti-Soviet activities of the kulaks and the clergy much easier. The latter were able to respond quickly, flexibly, and skillfully to the blundering, tactlessness, and ineptitude of our local party and Soviet organizations. The kulaks were particularly successful in taking advantage of incidents where local party and Soviet organizations closed churches and so forth by administrative fiat, without careful preparations at the lowest levels and without explaining, persuading, and gaining the support of most of the poor and middle peasants.” Signed Bogomolov, Head of the Information Department

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 378

HUMANE EVICTION OF KULAKS FROM THE POLES REGION OF THE UKRAINE

[Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee resolution, April 1, 1932, on the eviction of kulaks from the Poles’ region]

1. It must be considered essential to purge the Poles’ region of kulak elements, as we have determined the number of families subject to deportation to be 5000.

2. The deportees are to be utilized to develop quarries for stone, clay, etc., and for this purpose permanent kulak settlements are to be established on the left bank of the Dnieper River in regions where quarries are located.

3. It is ordered:

a) organizations which will utilize the labor of the special deportees are to provide fully the food supply, living quarters, and cultural-medical services to the special deportees. In particular, the People’s Commissariat for Supply of the Ukraine must exercise particular supervision and supply food and manufactured goods to the special deportees.

Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 402

These people [kulaks] were obviously small farmers, used to hard work, as we could tell by the rough hands of both men and women, and they had the ruddy complexions of people who work on the land. But at this time they were a bewildered-looking lot. They didn’t seem to know what was happening to them, or why, and neither did the other Russians who saw them being moved about. Well, these people were “kulaks,” and they were being “liquidated.” This was the process which has been described by many an “expert” in many a book about Russia.

I watched the “liquidation of kulaks” before I had read any expert interpretations of the process. It just looked to me as if most of the small farmers in Russia were being moved from one place to another under police guard. I had no more idea why this was being done than most of the Russians seemed to have. It seemed that orders had come from Moscow to do this, so it was being done.

Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 73

SOMETIMES FORCE AGAINST THE KULAKS WAS NECESSARY

What must be done in order to obtain grain surpluses? We must, first of all, put an end to the mentality of waiting for the grain to come itself, as a harmful and dangerous one. Grain collections must be organized. We must mobilize the poor and middle peasants against the kulaks and organize their public support for the measures adopted by the Soviet government for increasing the grain collections…. It is true that this method is sometimes coupled with the application of emergency measures against the kulaks, which calls forth the comical wailings of comrades Bukharin and Rykov. But what is wrong with that? Why is it wrong, sometimes, under certain conditions, to apply emergency measures to our class enemy, the kulaks? Why is it permissible to arrest the speculators in the towns by hundreds and exile them to the Turukhan region, and not permissible to take surplus grain from the kulaks–who are trying to take the Soviet government by the throat and enslave the poor peasants–by methods of public coercion, and at prices at which the poor and middle peasants sell their grain to our grain collection organizations. What is the logic of this? Has our Party ever declared itself opposed in principle, to the application of emergency measures against the kulaks? Comrades Rykov and Bukharin apparently are opposed in principle to the application of any kind of emergency measures against the kulaks. But that is a bourgeois liberal policy, and not a Marxist policy.

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 170

TRYING TO MERELY PERSUADE SOME KULAKS TO YIELD THEIR GRAIN IS STUPID

Those who support Comrade Bukharin’s group, hope to persuade the class enemy that he should voluntarily forego his interests and voluntarily surrender his grain surplus. They hope that the kulak, who has grown, who is able to avoid giving grain by offering other products in its place and who conceals his grain surplus, they hope that this same kulak will give us his grain surplus voluntarily at our collection prices. Have they lost their senses? Is it not obvious that they do not understand the mechanism of the class struggle, that they do not know what classes mean? Do they know with what derision the kulaks treat our people and the Soviet government at village meetings called to assist the grain collections? Have they heard of facts like this, for instance: one of our agitators in Kazakhstan, for two hours tried to persuade the holders of grain to surrender that grain for supplying the country. At the end of the talk a kulak stepped forth with his pipe in his mouth, and said: “Do us a little dance, young fellow, and I will let you have a couple of poods of grain?”…

Stalin, Joseph. Stalin’s Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 172

Summing up the results of the First Five-Year Plan at the January 1933 plenum, Stalin included a special section on the tasks and results of the struggle against ‘the remnants of the hostile classes’. Despite the fact that he was talking about ‘remnants’, he nevertheless issued a call to ‘struggle against them implacably’. And not a word about re-education, or bringing many ‘ex-people’ and their families into the new life which might the more effectively help to change their outlook and their ‘class instincts’. Depicting the social scene, he said:

“The remnants of the dying classes–industrialists and their servants, private traders and their stooges, former nobles and priests, kulaks and their henchmen, former White officers and NCOs, former gendarmes and policemen–they have all wormed their way into our factories, our institutions and trading bodies, our railway and river transport enterprises and for the most part into our collective and state farms. They have wormed their way in and hidden themselves there, disguised as ‘workers’ and ‘peasants’, and some of them have even managed to worm their way into the party.

What have they brought with them? Of course, they have brought their hatred of the Soviet regime, their feeling of ferocious hostility to the new forms of the economy, way of life, culture…. The only thing left for them to do is to play dirty tricks and do harm to the workers and collective farmers. And they do this any way they can, on the quiet. They set fire to warehouses and break machinery. They organize sabotage. They organize wrecking in the collective and state farms, and some of them, including a number of professors, go so far in their wrecking activities as to inject the livestock in collective and state farms with plague and anthrax, and encourage the spread of meningitis among horses, and so on.”

Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 186

IN DIZZY WITH SUCCESS STALIN CRITICIZES THOSE CLOSING CHURCHES

In his article “Dizzy with Success,” published in Pravda on March 2, 1930, Stalin wrote:

“And what about those “revolutionaries,” if one may call them that, who begin the job of organizing collective farms by taking the bells from the churches. To take a bell–just think–how r-r-revolutionary!”

On March 15, 1930 Soviet newspapers published the decree on “distortions” of the party line in the cooperative movement. This decree referred to the administrative closing of churches as an error committed by local officials and threatened severe punishment for anyone offending the feelings of believers…. By the end of 1930 roughly 80 percent of the village churches had been closed and among the “dispossessed kulaks” there were a substantial number of clergymen.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 229

KULAKS IN EXILE SETTLEMENTS WERE GIVEN FREEDOM BECAUSE THEY FOUGHT IN THE WAR

Thousands of kulak special supplements were established in these remote regions. The inhabitants of these exile colonies were denied freedom of movement. The exiles situation changed in 1942, when young men from the special settlements began to be drafted into the Red Army because of the Soviet army’s severe losses in the war. At the end of the war the commandants’ offices for supervising these colonies were closed, and the residents of the former special settlements obtained relative freedom of movement.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 237

POOR LEADERS OF EARLY STATE FARMS WERE FIRED OR BROUGHT TO TRIAL

The newly formed state farms also experienced repression. A typical example was a decree “On the work of livestock state farms,” published in the spring of 1932 and signed by Stalin, Molotov, and Yakovlev, people’s commissar of agriculture. The decree named 34 directors of state farms who had tried “to gloss over shortcomings resulting from their own poor leadership by referring to the fact that livestock state farms are in the early stages of construction.” The decree “proposed” that these 34 be fired and brought to trial; it also listed 92 other directors, who were only to be fired.

Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 240

HOW WERE THE KULAKS TREATED DURING COLLECTIVIZATION

And about the time we arrived in Russia, The Communist General Staff in Moscow had decided to reorganize agriculture. They didn’t like the idea of small farmers cultivating their little plots and selling their products in bazaars and markets such as the one at Kochkar, just as they didn’t like the idea of the nomad herders roaming around on the steppes with their flocks of sheep and cattle and milkmares. These people who somehow derived their living from the land composed about 85 percent of the population of Russia at that time, and the Communists decided they couldn’t get ahead with their plans to industrialize and socialize the country so long as these small farmers were left as they were.
So the Communists worked out an ingenious scheme for reorganization of Russian agriculture. They had already confiscated all the largest estates and turned them over to the state, which operated them as huge state farms. Now the Communists got the idea of combining small farmers into “collective farms” under state control. Since the small farmers already lived in villages, as I have explained, and even had a loose kind of co-operative organization in most villages, it would be a simple matter, the Communists decided, to persuade the small farmers to pool their land holdings and domestic animals and thus create thousands of collective farms, in which the small farmers would lose their deep-seated desires to own land on their own and acquire instead the socialist instinct. At the same time, these collective farms could use large-scale agricultural machinery and make use of the latest technical methods.
The scheme had much to recommend it, especially in Russia, where the small farmers already lived in villages and where nothing new would have to be built to install the proposed new system. It seemed to be merely a question of persuading the small farmers to adopt the scheme by showing them it would be to their advantage.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 75

But small farmers are conservative; they are not easily persuading to accept changes, especially changes which affect the whole routine of their daily lives. And some small farmers had managed to accumulate a little more stock than their neighbors; perhaps an extra horse or a couple of cows or even a tractor. These people didn’t see why they should turn their things into a collective farm on a basis of equality with those who had nothing to turn in. To make matters worse, the first collective farms were not run properly, and the people who went into them were miserable.
Some time before this, in order to equalize the holdings of small farmers, the authorities had instructed the farmers in every village to be divided into three classifications: poor peasants, middle peasants, and kulaks. This last name had an unpleasant meaning in Russia, having been used before the Revolution to describe the village moneylenders who charged excessive rates of interest and gradually got hold of most of the land and employed labor to work it. But it couldn’t have any such meaning any more, because the Communist authorities didn’t allow money-lending or mortgages of any kind. The farmers classified as kulaks were taxed a much heavier percentage of their crops and earnings than the other small farmers. This classification caused much ill feeling in the villages, and aroused one group against the others, which was one purpose the Communists had in mind. By arousing the small farmers against each other, they figured they could reorganize agriculture with less difficulty. At this time the term “kulak” was used concerning any farmer who opposed, generally passively, the collectivization of the farmers.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 76

The Communist General Staff at Moscow had given orders to hurry up the process of collectivization; but officials in the farm villages reported that the small farmers were balking. They especially blamed the kulaks, who, they claimed, were persuading the other peasants not to join collective farms. The people in Moscow decided that something would have to be done to break the log-jam in the villages. They therefore announced one-day that the kulaks must be liquidated as a class.
Several hundred thousand families in the thousands of farm villages were classified as kulaks, and the process of liquidating them began. First, they were driven out of their houses, and their furniture, domestic animals, and all except the few personal possessions were taken away from them. The confiscated houses and goods were turned over to the collective farm to be used for clubs and offices.
Then the dispossessed small farmers and their families were herded into district centers, and arrangements were made to ship them off to some distant part of the country. It can be imagined what scenes of disorder and confusion resulted in all these farm villages. The small farmers who had not been labeled kulaks assisted in the process of liquidation because many of them had been envious of their better-to-do neighbors and others hoped to get something out of it.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 77

The task of handling the kulaks and their families after they had been dispossessed was entrusted to the federal police, who were well organized to take care of it. It is my opinion that the liquidation of kulaks was based as much upon the need for unskilled labor in industry during this period as it was upon the desire to reorganize agriculture. I can testify that we had difficulty keeping enough labor on hand in the mines, and I believe this was also true in the new industrial centers. Housing conditions in those places were still very bad, the shortage of food and other human needs was great, and retail stores were so badly organized that there seemed no immediate prospect of improvement. Free workers therefore were constantly on the move in search of more agreeable living conditions, and the labor turnover was terrific and very bad for production.
It seems to me that a conversation something like the following must have taken place at Communist headquarters in Moscow. One of the big Communists said: “Well, what will we do about it. We can’t put through our plans for industry unless we have a few million workers who will stay put. There will be too much of a howl if we simply make the free workers stay where they are. What can we do?” And someone may have answered: “Why not liquidate the kulaks? We can kill two birds with one stone: get these obstinate small farmers away from the villages, where they obstruct our scheme for collectivization, and at the same time get plenty of industrial labor which will stay put because it is under police guard.” At any rate, the dispossessed small farmers were rapidly converted into forced labor in mines, factories, and forests.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 78

