He opened his eyes in despair. Bending over him was a woman, half dressed. He had called out to his mother in a dream, and this woman had come to him.
She was there beside him. He felt at once, with all his being, that she was beautiful. She had heard him cry out in his sleep and she had come to him, feeling tenderness and pity toward him. The woman’s eyes were not weeping, but in them he could see something more important than tears of compassion. He saw something he had never before seen in the eyes of anyone.
She was beautiful because she was kind. He took her hand. She lay down beside him and he sensed her warmth, her tender breasts, her shoulders, her hair. It was as if he were sensing all this in his sleep; never, while awake, had he felt happy.
She was kindness, all kindness, and he understood with the whole of his corporal being that her tenderness, her warmth, her whispers were beautiful because her heart was full of kindness toward him, because love is kindness.
A first night of love...
“I don’t want to remember it—it’s too painful—but it’s impossible to forget it. It’s all still there. Asleep or not, it’s still living. A piece of iron in my heart, like a shell fragment. Something you can never get away from. How could I forget? I was already grown up.
“Darling, I loved my husband very much. I was beautiful, but I wasn’t a good person. I wasn’t kind. I was twenty-two. You wouldn’t have loved me then, even if I was beautiful. I know, I can feel it as a woman. I know I’m more to you than just this, than the two of us lying here together. As for me—don’t be angry if I say I look on you as Christ. I keep wanting to confess—to repent before you, as if before God. My good one, my desired one, I want to tell you about it. I want to recall everything that happened.
“No, there was no famine at the time of the dispossession of the kulaks. All that happened then was that some of the land went out of cultivation, that’s all. The famine began in 1932, well over a year after what we called ‘dekulakization.’
“I worked as a cleaner in the building of the district executive committee; I used to wash the floors. A friend of mine used to wash the floors in the land office. We heard a great deal. I can tell you everything, everything that happened. The accountant used to tell me I should have been a government minister. It’s true—I understand things quickly, and I’ve got a good memory.
“Dekulakization began in late 1929, and the campaign was at its fiercest in February and March 1930.
“First of all, before there were any arrests, the kulaks were asked to pay a special tax. They paid up; somehow they found the money. Then they were taxed a second time. Anything they could, they sold. They believed that, if they paid up, the State would be merciful. There were some, though, who made vodka out of their grain and slaughtered their cattle. They felt there was nothing left in their lives, so they just ate and drank.
“In other provinces things may have been different, but this is how it went in our province. At first it was only the heads of families who were arrested. Most of the men they took had fought for the Whites, in Denikin’s Cossack units. This first wave of arrests was carried out by the OGPU; the Party activists played no part at all. And everyone arrested was shot—to the last man. Those who were arrested in late December, however, were kept in prison for two or three months and then sent to special settlements. When it was a father who was arrested, the rest of the family were left alone, except that an inventory was made of all their property; the family was no longer considered to own the property but merely to have been entrusted with it for safekeeping.
“The provincial Party committee would draw up a plan—that is, the total number of arrests to be made—and send it to each district Party committee. The district committees would then decide on the number of kulaks to be arrested in each village—and the village soviets would then each draw up a list of names. It was on the basis of these lists that people were arrested. And who drew up the lists? A group of three—a troika. A group of three ordinary, muddle-headed people determined who was to live and who was to die. There were no holds barred. There were bribes...There were scores to be settled because of a woman, or because of some other past grievance...Often it was the poorest peasants who were listed as kulaks, while the richer peasants managed to buy themselves off.
“I can see now, though, that it’s not simply a matter of the lists having been drawn up by the wrong people. There were, in any case, more honest, sincere people among the activists than there were scoundrels. But the evil committed by the honest people was no less than the evil committed by the bad people. What matters is that the very existence of these lists was unjust and evil. Precisely who was included in them is hardly the point. Ivan was innocent—and Pyotr was no less innocent. Who was it that established the total figure, the number of arrests for the whole country? Who drew up the grand plan? Who signed it?
“The fathers were already in prison, and then, at the beginning of 1930, the authorities began to round up the families too. This was more than the OGPU could do on its own, and so the Party activists were mobilized too. The activists were just villagers like anyone else, they were people everyone knew, but they all seemed to lose their minds. They seemed dazed, crazed, as if they’d fallen under some spell. They threatened people with guns. They called small children ‘kulak brats.’ ‘You’re bloodsuckers!’ they yelled, ‘bloodsuckers!’ And the ‘bloodsuckers’ were white as sheets—they hardly had a drop of blood left in their veins. As for the activists, their eyes were like glass; they were like the eyes of cats. And yet, for the main part, they were people from our own village. They were, admittedly, under a spell. They’d convinced themselves that the kulaks were evil, that it was best not even to touch them. They would not even sit down to eat with one of ‘those parasites.’ The kulaks’ towels were unclean, their children were disgusting, their young women were worse than lice. The activists looked on those who were being dispossessed as if they were cattle, or swine. Everything about the kulaks was vile—they were vile in themselves, and they had no souls, and they stank, and they were full of sexual diseases, and worst of all, they were enemies of the people and exploiters of the labor of others. The poor, the Komsomol, and the police—they were all Chapaevs, every one of them was a hero. In reality, though, you only had to look at these activists and it was obvious they were just people like any other people—some were green and inexperienced, and a fair number of them were just plain scoundrels.