One-day several train-loads of men, women, and children arrived at these mines, consisting of dispossessed small farmers and their families under police guard…. This group was assigned to one mine for work, thus making it easier for the police to keep track of them and avoiding any conflict between these people and the free miners. I saw quite a lot of these kulaks [at the mines] from the beginning, since it was my job to teach them how to mine. Being farmers, they naturally knew none of the processes.
The newcomers all seemed to be completely bewildered by what had happened to them, and very few of them ventured to make complaints of any kind….
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 79

They lived very much the same as other miners, whose standards of living at that time [1931], from the American viewpoint, were unbelievably low. This was the period when the food shortage was most acute, partly because these kulaks were no longer working their land. But they got their share of what was available. They occupied old houses which had been used by the miners before the Revolution, and by our standards, were hovels of the worst type. Eventually, however, some of them put up better houses of their own.
The working hours and rates of pay for the kulaks were the same as for the other miners, with the exception that the kulaks paid out a portion of their wages into a fund to look after old and disabled persons in their own group. They were free to move around within the district, an area of several miles, so long as they reported once a week to the chief police officer.
Very few of these people made any effort to escape; their experiences seemed to have broken up any spirit of defiance they may have had before. Once in a while two or three of them walked off and didn’t come back; I never learned what happened to such people. The authorities from the beginning tried to encourage them to submit promptly to circumstances; those who buckled down to work were soon given their lost citizenship rights and other little privileges.
Later, I ran up against similar groups of ex-farmers engaged in forced labor in gold, copper, and zinc mines in which I worked in several parts of the country. Usually, they were kept at work separately, for purposes of convenience, although they were not isolated in ordinary life, and mixed as much as they liked with the free miners.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 80

When they were brought into a mine, production ordinarily fell off for six months or longer, and then gradually climbed up again. The kulaks, who had been the most intelligent and ambitious small farmers, became superior miners too, once they had learned the trade.
I don’t know how many of these kulaks were put at forced labor; I have run across them all over the eastern districts of Russia, not only in mines, but in factories and forests and at work on dams, railways, canals, and powerhouses. There were so many of them that they converted the federal police into the largest single employers of labor in Russia, and gave the police a great reputation with the Communist General Staff for getting things done.
… The kulaks formed the backbone and basis for the great forced labor army which has worked in Russia ever since. This army of forced labor mixes up murderers, thieves, and other ordinary criminals with such groups as kulaks, whose offense was of a different nature.
The Communist authorities probably are well pleased with the results of the liquidation of the kulaks. It worked out about as they had figured, in that it broke up the opposition to collectivization in farm villages, and at the same time provided plenty of much-needed fixed labor in new industrial centers.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 81

On the basis of resolutions passed by the Central Committee of the party, the government’s Central Executive Committee, and the Council of People’s Commissars on January 3 and February 1, 1930,…all kulaks and podkulachniki were divided into three categories.
“Organizers and perpetrators of terrorist acts, and those engaged in active anti-Soviet work, were isolated and sent to concentration camps. Kulaks who demonstrated the slightest active resistance were deported to remote regions of the country, where they were put to work cutting down the forests, doing farm labor, etc. The other kulaks remained where they were, but they could not have any land allotments from within the bounds of the kolkhozes.”
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 235

… for instance, in the Donetz Coal Basin no fewer than 40 percent of the miners were, in 1930, expropriated kulaks and other peasants.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 115

Later, when the sabotage took the form of a widespread “general strike” against even cultivation of the collective farms, the Soviet Government found itself on the horns of the same dilemma that perplexed the administrators of the English Poor Law. To provide maintenance for able-bodied men whose refusal to work had brought them to destitution would merely encourage them, and their families, and eventually countless others, to repeat the offense. Yet deliberately to lead them to starve was an unacceptable alternative. The English Guardians of the Poor, early in the 18th century, invented the device, which was readopted in 1834, of relieving the able-bodied and their families only on condition that they entered the workhouse, and there performed whatever tasks of work could be set to them. The Soviet Government had no workhouses available and no time to build them. It’s device was forcibly to remove the peasants who were found to be without food from the villages which they were demoralizing to places at a distance where they could be put to work at the making of railways, roads or canals, at the cutting of timber, or at prospecting or mining for mineral ores–all tasks of discomfort and occasionally of hardship, by which they were enabled to earn the bare subsistence wage of relief work. It was a rough and ready expedient of “famine relief,” which undoubtedly caused much suffering to innocent victims. But candid students of the circumstances may not unwarrantably come to the conclusion that, when the crisis of possible starvation arrived, as the result largely of deliberate sabotage, the Soviet Government could hardly have acted otherwise than it did.
Footnote: The enforced expropriation of these peasants has seemed to foreign critics as extreme injustice. Were not the peasants, in limiting their production, merely doing what they liked with their own? In fact, the peasants in the USSR are not owners of the land they till, but merely occupants of nationalized land, for the purpose of cultivating it. But whether or not they are in the same position as the peasant proprietors of France or Flanders, there seems nothing unreasonable or inequitable in the view that, wherever the land is entrusted to a peasant class by the community, it is on the paramount condition that they should produce, up to their ability, the foodstuffs required for the maintenance of the community. Any organized refusal to cultivate must inevitably be met by expropriation.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 206

WIVES AND DAUGHTERS OFTEN ACCOMPANIED KULAKS IN LABOR CAMP WORK

The wives and daughters of kulaks usually accompanied them at forced labor in some of the mines I supervised, and they sometimes also worked in the mines. These women had worked hard in the fields, and thought nothing of performing manual labor. They were not compelled to work in the mines, but were permitted to do so, and preferred to eke out their husbands’ modest earnings. In this way thousands of Soviet peasant women got their first training for industry, and many of them later went into mills and factories as operators.
My wife and I can testify, from our own experience, that many people in the outside world have an exaggerated impression of the relations between men and women in Russia. THE OLD STORY ABOUT THE “NATIONALIZATION” OF WOMEN, STARTED SOON AFTER THE REVOLUTION, HAS BEEN KEPT IN CIRCULATION EVER SINCE, AND OTHER EQUALLY FALSE REPORTS HAVE SOMEHOW GOTTEN AROUND.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 234

DEKULAKIZATION WAS DONE POORLY AT THE LOCAL LEVEL NOT FROM THE CENTER

(Lynn Viola)
Although the center equipped local officials with the legislative powers necessary for de facto dekulakization, many regional party organizations, particularly those in grain-producing regions, went one step further and issued orders for the expropriation or exile of kulaks on a relatively large scale from the fall of 1929. In the Lower Volga, Middle Volga, Siberia, and Ukraine, thousands of peasants were expropriated and/or exiled on the basis of regional party decisions made prior to the adoption of the central decree on dekulakization on Jan. 5, 1930. By the time of the central decree, the center was recognizing and endorsing what had already become a reality in many parts of the countryside.
Implementation of dekulakization following the central decree spread far beyond the grain-producing regions into grain-deficit and national minority regions in spite of the center’s directives not to implement dekulakization outside of regions of wholesale collectivization, which was then limited mainly to grain-producing regions. The result was massive violations that soon led the center to issue more precise directives in late January and early February, in hope of establishing control over the campaign and standardizing and regulating procedures.
…Finally, the center issued a strict warning that dekulakization was to occur only in regions of wholesale collectivization and that dekulakization should not be considered an end in itself. These directives represented the center’s belated attempt to re-gain the initiative in policy implementation. The directives, however, failed to stem the tide of violence and anarchy unleashed in the countryside, and the center was finally forced in early March to signal a retreat with the publication of Stalin’s famous article, “Dizziness with Success,” and the Central Committee decree of March 14, 1930.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 67

The regions acted first in the campaign to eliminate the kulak as a class and in so doing forced the hand of the center in this issue. Dekulakization began on local and regional initiative in late 1929 and early 1930, … The 5 January decree on collectivization, which made the new policy toward the kulaks official, provided encouragement for the actions and initiative of local and regional authorities.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 96

Moreover, to view the retreat as an act of total cynicism would be to deny the very fact that rural cadres had indeed become “dizzy from success,” and, despite the central impetus of the campaign, had carried the campaign beyond the control of the center.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 116

This first phase of dekulakization led to repressive mayhem and massive peasant discontent. The center had unleashed its cadres in the field from the time it adopted extraordinary measures to deal with the grain procurement crisis and quickly discovered that it was no easy task to bring them back under control. The center was not prepared to deal with either the army of recently dekulakized or the peasant unrest thus generated. The first consequence of this lack of preparation was the March retreat. The second consequence was the formation of commissions to review complaints from dekulakized peasants seeking redress. According to Soviet data, in the Central Black Earth Region alone, some 32,583 peasants were rehabilitated in 1930; an additional 5000 in the Middle Volga and 5500 in the Lower Volga were also said to have been rehabilitated in 1930.
Dekulakization resumed in late 1930 and the first half of 1931…. It appears to have been less anarchic and more subject to central control…. Elsewhere, dekulakization resumed in late 1930 and extended into the early summer of 1931. After this second phase of dekulakization, the state claimed that dekulakization was basically accomplished a in the major grain-producing regions.
Another form of dekulakization, perhaps better called simple repression, occurred in conjunction with the notorious tikhaia sapa (on the sly) activities of the kulak and included civil and criminal penalties for a large range of offenses, such as infiltration of collective or state farms and MTS (Machine-Tractor Stations) units, theft of socialist property… and so on. In reference to kulak work on the sly, Soviet sources generally stress the frequency of such activities in Ukraine and North Caucasus, in particular, and the Volga regions as well–the prime areas hit by the 1932 famine…. The final phase of dekulakization tapered off after 1934 and was followed by several amnesties for an undetermined part of the repressed.
…Repression, however, should not be mistaken for central control. Although the center was responsible for setting policy, the cadres in the field were responsible for interpreting and implementing policy. The vague and frequently contradictory directives of the center, as well as the very broad official definition of the kulak, allowed local cadres great latitude in labeling peasants kulaks, resulting in an explosion of local proizvol or arbitrariness.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 68-69

CENTER OPPOSED LOCAL USE OF GENEALOGIES TO DETERMINE WHO WAS A KULAK

Local cadres and activists, however, carried the manhunt further than the center wished in their zeal for genealogical purity. Central authorities and legal officials, in particular, often inveighed against the extremes that the genealogical craze assumed. The problem with these protests was that they were seldom consistent and often contradicted one another. There were some genuine concerns, however, that some of the activities of local cadres, the collective farm expulsions in particular, were getting out hand. For example, in one district in the Ivanovo Industrial Region, collective farm expulsions were condemned because they were implemented “formally” on the basis of prerevolutionary social and economic status, including information on the property holdings of parents and even grandparents. In Ordinskii district in the Sverdlov Region, local authorities suggested purging from the collective farms all those with even the most distant kulak relatives and all those who served in the White Army; as a consequence, there were massive illegal expulsions in this district, later condemned by the center.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 79

CENTER ORDERS NO DEKULAKIZATION OF TEACHERS BY LOCAL OFFICIALS

The government consistently noted and condemned the repression of rural school teachers. The dekulakization of teachers (along with other rural specialists) was expressly forbidden. Also forbidden was expulsion of teachers from collective farms in the collective farm purges of the famine years. According to the central authorities, teachers could not be subject to repression regardless of their social origin.
The government’s directives to stem the tide of repressive measures aimed at teachers and other rural specialists were prompted by an unanticipated rash of attacks on teachers. Yet the directives and the constant appeals of the center appear to have had little effect on alleviating the victim’s plight.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 82

CENTER CONDEMNS LOCALS MISTREATING & CONDEMNING UNFORTUNATES AS KULAKS

Divisions within the village may also explain the repression of another group of unexpected targets among the so-called class enemies of this time. These targets were economically marginal households or individuals, who were needy, incapable of contributing their fair share of work in the collective farm, or entitled to collective farm privileges. This category included Red Army families, the elderly and ill, the families of exiled or rehabilitated kulaks, and women of special repute. These individuals and households were subject to expulsion from the collective farm and taxation as kulaks. Less frequently, they were subject to dekulakization. In all cases, the state condemned their persecution.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 90

NUMBERS GIVEN FOR REPRESSED KULAKS ARE FAR TOO HIGH

But he [Conquest] does seem altogether too high in his estimates of the number of dead kulaks and of those shot and incarcerated in the great purge.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 274

It is, we think, to be regretted that no statistics are accessible, and not even a descriptive report has been published, as to the manner in which this enforced diaspora of probably some hundreds of thousands of persons was effected. We can form no estimate of the number of cases in which practically the whole property of these families was confiscated, or was simply taken over by the kolkhosi, which, as kulaks, they were not allowed to join, or membership in which they stubbornly refused. We can form no idea as to how many of them could accurately be described as kulaks, or persons guilty of economic oppression of their less successful neighbors; and how many were merely obstinate individualists who, whether or not their separate cultivation of their little holdings had been successful, resolutely declined to merge these in the collective farms. We do not know to what extent or by what means their cases were investigated, before they were forcibly ejected from their homes. We have been unable to learn how many of these peasants were removed to prison, or (as is specifically alleged) deported to the lumber camps in the northern forest areas, or employed on public works of railway or canal construction, or taken on as laborers at such gigantic industrial enterprises perpetually hungry for men as Magnitogorsk or Chelyabinsk, or sent to the Donets Basin to work in the coal mines, which had been equally suffering from a shortage of labor force. Nor is there any account known to us of the conditions under which these hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have had to live in this process of arbitrary removal and resettlement, nor any estimate of the mortality involved in their displacement. So far as we are aware the Soviet Government has not deigned to reply to the numerous denunciations of the cruelty on a gigantic scale alleged to have been perpetrated by its agents; nor published any explanatory account of its proceedings in this summary “liquidation” of so large a proportion of its citizens….
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 467

How many kulaks were summarily expropriated in this way, stripped of all their possessions, and turned out of the villages, we cannot say. But this was not the only cause of their “liquidation.” In 1931 and 1932, concurrently with the widespread partial failure of the harvest that we have described, many peasants, both members of the new kolkhosi and non-members, obstinately refused to cultivate their holdings; limited their sowing to a small proportion of their land which they thought would yield a crop large enough for their own maintenance; wholly neglected the weeding, and when the grain ripened limited their reaping to the minimum that they required, and left the rest of the harvest to rot on the ground. The result was that, when the drought interfered with their estimates of yield, many peasants in Ukraine and in the North Caucasus found that they had nothing to live on during the winter and spring. The Soviet Government, after remitting taxes, and in some cases bringing grain to the starving, decided that it was impolitic to feed these recalcitrants in the holdings which they had refused to cultivate. They were deported, either as individual families or, in some cases in the North Caucasus, as whole villages, to places in which they could be saved from starvation by being employed, as on “relief works,” at bare subsistence wages. Tens of thousands of the men were put to work on the construction of the White Sea Canal. Others were sent to swell the labor force building the new cities of Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk. How many hundreds of thousands of families were thus, between 1930 and 1934, forcibly torn from their holdings, losing all that they possessed, we are unable even to estimate.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 470

STALIN DENIES BEING THE ONLY AUTHOR OF DIZZY WITH SUCCESS

…For instance, he [Stalin] wrote to some collective farmers: ‘Some people think the article “Dizzy with Success” represents the result of Stalin’s personal initiative. That’s nonsense, of course. It was the result of reconnaissance by the Central Committee.’ And further: ‘It is hard to stop people when they are on a wild stampede towards the abyss, and to head them off on to the proper path in time.”
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 168

April 1930: “There are some who think that the article ‘Dizzy with Success was the result of Stalin’s personal initiative. That, of course, is nonsense. It is not in order that personal initiative in a matter like this be taken by anyone, whoever he might be, that we
have a Central Committee”.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 12, p. 218

WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A KOLKHOZ LEADER AND WHAT SUBVERSION YOU MUST LOOK FOR

[Oct. 15, 1933 letter from Soviet chairman Onishchenko to Kalinin]
I am 40 years old and have been working for 28 years. I was mobilized by the town party committee to go to the country as chairman of the rural Soviet of Tsvetnoe village and have served in this post since January 1, 1933. This work was completely unfamiliar to me, but after nine and a half months I’ve become somewhat familiar [with it].
To be a worker and to work as an executive are two quite different things. Since 1913 I’ve worked as a loader with interruptions caused by the imperialist and civil wars. It was easier for me then than it is now. The work I’m doing now requires that you know how to work yourself and to teach others to work, to give sensible answers to kolkhoz members, to be conversant with all the laws, to know the psychology of the village in all matters, to study the people you work with. You have to know how to skillfully expose everything that causes harm, to conduct a daily battle with the kulak element, to study his tactics, to unmask him, and expel him from the kolkhoz ranks. You have to know how not to violate revolutionary legality and order and acquire a lot of other knowledge and sensitivities. You have to know how to forge a new group of party activists, to learn to teach them how to work–to work in a practical way to fulfil the General Line of the party in the countryside.
So, when I came there, everything, as they say, was in a complete shambles, and I have put it all back together solidly.
On the rural soviet’s territory there is a fishing kolkhoz which numbers 774 households; the total population here is 3,740 persons, making it the largest rural soviet in the raion. Before the revolution the residents had a substantial fishing industry and caught primarily sturgeon. During the Civil War a quarter of them participated actively in the White Army and were infected to the core with acquisitive greed.
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 130

UPON ENTERING KOLKHOZS KULAKS OFTEN WERE JUST PLAIN LAZY

[Excerpts from a secret report by an instructor named Kheilo…dated August 21, 1940 describes the everyday life of exiled Poles: Report on exiled Poles in Kustanai Oblast]
On the Demoralizing Influence on Kolkhoz Labor Discipline of Kulaks and Bourgeois Exiled from the Former Poland to Kustanai Oblast in the Kazak SSR…. Exiled kulaks are put up in the homes of kolkhoz farmers, often without the latter’s consent. There have been cases in which one kolkhoz arranged such a cordial welcome for exiles that it gave them a day’s milk yield from the dairy section, so that the kolkhoz farmers’ children at the open-air kindergarten were left without milk. There have been cases in which certain kolkhoz chairmen have taken exiles into their apartments. Combine and tractor operators and other kolkhoz activists have married exiles.
Exiles are credited with labordays and paid on an equal footing with kolkhoz farmers for their work on the kolkhoz.
In the vast majority of cases these bourgeois and kulaks don’t do anything on the kolkhoz. Many of them arrived with enough money, clothing, and other belongings, and some of them receive money transfers of 2000 to 3000 rubles each, evidently from relatives.
They buy foodstuffs from kolkhoz farmers, but they don’t want to work and nobody makes them.
Twenty families of exiles [in Karabalyk raion] did not do anything, explaining that they were not used “in the vocation”….
At a Magnai MTS in the same raion, a former officer arrived with his orderly, and the latter continued even here to make coffee for him and to polish and remove his boots, and when the NKVD transferred his former orderly to another kolkhoz, the officer did not take off his boots for a week, and when his feet became swollen, he took the boots off and has not put them on for two weeks….
There are many exiles in Fyodorovka Raion, in the raion center itself, who have also been placed in kolkhoz farmers’ homes, who don’t do anything, spend entire days sitting in a restaurant and strolling around a market and around offices….
There are cases in the oblast center itself, the city of Kustanai, when exiles are hired as office typists and clerks and are even hired to work in such organizations as the All Union Bureau for Grain Procurement and Sales, where possible acts of sabotage by them are not out of the question….
Siegelbaum and Sokolov. Stalinism As a Way of Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, c2000, p. 264

GOVT OFFICIALS WERE ATTACKED AND KILLED FOR IMPLIMENTING COLLECTIVIZATION

These were, we knew, serious accusations, for attached to them was Comrade Zeitlin’s statement that the assaults on the officials “took place while the latter were performing their official duties.” The circumstances surrounding these events were not mentioned.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 59

“Where are those cutthroats?” was a question one could often hear muttered, or exhortations like, “Let’s get those damned cutthroats!” “Let’s get our horses and cows back from that cursed collective farm!”
No one would have dared to utter such words before; now they could be heard everywhere. The villagers were ready to fight and even kill if necessary. Indeed, a few days later, we saw two fires a distance away from the other end of the village. Later we learned that the headquarters of the Seventh Hundred had burned to the ground. Then the news spread that the villagers were storming the homes of the activists and village officials. We also heard that somebody had attempted to burned down the building of the village Soviet; that windows had been smashed in the village club (the propaganda center); and that the telephone connection with the county center had been cut off. More than a kilometer of telephone wire was missing.
Then one night, the first murder occurred. Someone ambushed Comrade Judas and beat him to death. Curious, as teenagers are, I ran to the place where his body had been discovered. It was still there. He was lying in a shallow gutter at the village main road. His priestly beard was singed, and his face was badly burned. The chasuble he always used to wear was missing. On a piece of newspaper attached to his chest, scrawled in slanting capitals, were the words: “A CUR’S DEATH FOR A CUR!”
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 76

KULAKS ADMIT THEY HID GRAIN FROM THE GOVT AND BROKE THE LAW IN 2 WAYS

After much worried thinking and discussion, our mother finally hit upon an idea: it was very simple, but extremely risky.
“Why not enlist the help of the government?” she remarked, as if it were obvious.
We did not understand what she had in mind.
“What do you mean?” I asked, completely baffled. “You mean to ask the government for help? You know that instead of helping us they have already taken everything we have!”
“No, not that,” she answered quietly, as was her way. “I mean we should hide whatever food we have in a pit on government land.”
We had to agree with her. It was an excellent idea. Its logic was clear: no official would even think of someone daring to hide food from the government on the government’s own land. Any personal use of government property was severely punished by law, but we dared to defy that law, and by doing it we saved our lives.
As we anticipated, the Bread Procurement Commission searched all over our backyard and garden, but did not bother to cross the boundary to the government property–the adjacent sand dunes.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 170

We took the road along a strip of sand dunes that separated the woods from our neighborhood. It was here we had hidden some of our food.
Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton, c1985, p. 209

SOVIET LEGAL TREATMENT OF REBELLING KULAKS WAS FAIR

The standard penalty for peasants accused of counter-revolutionary activity was confiscation of property and re-settlement. Between 300,000 and 380,000 peasant families (1,200,000-1,500,000 individuals) were exiled to distant locations during the 1930-33 collectivization drive (mostly in 1930 and 1931)…. The majority of displaced peasants were deprived of their voting rights and sentenced to exile without confinement and allowed to keep an essential minimum of agricultural implements to begin life anew as poor/middle peasants. The most active opponents, however, were sentenced to exile with forced labor; most of these served sentences of five years, after which their voting rights were restored. Special settlements were organized for the resettled rich peasants in the virgin lands of the east (in Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Urals).
Some left the virgin lands after their period of forced exile was over, but the bulk of them were not allowed to return to their native regions. In late 1941 there were still approximately 930,000 former kulaks settled where they had been relocated in the early 1930s. That the number of kulaks still in their places of exile both in 1935 and 1941 was approximately the same number as the number forcibly relocated in the 1930-33 period, indicates that most of them survived the often harsh conditions of transit and beginning a new life.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 224-225

PEASANT REVOLTS IN THE EARLY 1930’S

Nor was peasant resistance passive only. There took place during February and March 1930 what Soviet historians after Stalin have called “anti-kolkhoz” and even “anti-Soviet” peasant outbreaks, and the atmosphere in the countryside grew tense in the extreme. Not only were peasants engaging in arson; here and there they were rising up in armed rebellion. There were 38 armed outbreaks in the Central Black Earth province between 17 December 1929 and 14 February 1930.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 182

Peasants responded to forcible collectivization with a new wave of uprisings, and by murdering local leaders.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 4

The most important document is a long OGPU report from March 1931, which lists 13,754 peasant protests during 1930. The document specifies that the OGPU had data on the number of people involved in only some 10,000 of these events, and these data totaled approximately 2.5 million people….
Yet the rural population in the USSR, according to the 1926 census, exceeded 120 million, of whom more than 70 million people, approximately 60%, were over 15 years of age, and these numbers increased by 1930. The approximately 3.3 million protesters attested in the OGPU document thus comprised about 5% of the adult rural population…. What happened to the other tens of millions of households already collectivized and the nearly 50% outside the kolkhozy? To the extent that this document is correct, and even if it understates the total number of protesters, it indicates that the vast majority of Soviet peasants, some 95% based on the data in this document, did not engage in protests against collectivization. In this way, in other words, this key document actually supports Viola’s point that resistance was ‘likely a small part’ of a continuum of societal responses to Soviet policies.
…Even in regions where protests were more widespread, with few exceptions protests involved a small minority of villages, and even of peasants in many rebellious villages.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 71-72

As noted above, my argument is not to deny that resistance took place, but to deny that it was the only or even the main peasant response to circumstances in these years: such resistance as did occur must be understood accurately and in context.
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 84

STALIN SAYS SON DOESN’T ANSWER FOR THE FATHER WITH REGARD TO KULAKS & WHITES

Stalin again presented himself as a peasant’s advocate when, during a Kremlin conference of combine drivers in December 1935, one of them complained that the local authorities hadn’t wanted to send him to Moscow to attend the conference because he was the son of a kulak. That was when Stalin said: “The son doesn’t answer for the father.” Soon afterward, his Central Committee headquarters sternly–on Pravda’s front page –overruled the refusal of a Machine Tractor Station deputy director for political matters to permit a young collective farm woman to take a tractor drivers course on the ground that she was the daughter of a deported kulak. The accompanying editorial pointed out that following Stalin’s just-quoted statement, the government, on 29 December 1935, had repealed restrictions on entry into higher education or vocational schools on grounds of social origin or parents’ deprivation of rights. All citizens, irrespective of social origin, had an equal right to education.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 329

STALIN WANTS TOUGHER LAWS ON STEALING BY KULAKS

[In a letter to Kaganovich and Molotov on 20 July 1932 Stalin stated] Recently there has been an increase in the frequency, first of all, of thefts of freight on railroads (the thefts amount to tens of millions of rubles), and secondly, of thefts of property belonging to cooperatives and collective farms. The thefts are mostly organized by kulaks (dekulakized persons) and other antisocial elements who are trying to undermine our new system. Under the law these gentlemen are viewed as common thieves, they get two or three years in prison (nominally!), but in reality they are amnestied 6 to 8 months later. This kind of procedure with regard to these gentlemen, which cannot be called socialist, merely encourages what is essentially their real counterrevolutionary “work.” It is unthinkable to continue tolerating this situation. I propose that we promulgate a law (while withdrawing or repealing current laws) that would:
a) confer the same status on railroad freight, collective-farm property and cooperative property as on state property
b) make the theft (or stealing) of property in the above-mentioned categories punishable by a minimum of 10 years’ imprisonment, and as a rule, by death;
c) revoke the use of amnesty for criminals in such “professions.”
Without these (and similar) Draconian socialist measures, it is impossible to establish a new social discipline, and without such discipline, it is impossible to uphold and strengthen our new system. We must not delay, it seems to me, the promulgation of such a law.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 164

[In a letter to Kaganovich and Molotov on 24 July 1932 Stalin stated] If there are any objections to my proposal on promulgating a law against the theft of cooperative and collective-farm property and freight on transport, give the following explanation. Capitalism could not have smashed feudalism, it would not have developed and solidified if it had not declared the principle of private property to be the foundation of capitalist society and if it had not made private property sacred property, with any violation of its interest strictly punished and with the creation of its own state to protect it. Socialism will not be able to finish off and bury capitalist elements and individualistic, self-seeking habits, practices, and traditions (which are the basis of theft) that shake the foundations of the new society unless it declares public property (belonging to cooperatives, collective farms or the state) to be sacred and inviolable. It cannot strengthen and develop the new system and socialist construction, unless it protects the property of collective farms, cooperatives, and the state with all its might, unless it prevents antisocial, capitalist-kulak elements from stealing public property. That is why a new law is needed. We don’t have such a law.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 166

[In a letter to Kaganovich on 26 July 1932 Stalin stated] I think it would be more expedient to combine in a single law the issue of protecting the collective-farm and cooperative property and railroad freight with the issue of protecting the collective farms themselves, i.e., combating the elements that use violence and threats or preach the use of violence and threats to collective farmers in order to make them quit the collective farms, in order to bring about the forcible destruction of the collective farms. The law can be broken down into three sections, of which the first section will cover railroad freight and water-transport cargo with the respective punishments specified, the second section will cover collective-farm and cooperative property with the respective punishments, and the third section will cover the protection of the collective farms themselves from acts of violence and threats by kulaks and other antisocial elements, and will specify that crimes in such cases, i.e. in the latter cases, will be punishable by imprisonment for 5 to 10 years, with subsequent confinement in a concentration camp for three years and without the possibility of amnesty. I think that on all three of these points we must act on the basis of a law (“the peasant loves legality”), and not merely in accordance with the practice of the OGPU, although it is clear that the OGPU’s role here will not only not diminish but, on the contrary, it will be strengthened and “ennobled” (the OGPU agencies will operate “on a lawful basis” rather than “high-handedly”).
…As for the struggle against profiteers and resellers both at bazaars and markets and in the countryside, what is needed here is a special law (here, too, it will be better to operate on the basis of a law) that, while referring to the previous law on collective-farm trade, which points to the eradication of resellers and profiteers, will order OGPU agencies to exile profiteers and resellers to a concentration camp for five to eight years without the possibility of amnesty.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 169

COLLECTIVES MADE MANY MISTAKES AT FIRST AND HAD LOTS OF KULAK SABOTAGE

But the progress of the collective-farm movement was so far to be measured in breath rather than in-depth: the collective farms were increasing in number and were spreading to district after district, but there was no commensurate improvement in the work of the collective farms or in the skill of their personnel. This was due to the fact that the growth of the leading cadres and trained personnel of the collective farms was not keeping pace with the numerical growth of the collective farms themselves. The consequence was that the work of the new collective farms was not always satisfactory, and the collective farms themselves were still weak. They were also held back by the shortage in the countryside of literate people indispensable to the collective farms (bookkeepers, stores managers, secretaries, etc.), and by the inexperience of the peasants in the management of large-scale collective enterprises. The collective farmers were the individual peasants of yesterday; they had experience in farming small plots of land, but none in managing big, collective farms. This experience could not be acquired in a day….
The first stages of collective farm work were consequently marred by serious defects. It was found that work was still badly organized in the collective farms; labor discipline was slack. In many collective farms the income was distributed not by the number of work-day-units, but by the number of mouths to feed in the family. It often happened that slackers got a bigger return than conscientious hard-working collective farmers. These defects in the management of collective farms lowered the incentive of their members. There were many cases of members absenting themselves from work even at the height of the season, leaving part of the crops unharvested until the winter snows, while the reaping was done so carelessly that large quantities of grain were lost. The absence of individual responsibility for machines and horses and for work generally, weakened the collective farms and reduced their revenues….
The situation was particularly bad wherever former kulaks and their toadies had managed to worm their way into collective farms and to secure positions of trust in them. Not infrequently former kulaks would betake themselves to districts where they were unknown, and there make their way into the collective farms with the deliberate intention of sabotaging and doing mischief. Sometimes, owing to lack of vigilance on the part of Party workers and Soviet officials, kulaks managed to get into collective farms even in their own districts. What made it easier for former kulaks to penetrate into the collective farms was that they had radically changed their tactics. Formerly the kulaks had fought the collective farms openly, had savagely persecuted collective farm leading cadres and foremost collective farmers, nefariously murdering them, burning down their houses and farms. By these methods they had thought to intimidate the peasantry and to deter them from joining the collective farms. Now that their open struggle against the collective farms had failed, they changed their tactics. They laid aside their sawn-off shotguns and posed as innocent, unoffending folk who would not hurt a fly. They pretended to be loyal Soviet supporters. Once inside the collective farms they stealthily carried on their sabotage. They strove to disorganize the collective farms from within, to undermine labor discipline and to muddle the harvest accounts and the records of work performed. It was part of their sinister scheme to destroy the horses of the collective farms by deliberately infecting them with glanders, mange and other diseases, or disabling them by neglect or other methods, in which they were often successful. They did damage to tractors and farm machinery….
The kulaks were often able to deceive the collective farmers and commit sabotage with impunity because the collective farms were still weak and their personnel still inexperienced.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 315

PARTY LEADERS OF COLLECTIVES SUCCUMB TO BAD KULAK INFLUENCE AND DO BAD THINGS

“The village Party and Young Communist organization,” declared Kaganovich in January 1933, “including the groups in state farms and machine-tractor stations, frequently lack revolutionary feeling and vigilance. In many places they not only do not oppose this anti-soviet work of hostile elements with class alertness and an everyday Bolshevik drive to strengthen soviet influence over the broad non-Party masses of the collective farmers and state farm-workers, but they themselves sometimes fall under the influence of these sabotaging elements; and some members of the Party, who entered for careerist purposes, line up with the enemies of the collective and state farms and the Soviet Government, and join with them in organizing thieving of seed at sowing time, grain at harvesting and threshing time, hiding grain in secret granaries, sabotaging state grain purchases, and really draw certain collective farms, groups of kolkhozniks and backward workers of state farms into the struggle against the soviet power. It is particularly true of state farms, where frequently the directors, under the influence of anti-soviet elements, undergo a bourgeois degeneration, sabotage the tasks set by the Soviet Government, enter upon out and out treachery to the Party and Government, and attempt to dispose of state farm products as if they were their own personal property.”
But with no less characteristic Bolshevist persistence, the occasion was taken to intensify the campaign, so as to ensure that 1933 and 1934 should see better results than 1931 or 1932. It was recognized, and frankly confessed, that a serious error had been made, often owing to the mistaken zeal of local agents, in making successive levies on the successful kolkhosi, when these were found in possession of unexpectedly large crops. Many peasants had lost confidence in the government’s financial measures, always fearing that the results of their labors would be taken away from them. Hence the whole system was changed. The Government relinquished all right to take produce by contract any more than by requisition. Henceforth nothing more was to be exacted from the collective farms by way of agricultural tax (apart from the agreed payment for the use of the tractors) than the one official levy of grain, meat, milk, and other produce, definitely fixed in advance, in exact proportion so far as arable produce was concerned, to the normal harvest on the number of hectares that had to be sown and weeded and reaped. Similar assessments were made for other produce. However great might prove to be the yield, the government would claim no more. Even if a larger area were sown than had been required, the government pledged itself not to increase its demand upon the zealous kolkhos. As soon as this definitely fixed levy had been paid for the whole district, each kolkhos was to be free to sell the surplus to outsiders as it pleased; even to selling it, in the open market, to the highest bidder. At the same time the whole organization was drastically overhauled. Many hundreds of local officials were, during 1932, found guilty of gross neglect, or wanton mishandling of machinery, stores, and crops. These were severely reprimanded and in many cases dismissed from office. Hundreds of the worst offenders were sentenced to imprisonment, and at least several dozens to be shot. The members of the kolkhosi themselves, including the managers and accountants, were also faithfully dealt with. What was most difficult to cope with was the deplorable general sullenness, in which many, and sometimes most, of the peasants had ceased to care whether or not the normal harvest was reaped. Where the plowing had been only feebly performed; the weeding left undone; and the scanty growing grain filched from the fields by night, the whole kolkhos was drastically shaken up; the most guilty of the sabotagers, often ex-kulaks, were expelled; the negligent managers and peasant accountants were dismissed from office; collective farms which had willfully neglected or refused to till the land were sternly refused relief when they found themselves without food, so as not to encourage further recusancy; and in some of the worst cases the inhabitants of whole villages, if only in order to save them from starvation, were summarily removed from the land that they had neglected or refused to cultivate, and deported elsewhere, to find laboring work of any sort for bare maintenance. It is not denied that in these summary removals, as in those of individual kulaks who had refused to conform to the government’s requirements, great hardship was inflicted on a large number of women and children, as well as on the men. Without such costs in suffering, it is argued, the rapid reorganization of peasant agriculture, which seemed the only practicable means of solving the problem of the national food supply, could not have been affected.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 207

Because the early collective farms had been organized spontaneously–that is, without Moscow’s direct supervision or the guiding force of the party and proletariat–they were vulnerable to class alien influences. The lack of central control in the collectivization
campaign spanning the summer and fall of 1929 and the problems associated with the cadre crisis had led to this.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 32

IN EARLY COLLECTIVIZATION CENTER UNLEASHED FORCES AND LOST CONTROL

The center was both all-powerful and completely helpless. It was confounded in its every step by the realities of fortress storming in rural Soviet Russia. In its rapid drive to collectivize agriculture, the center had unleashed a storm upon the countryside; it could not as easily rein in the forces as it had unleashed them.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 89

From 1928 to 1933 bureaucrats and peasants waged one of the most grandiose class-conflicts human history has known. It was complicated by struggles between bureaucracy and proletariat, between Communist bureaucrats and non-Party technicians, and lastly by an internal struggle between the various sections of the Communist bureaucracy. One can say that the Five-Year Plan, as it was carried out, represented to a certain extent the expression of a terrifying conflict between all classes and all social groups of modern Russia. Stalin’s victory was a solution by means of the average, as it were, the resultant of all of the social forces at work. Stalin was the product of the events more than he was their cause.
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 90

SOVIET GOVT CRACKS DOWN ON KULAKS DESTROYING LIVESTOCK

Finally, on 16 Jan 1930, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR issued the decree “On Measures of Struggle with the Rapacious Destruction of Livestock.” This decree was issued in response to the wholesale waves of slaughters and sales of livestock which occurred in this period as peasants attempted to avoid classification as a kulak. The decree entitled district soviet executive committees to arrest, expropriate, and exile kulaks guilty of the destruction of livestock….
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 96

He [Stalin] accused the kulaks, as a class, of living off the fat of the land, and of hoarding grain for themselves at the expense of the nation. Five million of them were dispossessed; the kulaks’ vengeful response was to slaughter their livestock. Mass deportation to Siberia ensued as punishment, and any active resistance was met with the same sentence. The carnage included the slaughter of 14 million cattle, one third of the nation’s pigs, and a quarter of its sheep and goats.
Richardson, Rosamond. Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 120

APPEARS LOCAL PEASANTS RATHER THAN THE RED ARMY CRUSHED MOST KULAK REVOLTS

There is scant evidence with which to judge the degree of Red Army involvement in crushing anti-collective farm resistance, but it appears that in most cases the revolts were suppressed by local forces (including OGPU forces) or fizzled out on their own with the collapse of the collective farm.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987, p. 125

STAIN WAS NOT THE CAUSE OF THE COLLECTIVIZATION EXCESSES

If this interval [May to October 1929] he was directing from behind the scenes the early phase of the vast agrarian upheaval that soon was to engulf Russia, no evidence to this effect has turned up in the extensive and relatively forthright post-Stalin scholarship in the Soviet Union on the subject of collectivization. This research generally has not attempted to protect Stalin’s reputation, and for a time even sought to emphasize his responsibility for the ‘excesses’ of the campaign. What has come out of Soviet research is a substantial body of evidence that the enthusiasm for collectivization and the destruction of the kulaks had generated considerable momentum on the lower levels before Stalin visibly attempted to intervene in the administration of the campaign. Part of this revitalized radical trend seems to have derived from the lower levels of party membership, among people whose zest for class war probably had been encouraged by Stalin’s pronouncements but was not simply his creation. Then there was the class hatred of the poor peasants for the relatively well-all ones, a potent force that cannot be discounted merely because Soviet historians have emphasized it excessively. An added factor in the intensification of the conflict was the active and not infrequently violent resistance by kulaks to collectivizers, who were often erstwhile factory workers.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 124

There is no reason to believe that Stalin in June 1929 compelled the state agency ‘Kolkhoztsentr’ (Collective Farm Center) to decide that it was necessary drastically to increase the goal of the Five-Year Plan for collectivization, embracing seven or 8 million families in 1930 alone. Nor that Stalin was involved in the decision of the Khoper district, a large area in the former Don Cossack land, to declare that they would achieve complete collectivization by the end of the plan period. Nor is it plausible to attribute directly to Stalin the eviction of a substantial number of kulak families from their farms during 1929, which is to say before he had announced the drive to ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’. Yet the best Soviet study on the subject estimates that about 30,000 families or over 200,000 people were evicted in 1929.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 125

Thus in November 1929, when Stalin decided to break his silence concerning the agrarian upheaval, a strong radical movement already was in motion, involving elements of the peasantry, middle-level party officialdom and the central administration of the state. On the anniversary of the October Revolution, an occasion associated with class warfare, Stalin applauded this upsurge. The year 1929, he said, taking stock of the changes of the few months preceding, was ‘a year of great change’. He called for an end to the retreat that was embodied in the New Economic Policy and for a resumption of the attack on capitalist elements in both industry and agriculture. But he was non-committal on the extent and nature of collectivization in the immediate future and on the fate of the kulaks.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 125

Since he [Stalin] did not choose to intervene in this debate, the resolutions that emerged from it were generally enthusiastic about the socialization of agriculture, but did not settle the question of tempo. Some passages spoke of various organizational measures, such as the establishment of a central school for collective farm organizers or the building of tractor factories, which seemed to imply a relatively long-term approach to the transition. However, the decision of the committee at this time to send 25,000 industrial workers into the countryside within a few months to push collectivization seemed to imply a frantic campaign. So did some of the rhetoric of the resolution, particularly a favorable reference to ‘complete collectivization of entire districts’, marking ‘a new stage, a new phase in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism’.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 126

Such ambiguous marching orders invited confusion among the middle-and lower-level party officials and the disruption of agriculture. Even by the time of the Central Committee session, and especially in its wake, there was increasing evidence that chaos was brewing. On the one hand, radical zealots on the lower levels were in many areas deciding on their own to push for a high level of collectivization within a year or less. For example, at the opening of December 1929 the party leadership of the vast Lower Volga region decided to aim at 80% collectivization by the spring of 1930 and 100% by the autumn. Fearing expropriation of the recent harvest by grain procurement teams, and incipient collectivization, many of the more prosperous peasants resisted the authorities by non–co-operation, and sometimes violence.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 126

On 15 December 1929, the Politburo concluded that the situation could not be allowed to drift any longer, that some order had to be imposed on an agrarian transformation that had departed entirely from the moderate goals of the plan and threatened not only agricultural production but the very existence of the regime…. In any case, there is no evidence that Stalin acted unilaterally or imposed his will on a reluctant Politburo. Had he been high-handed in this matter, Soviet historians of the early 1960s would have been quick to use this to bolster their argument that he and not the party was responsible for the ‘excesses’ in the early 1930s.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York : New York University Press, 1988, p. 127

Soviet historians who were allowed to sift the archives to construct this narrative deserve credit for beginning the illumination of the vast suffering and economic dislocation engendered by the crash campaign of collectivization in 1929-30. But they were supposed to demonstrate that the wisdom and rectitude of the party was never tarnished, that the ‘excesses’ were Stalin’s responsibility. The distinction between the good ongoing institution and the fallible transitory leader is a familiar apologia in the history of many institutions in the world. But with respect to Stalin and the ‘excesses’ of rapid collectivization it does not bear examination. Although the Soviet historians tried to saddle him with responsibility for making rash changes in the resolution of 5 January 1930, transforming a prudent and humane plan into a drastic and excessive one, the evidence that they present scarcely sustains this contention. True, Stalin revised the schedule for the collectivization of ‘the overwhelming majority of collective farms’, as provided by the commission’s draft, but his changes were slight, and not always in favor of higher goals. For example, the Lower Volga region was to be collectivized by the autumn of 1930 according to the draft. Stalin changed this to read ‘the autumn of 1930, or at any rate the spring of 1931’, a reduction of tempo, if anything. For the Middle Volga and North Caucasus he changed the target from ‘Spring 1931’ to ‘autumn 1930 or Spring 1931’, which merely raised the possibility of an increase in tempo.
Stalin was criticized in the 1960s for removing from the draft of the resolution an article that exhorted the lower officials not to treat the drive ‘with the excitement of a sporting event’, replacing collectivist spirit from below with bureaucratiism. But the same sentiment ended up in condensed form in the published version as the parting shot of the whole decree. As his latter-day Soviet critics asserted, Stalin did delete an article that permitted the collectivized household to retain some animals and implements. But this was merely an attempt to delay a decision on a disputed point until the commission on the draft statutes of the collective farm could reach a conclusion. In it’s draft statutes published in March 1930, no doubt with Stalin’s approval, the right to possess such modest capital was restored.
The fate of five or 6 million kulaks, as their number was estimated by the commission, raised such complexities that the commission could not agree on any formulation. There were, however, no tender hearts among these committed Bolsheviks, and Stalin was well within the limits of commission opinion went on 27 December he delivered his famous address ‘On Questions of Agrarian Policy in the USSR’ to a conference of some 300 Marxist students of the agrarian problem. The party, he announced, had passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class’. The same violent phrase appeared in the party decree of 5 January 1930, and this double authority of the General Secretary and Central Committee may well have accounted for much of the chaotic, destructive, sometimes deadly attack on peasant families deemed by somebody to be kulaks. Stalin did not add any detailed instructions on the handling of the elimination of kulaks, nor their disposition after they had been stripped of their possessions. In late December 1929 and early January 1930 he was aware that the commission had been unable to reach agreement on this topic, and evidently he did not want to settle it on his own responsibility. But the matter could not wait, for there were widespread attacks on alleged kulaks. Thus on 15 January the Politburo appointed Molotov to head a new commission that included many of the members of the previous one. By the 26th, they had prepared a decree entitled ‘On the Means for the Liquidation of Kulak Farms in Areas of Complete Collectivization’, which the Politburo passed on the 30th.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 128

By the time the decree on the deportation of kulaks appeared at the end of January the Soviet countryside was in a state of calamitous and violent chaos as peasants, willing and unwilling, were enrolled in collective farms, real and fictitious. The most prosperous 15-20% were swept from their homes, their possessions transferred with great wastage to the new collectives. As early as 30 January Stalin showed some apprehension concerning excessive rates of collectivization, wiring orders to Central Asia to reject the request of local authorities for permission to complete the collectivization of 32 districts. This was ‘mistaken’, he said. His telegraphic order was to ‘advance the cause of collectivization to the extent that masses really involved.’. In early February his office ordered the Moscow region to cease the deportation of kulaks. This measure had been ordered only for regions of complete collectivization, which did not include Moscow. By the opening of March he had concluded that some degree of order and relaxation was essential before the spring planting if crop failure were to be avoided in 1930. His relative moderation owed something to the fact that he was the person best placed to learn of the destruction and disorder that collectivization was inflicting on the Soviet countryside. Stalin received weekly reports from the information section of the Central Committee, based on regional offices, and about 50,000 letters from the populace in general, which his staff presumably summarized for him. On this basis, he concluded that a pause was necessary, and on 2 March he published in Pravda, over his own name, the famous short article ‘Dizzy with Success’. While praising the great ‘achievements’ of the campaign, he called for consolidation rather than expansion of collectivization and sharply criticized violations of the voluntary character of the process and such excesses as the socialization of poultry and the removal of church bells.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 130

It is customary to say that Stalin’s article ‘Dizzy with Success.’ was hypocritical in blaming lower officials for their own excessive enthusiasm for collectivization. The point has some merit. Stalin’s general encouragement of renewed class war in 1928-29 had contributed to the stimulation of zest for the agrarian debacle of 1929-30. By approving the party decree of 5 January 1930 on the tempo of collectivization he contributed to the chaotic and destructive events of the next two months. But the evidence does not sustain the notion that a single dictator was forcing his program on a hierarchy of reluctant or intimidated officials. Stalin was slow to commit himself to any specific program of agrarian transformation, even though an increasingly ardent radical movement was in progress. Even after he threw his support behind rapid collectivization and dekulakization his main role was to approve the plans that his colleagues on the commissions quickly put together. And in March, when the resulting possibility of economic disaster faced the regime, Stalin was ahead of the Politburo in calling for temporary retreat.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 130

This is not to conclude that Stalin was an innocent bystander to the waste and carnage of the time, nor that he was moderate in his conception of class war. But opposing political camps have unwittingly conspired to sustain the conclusion that Stalin was the main force behind collectivization. First the Stalinists, pretending that collectivization was a great triumph for socialism, credited it to their all-wise leader. The anti-Communists, more realistically treating collectivization as a human and economic disaster, agreed that it was his personal work, a great crime. After his death they were gratified to find Soviet historians, agreeing that the ‘excesses’ of collectivization were Stalin’s fault. But the substantial evidence provided by Soviet research actually presents a more complex case. What emerges is a Stalin, who was at this stage of his career a ‘chairman of the board’, delegating most of the crucial work to commissions, listening to opposing viewpoints and acting to cut his losses when it appeared that the program was headed for disaster.
In the party the decision to pause and allow unwilling peasants to withdraw from the collective farms produced a serious wave of indignation among lower officials. Some of this anger was directed at Stalin for passing the blame for ‘excesses’ onto the lower echelons. But the main grievance, which was widespread, was simply that the leadership had interrupted and retarded the process of collectivization. In one district, for example, Stalin’s article was treated as ‘a retreat to capitalism.’; in another as ‘a backward step in the rates and methodology of collective farm construction…crawling to the policy of the Right wing’. This was the most persuasive of all evidence that Stalin had not invented and foisted on a passive or unwilling bureaucracy the policies of class war and collectivization. His article of 3 April, ‘Reply to the Collective Farm Comrades’, tried to placate some of the irate zealots. Stalin addressed 10 questions that, he said, had been raised in a number of inquiries addressed to him by ‘practical workers’, meaning organizers, in the collective farm movement. First he asserted that the main error had been that the movement at some point ‘began imperceptibly to slip from the path of struggle against the kulaks onto the path of struggle against the middle peasant’. Then he went on to deny that the turn to moderation was ‘a step backwards, a retreat’, as some of his incoming mail, no doubt said it was. This explanation, and other official publications, was not enough to eliminate the possibility that the 16th Party Congress, scheduled for 15 June 1930, might be marred by protests from the zealots, so it was postponed for 10 days.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 131

COLLECTIVIZATION HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL

December 16, 1933–in the latter respect it is noteworthy that the proportion of wheat in this year’s collections is half as large again as that of last year.
This result fully justifies the optimism expressd to me by local authorities during my September trip through the Ukraine and North Caucasus–optimism that contrasted so strikingly with the famine stories then current in Berlin, Riga, Vienna and other places, where elements hostile to the Soviet Union were making an 11th hour attempt to avert American recognition by picturing the Soviet Union as a land of ruin and despair.
Second, it is a triumph for Joseph Stalin’s bold solution a year ago of the collective farm management problem–namely, the establishment of political sections in the tractor stations, a step that future historians cannot fail to regard as one of the major political moves in the Soviet Union’s second decade.
Duranty, Walter. Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934, p. 324

Collectivization is nevertheless Stalin’s life’s achievement, and probably his greatest. It solved Russia’s age-long agrarian problem. Collectivization prevented hostile economic forces from springing ever anew from the soil of the countryside to attack the Soviet economic system.
Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 195

In a December 5, 1929, letter to Molotov Stalin stated, “The collective farm movement is growing by leaps and bounds. Of course there are not enough machines and tractors–how could it be otherwise?–but simply pooling the peasant tools results in a colossal increase in sown acreage (in some regions by as much as 50 percent!)…. The eyes of our rightists are popping out of their heads in amazement….”
Naumov, Lih, and Khlevniuk, Eds. Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1995, p. 183

In four earth-shaking years, the Soviet Union changed from a country of tiny, badly tilled holdings, worked with wooden plow and hand sickle, to the largest scale farms in the world. The initiative was taken by the poorer peasants and farm hands, urged and organized by the Communists, and assisted by government credits and machines. When the five-year plan swiftly increased the farm machinery available, the new collective farm proved able to attract ever wider and wider groups of farmers. The movement was bitterly fought by the small rural capitalists known as kulaks, who farmed with hired labor, lived by money-lending, or owned small mills, threshers and other means of production and used these facilities to exploit their neighbors.
[Footnote]: Writers unacquainted with Russian rural life often confuse kulaks with peasants generally, which leads them to describe the whole collectivization movement as an attack on the peasants. But for half a century students of Russian rural districts have spoken of kulaks. In 1895 Stepniak wrote that “hard unflinching cruelty” was their main characteristic; in 1904 Wolf von Schierhand wrote of the kulak as a “usurer and oppressor in a peasant’s blouse.” In 1918 Dr. E. J. Dillon, in The Eclipse of Russia, said: “Of all the human monsters I have ever met in my travels, I cannot recall any so malignant and odious as the Russian kulak.
Strong, Anna Louise. This Soviet World. New York, N. Y: H. Holt and company, c1936, p. 178

But anyone in a position to compare a Russian farmstead of 1910 with one of 1930 must confess that the latter guarantees more of two all-important elements: human happiness and dignity.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1942, p. 147

Despite all the bourgeoisie’s hue and cry about the repression suffered by the rich peasants during the collectivization, in less than one decade, the Russian peasants left the Middle Ages and joined the twentieth century. Their cultural and technical development was phenomenal.
This progress properly reflected the sustained rise in investment in agriculture. It increased from 379 million rubles in 1928, to 2,590 million in 1930, to 3,645 million in 1931, stayed at the same level for two years, reaching its highest levels at 4,661 million in 1934 and 4,983 million in 1935.
Charles Bettelheim. L’Economie sovietique (Paris: editions Recueil Sirey, 1950), p. 74.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 86 [p. 77 on the NET]

After the success of the collectivization of 1932–1933, Bukharin’s defeatist theories were completely discredited.
Martens, Ludo. Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27 2600, p. 136 [p. 117 on the NET]

I heard incredible stories of the hopes raised among peasants by collectivization. With collectivization, technical civilization penetrated into the backward rural districts of Russia. Wireless and cinema came to villages that were without a school the day before; where the plough was still unknown and the earth was broken with the aid of the ancestral hoe, tractors made their appearance. The people were dazzled. Countless factories were rising, armies of tractors, cars, unheard-of agricultural machines were to make their appearance in the village, along with piles of artificial manure. Postal and telephone service, medical service, agrarian experts, machinery and tractor stations, all sorts of courses and schools were introduced. All this could not fail deeply to impress the creative instinct of the masses, to fan the ancient hope of a better life in those villages that had suffered so much during the NEP.
Ciliga, Ante. The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 100

COLLECTIVIZATION AND MODERNIZATION WERE DEFINITELY NEEDED

For, in 1928, the old-style Russian farming could not even feed the cities; it could never provide food for rapid industrialization or for expanding education and culture. Farming, along with industry, had to be modernized.
Russian peasants, in 1928, farmed by methods of the Middle Ages, methods that even went back to Bible times. They lived in villages and walked long distances to fields…. One-fourth of the peasants did not own a horse; less than half had a team of two horses or oxen. So plowing was seldom and shallow, often by homemade wooden plow, without a metal share. Sowing was by hand, the seed cast from an apron to the earth, where birds and winds carried much away….
Social life was equally medieval. The Old Man ruled the home. Sons married, brought their wives to the patriarchal homestead and worked the farm that their fathers still bossed. So farm practice remained old-fashioned, unchanged by young views. Much of it was determined by religion. Holy days fixed dates for sowing, religious processions sprinkled fields with holy water to insure fertility, rain was sought by processions and prayers. The ultra-pious regarded tractors as “devil machines”–priests actually led peasants to stone them. Any fight for modern farming thus became a fight “against religion.”…
By 1928, the farms had recovered from war devastation; the total crops equaled those before the war. Far less grain, however, was reaching the cities.
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 34

Life magazine said, March 29, 1943, in a special number: “Whatever the cost of farm collectivization…these large farm units…made possible the use of machinery…which doubled output…(and) released millions of workers for industry. Without them… Russia could not have built the industry that turned out the munitions that stopped the German army.”
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 46

They say Lenin would have accomplished collectivization with fewer victims. But how could it have been done any other way? I renounce none of it. We carried out collectivization relentlessly; our measures were absolutely correct.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 146

CHUEV: Some writers now argue that Stalin and Molotov declared they would not rush ahead with collectivization, but as a matter of fact they…
MOLOTOV: We couldn’t have delayed it any longer. Fascism was emerging. Soon it would have been too late. War was already looming on the horizon.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 245

I believe our success in collectivization was more significant than victory in World War II. If we had not carried it through, we would not have won the war. By the start of the war we already had a mighty socialist state with its own economy, industry, and so forth.
I personally designated districts where kulaks were to be removed….
We exiled 400,000 kulaks. My commission did its job….
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 248

Molotov asserts that the members of the former employing and exploiting classes are still numerous, a fact that is indisputable when we remember that there were millions of rich peasants exploiting hired labor in the Soviet Union in 1928, in addition to millions of merchants and shopkeepers.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 139

This was a crisis in grain farming which was bound to be followed by a crisis in livestock farming….
The only escape from the predicament was a change to large-scale farming which would permit the use of tractors and agricultural machines and secure a several-fold increase of the marketable surplus of grain. The country had the alternative: either to adopt large-scale capitalist farming, which would have meant the ruin of the peasant masses, destroyed the alliance between the working-class and the peasantry, increased the strength of the kulaks, and led to the downfall of Socialism in the countryside; or to take the course of amalgamating the small peasant holdings into large Socialist farms, collective farms, which would be able to use tractors and other modern machines for a rapid advancement of grain farming and a rapid increase in the marketable surplus of grain.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 287

Land redistribution greatly multiplied the number of small-farm holders till they aggregated 25 million by 1928. Although possessed of land and relieved of rents they did not prosper, for in fact they had no more land to use than under the Czar. They produced no more. The government in consequence failed to get grain for export or to feed the cities properly. Their own area had not increased under the new system and the small farmers had proved to be less efficient producers than the landlords. Thus the proletarian dictatorship faced a serious crisis created by the peasants.
It met it by decreeing what it had hitherto avoided, the extensive socialization of agriculture. Not that Marxianism did not require it, but a situation dominated by peasants had been too difficult. Now, however, action was imperative. As Stalin put it, they could not continue part socialistic and part capitalistic. The individualistic peasant had to be proletarianized or the revolution lost. So the Five-year Plan was launched with agricultural reconstruction as its most audacious and difficult task.
Davis, Jerome. The New Russia. New York: The John Day company, c1933, p. 54

We have no wish to minimize, still less to seek to justify, this ruthless expropriation and removal of the occupiers and cultivators who were stigmatized as kulaks, any more than we do the equally ruthless expulsion, little over a century ago, of the crofters from so much of the Scottish Highlands, or the economic ruin of so many small-holders that accompanied the statutory enclosure of the English commons. The policy of compulsorily substituting sheep-runs and large farms for tiny holdings may have been economically sound in the one case as in the other. The Soviet Government may well have been right in concluding that only by a wide-spread amalgamation of the independent peasants holdings could any general mechanization of agriculture be made practicable; and that only by such mechanization could the aggregate production of foodstuffs be made equal to the nation’s requirements. In fact, the partial failure of crops in 1931 and 1932 (though, as we have already explained, far removed from anything to be properly called a famine) brought many thousands of small peasants within reach of actual starvation; and it may well have seemed that, in these cases at any rate, nothing but removal could save them from death at the next failure of crops, or even before the next harvest. It is, indeed, not so much the policy of removal that is open to criticism, as the manner in which it appears to have been carried out, and the unsatisfactory conditions of life into which the victims seem to have been, without judicial trial or any effective investigation, arbitrarily deported.
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 471

FOR SOCIALISM KOLKHOZES MUST EVOLVE INTO SOVKHOZES

…the kolkhozes [collective farms] must evolve so as heighten the very level of socialization, that is, to be transformed into sovkhozes [state farm’s]. There is no other way. That was stated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 252

STATE FARMS CHANGED INTO SOVKHOZ AND PRIVATE FARMS INTO KOLKHOZES

So, whilst the large unoccupied estates were transformed into sovkhoz or pure and simple State farms, the private individual exploitations must be changed into kolkhoz, or co-operative farms.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 220

STALIN FAVORS THE ARTEL FORM OF KOLKHOZ RATHER THAN THE COMMUNE

There are two forms of kolkhoz: the Commune and the Artel.
In the commune, the kolkhosians own the entire concern in common, but that is all that they do possess, and they live in communities. In the Artel, each kolkhosian has his own house, his own farmyard and, if necessary, his own cow; he retains private ownership of a very small portion of the vast area whose cultivation he shares in other respects with the others.
The Artel form is the one which Stalin very strongly recommends. “Concessions! NEP! Abandonment of socialism!” people cried, or wanted to cry.
But wait one moment. Socialism, contrary to the legend which those to do not wish to know the truth spread about among those who are ignorant, was not invented just to annoy people, and to pursue them perpetually with cries of “You must!” like a creditor, but, quite on the contrary, to get them out of a mess. Its object is by no means arbitrarily to deprive every man and every woman of everything that gives them satisfaction and thus to make them pay too dearly, by personal restrictions, for the political equality, the social justice, and the security of livelihood which it brings them. Restriction on private property is not an end in itself, but a means of arriving at the state which is much more advantageous, everything concerned, for everyone. It is not a question of multiplying these restrictions indiscriminately, but of reducing them to the necessary minimum. The means of production are to be socialized, so let us socialize them. And then what?
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 223-224

STALIN SAYS THE APPEARANCE OF VILLAGES HAS BEEN IMPROVED GREATLY

The appearance of the villages has also changed. Stalin has said: “The old village, dominated by its church, and with the fine houses of the chief of police, the priest, and the kulak in the foreground, and its tumbledown mud huts in the background, is beginning to disappear. In its place the new village is springing up, with its public and economic service buildings, its clubs, its wireless station, its cinema, its schools, its libraries and its nurseries; with its tractors, it’s reaping-machines, its threshing-machines, and its motor-cars. The old silhouettes of the notables, the slave-driving kulak, the blood-sucking usurer, the produce-speculator, the ‘little father’–the chief of police–have all disappeared. The notables, nowadays, are the men of the kolkhoz and of the sovkhoz, of the schools and the clubs, the foremen tractor- and reaping- machine-drivers, the chiefs of the shock-brigades for work in the fields and for breeding, the best brigandiers, male and female, of the kolkhosian village.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 229

FARMS GIVEN TO MILLIONS OF PEASANTS IN 1933

Dec. 24th, 1933 was suitably chosen for a lavish gift to millions of peasants. When their holdings were originally grouped into collective farms, the State had issued loans to the collective farmers which had since become a millstone around the farmers’ necks. Now, all loans issued before 1933 and not yet repaid were simply wiped out. “Such benevolence only Comrade Stalin has shown,” said the papers. “Such a step could only have been taken in the Soviet Union where the workers are the ceaseless and supreme concern of the Party and the Government.”
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 280

One of the early signs of the new direction was that rationing was abolished (Nov. 26, 1934). This was decreed direct from the Communist Party, which could not have done it unless it had been in a position to do it. But the most material changes were mainly focused on the peasantry. It began with a remission of arrears of taxes (December 11, 1933), significantly enough for districts closest to the Far East frontier, but this was soon extended to the whole country (Feb. 27, 1934).
By a most important decree of February 18, 1935, the peasants of the collective farms got a considerably greater share in the management of their own affairs, which brought them closer to the popular ideal of free agricultural co-operation. Their houses and kitchen gardens, as in the times of the Tsars, together with all household articles, were declared to be individual property; but besides that they were given allotments–very small, it is true–on which they could labor for their own profit. This was immensely popular;…
Individual property had to be the result of one’s own work, but it was now recognized as property, including all earnings, and was guaranteed by the State. Earnings could be invested in the national savings banks, which very soon were full, and could also be bequeathed. Horses were regarded as means of production and therefore remained nationalized, but in principle every family was to possess a cow, and a large household two, if possible (it was just in the immediately preceding period of harsh legislation that all cattle had been socialized). Pigs, poultry, bees could be personal property.
One specially popular decree was that which declared that the limits of the domain of each collective farm could not be reduced. This the peasants regarded as satisfying their claim that the given holding belonged to these and to no other peasants–the principle which they had always maintained, and on which they had acted when they seized the squires’ land in 1917. They looked upon it as their charter, and in many villages showed it with genuine pride to Sir John Russell.
Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 196

In May 1932, the grain procurement plan for 1932-33 was somewhat reduced, and free trade in grain was permitted, provided that deliveries to the state had been completed; and, a matter of considerable significance, the state control of prices on the markets was abolished. These and related measures became widely known at the time as “neo-NEP,” though this characterization was vigorously rejected by the authorities.
Shabad, Steven, trans. The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931-1936. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 105

HOW DID COLLECTIVIZATION WORK

There have been many books describing this period, and telling just how and why the kulaks were being liquidated in this manner. The authors disagree considerably on many points, but I have combined the most plausible explanations together with what I saw for myself to give an idea of what actually happened.
In the previous chapter I have described this period as the Second Communist Revolution, and have said it was aimed principally at the small farmers, who had hung on to their small plots of land and small collections of domestic animals through the first Revolution. In 1917 and the years following, these small farmers had gladly helped the Communists to take away the land held by large landowners, because they were promised the privilege of dividing such lands among themselves, and that is what they had done.
When I came to Russia in 1928, there wasn’t a single large land owner in the country except the state itself. The land was broken up into little plots, each cultivated by a small farmer and his family. The small farmers lived in villages together, often at some distance from their land, as they have done in Russia for centuries. You couldn’t see in the length and breath of the country a single farm such as we have in America.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 74

In 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, Soviet Russia embarked upon her second revolution, which was directed solely and exclusively by Stalin. In its scope and immediate impact upon the life of some 160 million people the second revolution was even more sweeping and radical than the first. It resulted in Russia’s rapid industrialization; it compelled more than 100 million peasants to abandon their small, primitive holdings and to set up collective farms; it ruthlessly tore the primeval wooden plow from the hands of the muzhik and forced him to grasp the wheel of a modern tractor; it drove tens of millions of illiterate people to school and made them learn to read and write;….
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 294

Neither Lenin nor Stalin ever had any illusions that any single country, even one as vast and potentially rich as the Soviet Union, would ever be able to establish a stateless, classless society while capitalism still had power in the rest of the world. But Stalin, like Lenin, did believe that the Soviet Union could eliminate capitalism, industrialize, extend the power of the working class, and wipe out real material privation all during the period of capitalist encirclement.
To do this, Stalin held, the proletariat would have to rely on the peasantry. He rejected Trotsky scorn for the Russian peasants and saw them, rather than the European proletariat, as the only ally that could come to the immediate aid of the Russian workers.
When the Civil War ended, in 1921, with most of the Soviet Union in chaotic ruin, Lenin won a struggle against Trotsky within the Party to institute what was called the New Economic Policy (NEP), under which a limited amount of private enterprise based on trade was allowed to develop in both the cities and the countryside. NEP was successful in averting an immediate total catastrophe, but by 1925 it was becoming clear that this policy was also creating problems for the development of socialism. This brings us to the first great crux of the Stalin question.
We have been led to believe that in order to industrialize at any price, Stalin pursued a ruthless policy of forced collectivization, deliberately murdering several million peasants known as kulaks during the process. The truth is quite different.
When the Bolsheviks seized power, one of their first acts was to allow the poor peasants to seize the huge landed estates. The slogan was “Land to the tiller.” This, however, left most land in the form of tiny holdings, unsuited for large-scale agriculture, particularly the production of the vital grain crops. Under NEP, capitalism and a new form of landlordism began to flourish in the countryside. The class known as kulaks (literally “tight-fists”), consisting of usurers and other small capitalists including village merchants and rich peasants, were cornering the market in the available grain, grabbing more and more small holdings of land, and, through their debt holdings, forcing peasants back into tenant farming and wage labor. Somehow, the small peasant holdings had to be consolidated so that modern agriculture could begin. There were basically two ways this could take place: either through capitalist accumulation, as the kulaks were then doing, or through the development of large-scale socialist farms. If the latter, there was then a further choice: a rapid forced collectivization, or a more gradual process in which co-operative farms would emerge first, followed by collectives, and both would be on a voluntary basis, winning out by example and persuasion. What did Stalin choose? Here, in his own words is the policy he advocated and that was adopted at the 15th Party Congress, in 1927:
“What is the way out? The way out is to turn the small and scattered peasant farms into large united farms based on the cultivation of the land in common, to go over to collective cultivation of the land on the basis of a new and higher technique.
The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure, but by example and persuasion, into large farms based on common, co-operative, collective cultivation of the land with the use of agricultural machines and tractors and scientific methods of intensive agriculture.
There is no other way out.”
To implement this policy, the capitalist privileges allowed under NEP were revoked. This was known as the restriction of the kulaks. The kulaks, whose very existence as a class was thus menaced, struck back. They organized terrorist bands who attacked the co-operatives and collectives, burning down barns when they were filled with grain, devastating the fields, and even murdering Communist peasant leaders. Even more serious than these raids, the kulaks held back their own large supplies of grain from the market in an effort to create hunger and chaos in the cities. The poor and middle peasants struck back. Virtual open civil war began to rage throughout the countryside. As a collective farm movement spread rapidly, pressure mounted among the poor and middle peasants to put an end to landlordism and usury in the countryside for good. In 1929 Stalin agreed that the time had come to eliminate the kulaks as a class. He led the fight to repeal the laws that allowed the renting of land and the hiring of labor, thus depriving the kulaks both of land and of hired workers. The ban on expropriation of the large private holdings was lifted, and the peasants promptly expropriated the kulak class. The expropriation of the rural capitalist in the late 1920s was just as decisive as the expropriation of the urban capitalist a decade earlier. Landlords and village usurers were eliminated as completely as private factory owners. It is undoubtedly true that in many areas there was needless violence and suffering. But this did not originate with Stalin. It was the hour of Russia’s peasant masses, who had been degraded and brutalized for centuries and who had countless blood debts to settle with their oppressors. Stalin may have unleashed their fury, but he was not the one who had caused it to build up for centuries. In fact it was Stalin who checked the excesses generated by the enthusiasm of the collective movement. In early 1930 he published in Pravda “Dizzy with Success,” reiterating that “the voluntary principle” of the collective farm movement must under no circumstances be violated and that anybody who engages in forced collectivization objectively aids the enemies of socialism. Furthermore, he argues, the correct form for the present time is the co-operative (known as the artel), in which “the household plots (small vegetable gardens, small orchards), the dwelling houses, a part of the dairy cattle, small livestock, poultry, etc., are not socialized.” Again, overzealous attempts to push beyond this objectively aid the enemy. The movement must be based on the needs and desires of the masses of peasants.
Stalin’s decision about the kulaks perfectly exemplifies the limits under which he operated. He could decide, as he did, to end the kulaks as a class by allowing the poor and middle peasants to expropriate their land. Or he could decide to let the kulaks continue withholding their grain from the starving peasants and workers, with whatever result. He might have continued bribing the kulaks. But it is highly doubtful, to say the least, that he had the option of persuading the kulaks into becoming good socialists.
There can be no question that, whatever may be said about its cost, Stalin’s policy in the countryside resulted in a vast, modern agricultural system, capable, for the first time in history, of feeding all the peoples of the Soviet lands. Gone were the famines that seemed as inevitable and were as vicious as those of China before the revolution or of India today.
Meanwhile, Stalin’s policy of massive industrialization was going full speed ahead. His great plan for a modern, highly industrialized Soviet Union has been so overwhelmingly successful that we forget that it was adopted only over the bitter opposition of most of the party leaders, who thought it a utopian and therefore suicidal dream. Having overcome this opposition on both the right and the “left,” Stalin in 1929 instituted the first five-year plan in the history of the world. It was quickly overfulfilled. By the early 1930s the Soviet Union had clearly become both the inspiration and the main material base area for the world revolution. And it was soon to prove much more than a match for the next military onslaught from the capitalist powers, which Stalin had predicted and armed against.
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 16-19

This was a profound revolution, a leap from an old qualitative state of society to a new qualitative state, equivalent in its consequences to the revolution of October 1917….
The distinguishing feature of this revolution is that it was accomplished from above, on the initiative of the state, and directly supported from below by the millions of peasants, who were fighting to throw off kulak bondage and to live in freedom in the collective farms.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 305

SUCCESS OF COLLECTIVIZATION ENERVATED AND WEAKENED THE OPPOSITION

A lot has been said about the hardships of the Kulak during the period of collectivization. The Kulak had the opportunity of joining the collective farm. When he refused to do so and thus positively hindered collectivization, he was deported. The history of the Kulak money-lender is too full of brutality and mercilessness [committed by the kulaks] for one to waste sympathy on his hardships which he could have avoided.
…the Opposition leaders waited patiently for their turn, as Radek confessed at his trial, in the expectation that the Five-Year Plan would fail, involving the overthrow of Stalin.
The Five-Year Plan succeeded and the Second Five-Year Plan, accompanied by a series of bumper harvests, was already on the way when Kirov, the chief of the Leningrad Soviet, was assassinated. In 1934 the mood of the country had changed. The former “neutrals,” who had been critical of the Stalin policy and resentful of privations, were now wholeheartedly on his side. Rationing was being abolished; light industry was turning out large quantities of consumable goods; the standard of life, in short, had risen and with it the popularity of Stalin himself. The assassination of Kirov seemed a desperate stroke aimed at a member of the Politburo which had been responsible for the country’s success. His assassin, Nikolayev, had been influenced by the Social Revolutionaries, but there were threads leading from his practice to the theories of the Opposition leaders. The strategic position was now reversed. Whereas, during the difficult years of the First Five-Year Plan, the Opposition had been waiting as a nucleus to seize on mass dissatisfaction as an opportunity for action, now that there was no discontent, they were leaders without even a potential following. This is extremely significant when one asks why at the Moscow Trials Zinoviev and Kamenev did not make a bold stand and invoke the support of the masses or send a message to them by declamation to the Press of the world.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 214

The former political opposition had changed to organised violence. Having been defeated in the party referendum about the political line of the party, whereby the opposition got less than one per cent of the votes, the accused saw violence and a coup d’etat as the only possibility for grabbing the political power in the Soviet Union. The fantastic production results from the first five year plan and the collective farms had even more squeezed out those accused. The production results did not leave space any more for a political platform against the government.
Sousa, Mario. The Class Struggle During the Thirties in the Soviet Union, 2001.

COLLECTIVIZATION WAS THE SECOND REVOLUTION AS IMPORTANT AS THE FIRST

The country was undergoing a second economic, social, and political revolution [via collectivization, the First Five-Year Plan, and industrialization].
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner’s, c1990, p. 22

From mid-1928, however, Stalin’s group ordered Communists throughout the continent to adopt the stance taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Extreme radicalism became dominant again and the Comintern, at the Politburo’s instigation, purged the doubters and vacillators,as well as the Trotskyists,from the ranks of its parties. World communism was being readied for the eminent revolutionary upheaval.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 261

SOVIET FARMING MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN CRITICS ARE WILLING TO ADMIT

Conclusion: the Diversity of Rural Responses to Collectivization

The “resistance interpretation” has dominated recent literature on peasants. These studies have made a valuable contribution by presenting and analyzing new evidence of some of the peasants’ responses to collectivization and related policies. According to the studies, the peasants resisted and tried to undermine the collective farm system, and the result was famine and failure. Yet these studies minimize or ignore the actual harvest data, the environmental factors that caused low harvests, the repeated recovery from the famine and crop failures, the large harvests of the 1930s, the mechanization of Soviet farms in these years, Soviet population growth, and the long-term increases in food production and consumption over the Soviet period. It is an overstatement to describe the Soviet agricultural system as a failure….
Tauger, Mark. “Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation.” In Rural Adaptation in Russia by Stephen Wegren, Routledge, New York, NY, 2005, Chapter 3, p. 87.

SOVIETS DID NOT INTENTIONALLY PRODUCE BOGUS HARVEST STATISTICS

This paper employs new archival sources to examine the origins of the “biological yield” system of harvest estimates, considered one of the most notorious examples of Soviet statistical falsification, in light of harvest statistics in the United States and Germany in the early 20th century. It also argues that the Soviet Union’s shift to the biological system took place in the midst of a crisis analogous to crises in the United States and German harvest statistics a few decades earlier. The Soviet regime, introduced this new system, I argue, not in order to falsify harvest information, but rather to respond to problems similar to those faced by United States and German statistical agencies. In particular, Soviet statisticians sought to overcome what they perceived as the persistent falsification of harvest projections by farmers and local officials–a pattern dating back to the beginning of the Soviet regime, if not earlier–and also to end disputes between state agencies over the harvest. The regime resorted to the “biological harvest” because statisticians saw it as a more accurate method of harvest projection on the basis of pre-revolutionary Russian precedents.
Tauger, Mark. “Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: a Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust.” The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 2001, p. 8

I argue below that in introducing the biological method in 1933, Soviet statisticians did not intend to create a system of falsification, but rather to overcome what they considered inherent inaccuracies and uncertainties in their pre-existing systems of harvest projections. These uncertainties derived from the fact that Soviet statisticians from 1918 onward had to rely on the peasants for their basic data on crop conditions and harvests. The statisticians assumed, in part on the basis of concrete evidence, that the peasants substantially understated their actual production because they feared that the estimates derived from their statements would serve as the basis for requisitions and, during the New Economic Policy, taxation. This distrust culminated in a series of efforts to transfer responsibility for estimating harvests from the farmers to the government in the early 1930s.
Tauger, Mark. “Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: a Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust.” The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 2001, p. 15.

SOVIET GOVT AIDED THE UKRAINE IN ITS TIME OF NEED IN 1928-29

In the end, grain procurements in Ukraine in 1928-29 greatly declined from previous years, totaling 1.59 million tons. Only about 1/10 of this, 171,389 tons, was sent outside of Ukraine. Ukraine received from other republics more than 320,000 tons of grain, in other words, nearly twice as much as the republic exported, and was authorized to use (from both internal and imported sources) some 520,000 tons of grain as seed, about two thirds of total seed loans for the entire Soviet Union.
Tauger, Mark. “Grain Crisis or Famine?” in Provincial Landscapes, Local Dimensions of Raleigh, Don. Soviet Power, 1917-1953, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Penn., 2001, Chapter 7, p. 157.

…the Ukrainian famine of 1928-29 resulted from a genuine decline in food availability and was not an “entitlement” famine due exclusively to market forces.
Second, the regime undertook a concerted relief effort to feed several hundred thousand peasants. By reaching fewer than 20% of the overall population in the crop-failure regions, it obviously did not include all those who needed food, evidenced by efforts of local personnel to stretch resources to aid more people than planned. Bureaucratic delays, unanticipated interventions by central Soviet authorities, and of course the crop failure itself all obstructed relief efforts; yet agencies and officials at all levels did respond rapidly and in an organized manner, and did do a reasonable job of setting targets they could meet and meeting targets they set. Among these targets were measures to increase farm production, which were frustrated not by peasant resistance in the form of reduced sowings–as noted, peasants actually sowed substantially larger areas in fall 1928 and spring 1929 than previously–but again by extreme weather conditions.
Third…as already noted, Ukraine received more in food supplies during this famine crisis than it exported to other republics…. Soviet authorities made substantial concessions to Ukraine in response to an undeniable natural disaster and transferred resources from Russia to Ukraine for food relief and agricultural recovery.
Many studies of the Soviet regime and the peasantry emphasize the punitive and exploitative character of government policies and officials’ implementation of them. They argue that these practices took root during the Civil War and declined during the NEP, but revived during the grain crisis to become almost the exclusive pattern in state-peasant relations, a basic part of Soviet totalitarianism and fundamentally different from a “normal” state. The evidence presented here reveals another side of the Soviet regime, one concerned with alleviating suffering rather than creating it, specifically during the grain crisis. It is true that the relief agencies in 1928-29 tried to limit aid to the poorest peasants and nursing mothers and babies. While on one level, this seems harsh, some Western relief agencies during the 1921-23 famine maintained the same principles: Mennonite relief in Ukraine, for example, refused to aid anyone who had even such assets as a horse. Such policies reflected the food shortages that relief agencies faced to, and that prevailed in the country as a whole, in both periods. Governments today employ various “means test,” what the Soviets called balances, before allowing people access to welfare and other benefits for the poor; the criteria employed–comparison of income and assets with established statistical norms such as the “poverty line”–resemble, for example, the standards of the Uriadkom employed to determine whether a region qualified for relief.
Tauger, Mark. “Grain Crisis or Famine?” in Provincial Landscapes, Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953 by Don Raleigh, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Penn., 2001, Chapter 7, p. 169

The agencies involved in relief in 1928-29 functioned like bureaucracies in “normal” states in other ways as well. They had certain conflicting goals and interests, and they demonstrated patterns of bureaucratic rigidity, but similar examples can be found in any country, including United States, in both the public and private sectors. Despite these problems, these agencies also had common goals of providing aid, and they achieved a substantial portion of these goals. It seems clear from the sources that their efforts saved many lives. In this context, the “extraordinary measures” that the regime carried out during the grain crisis take on a different meaning: they created food shortages in some regions and for some peasants, but they also substantially alleviated a genuine famine in a large region of Ukraine (to say nothing of the rest of the country). Certainly, the results of these efforts, including the extraordinary measures, were superior to what would have happened had nothing been done and the regime simply relied on the market. The situation in that case would have resembled, for example, the Indian famines in which millions died of starvation and related epidemics, in some cases, as in Bengal in 1943, right in front of shops stocked with food they could not afford, while British colonial authorities asserted on the basis of classical political economy that the market would solve the problem. As already noted, many groups in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union during the grain crisis faced the same situation as market prices for food spiraled out of reach.
…The Ukrainian famine of 1928-29 was the third famine in the Soviet Union in seven years due to a natural disaster and was the most extreme part of a broader food-supply crisis that affected most of the country. This crisis did not result exclusively or even mainly from price policies. The Soviet Union clearly had an extreme vulnerability to natural disasters, and Soviet leaders interpreted this vulnerability in comparison to the West as a sign of agricultural backwardness.
Tauger, Mark. “Grain Crisis or Famine?” in Provincial Landscapes, Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953 by Don Raleigh, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Penn., 2001, Chapter 7, p. 169.

KOLKHOZES HAD GOOD LIVING CONDITIONS

I had visited [in 1934] a number of kolkhozes around Moscow with foreigners’ excursions as well as with my school, and they were positively model establishments. The kolkhoz peasants lived in passably good rooms; one could find no fault with the tools, the sanitary conditions and social welfare as a whole were amazingly well organized. My visits left me with the impression that, while not everything in Russia was perhaps so well off, conditions nevertheless were bearable and assuredly much better than before.
Tuominen, Arvo, The Bells of the Kremlin: Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983, p. 105

PERSONAL PROPERTY RIGHTS OF THOSE IN COLLECTIVES

The political privileges guaranteed by the Constitution….
Every household in a collective has a plot of land, including house, livestock, poultry, and tools, as its private property for family use (article seven)
“Alongside the socialist system of economy,” every citizen has the right to carry on personal labor, “precluding the exploitation of the labor of others.” (Article 9)
He likewise has a right to inherit personal property and is entitled (Art. 10) to personal ownership of income from work, savings, homes, furniture, and articles of personal use and convenience….
Soviet citizens have as much right as people of other lands to cultivate the joy, pride, and responsibility which are commonly supposed to attend individual ownership of apartments, homes, and gardens.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 335-36