“All these words had their effect on me too. I was only a girl—and during meetings and special briefings, from films, books, articles, and radio broadcasts, from Stalin himself, I kept hearing one and the same thing: that kulaks are parasites, that kulaks burn bread and murder children. The fury of the masses had to be ignited against them—yes, those were the words; it was proclaimed that the kulaks must be destroyed as a class, every accursed one of them...I too began to fall under this spell. It seemed that every misfortune was because of the kulaks; if we were to annihilate them immediately, then happy days would dawn for us all. No mercy was to be shown to the kulaks. They were not even human beings; goodness knows what they were—some kind of beasts, I suppose. And so I became an activist. And there were all sorts among us activists. There were those who truly believed, who hated the ‘parasites’ and who really did do all they could for the poorest peasants; there were those with selfish aims of their own; and then there were those—the majority—who were simply obeying orders, people willing to beat their own mothers and fathers to death if that was what they were told to do. The most terrible of all were not those who believed in the happy life that would set in after the kulaks were all done away with—no, the beasts that seem wildest are not always the most dangerous. The most terrible of all were the ones with selfish aims of their own. They never stopped talking about political awareness—and all the time they were settling personal scores, stealing and plundering, destroying the lives of others. They destroyed others just to get hold of a few possessions, for a mere pair of boo
ts. It was so easy to destroy: just write a denunciation—you don’t even need to put your signature to it. Just say that your neighbor owned three cows, or that he had hired hands working for him—and there, you’ve set him up as a kulak. I saw what was happening and I was, of course, upset—but it didn’t affect me deep down. It was the same as if farmyard cattle were being slaughtered in the wrong way—that too would have upset me, but I wouldn’t have lost sleep over it.
“Don’t you remember how you once answered a question of mine? Me—I shall never forget your words. Those words of yours opened my eyes; they brought me the light of day. I asked you how the Germans could send Jewish children to die in the gas chambers: How, I asked, could they live with themselves after that? Could there really be no judgment on them either from man or God? And you said, Only one judgment is passed on the executioner—from looking at his victim as other than human, he ceases to be human himself. He executes the human being inside his own self; he is his own executioner. But—no matter how hard the executioner tries to kill him—his victim remains a human being forever. Remember now?
“I understand now why I chose to become a cook, why I didn’t want to go on being the chairman of a collective farm. But I’ve told you about that already.
“When I look back now, I see the liquidation of the kulaks very differently. I’m no longer under a spell. I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. ‘They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash!’—that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating. And when I think about it all now, I wonder who first talked about kulak trash. Lenin? Was it really Lenin? How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. They are human beings. I can see now that we are all human beings.
“And so, at the beginning of 1930 they began dispossessing the families of the kulaks. The campaign was at its most frenzied in February and March. The district committee was hurrying everything on. They wanted every kulak out before the spring sowing. Then a new life would begin. We kept talking about our ‘first collective-farm spring.’
“The activist committees, of course, were in charge of the expulsions. But they had been given no detailed instructions. Some collective-farm chairmen gathered together so many carts that no one knew what to do with them. The ‘grasping kulaks’ didn’t have enough possessions to fill them, so they went off in half-empty carts. The kulaks from our village, on the other hand, were sent out on foot. They took only what they could carry on their own backs—blankets and clothing. The mud was so deep it kept sucking their boots off their feet. It was a terrible sight. There was a whole column of them and they kept looking around at their huts. They must still have been filled with the warmth from their own stoves. Heaven knows what they were going through. It was in those huts that they had been born. It was from those huts that they had given their daughters away in marriage. Their stoves were still burning—they had had to leave cabbage soup that was still only half cooked, milk that they hadn’t had time to drink. There was smoke coming out of their chimneys. The women were weeping, but they were too scared to howl. And what did we care? We were—activists. We could just as well have been driving a flock of geese down the road. And on a cart following behind them were Pelageya the blind woman, old Dmitry Ivanovich who hadn’t been out of his hut for ten years because of his legs, and Marusya the Fool, who had been kicked on the temple by a horse when she was still a child and who had been in a daze ever since.
“And in the district center there was no room in the prison. You couldn’t really call it a prison at all—just a lockup. And there were whole armies of kulaks—a column from every village. The cinema, the theater, the clubs, and the schools—all of them were turned into prisons. But people weren’t kept there for long. Soon they were taken to the station, where trains of empty freight wagons were waiting in the sidings. They were taken there under guard—grandfathers and grandmothers, women and children, all escorted by the police and the OGPU as if they were murderers. There were no fathers—the fathers, remember, had all been arrested a few months before. People whispered, ‘There go the kulaks.’ It was as if they were talking about wolves. Some people even shouted out curses at them—but the prisoners were no longer weeping, their faces were like stone...
“I myself didn’t see them being taken away in trains, but other people have told me what happened. Later, trying to escape the famine, there were fellow villagers who managed to join the kulaks in their settlements beyond the Urals. And a close friend sent me a letter. And there were people who escaped from their special settlements. I talked to two of them myself.
“They were transported in sealed freight wagons. Their belongings went separately. All they could take with them was the food they had in their hands. And at one station the fathers were all put on the train. That day there was great joy in the freight wagons, and great tears. The journey lasted more than a month—peasants were being taken from all over Russia and the railway lines were jammed with transport trains. There were no bed-boards in the cattle wagons. Everyone just slept on the floor, packed together. The sick, of course, died before they reached their destination. But still, people did at least get fed. At each of the main stations there were pails of gruel, and two hundred grams of bread per head.
“The guards were ordinary soldiers, not OGPU. They weren’t vicious—they simply treated the peasants like they were cattle. So my friend wrote in her letter.
“And I’ve heard what it was like when they finally got there, I heard from those who got away. Everyone was simply scattered about the taiga. If you were old or sick, if you couldn’t work, you were dropped off in a village in the forest. The village huts ended up as crowded as the cattle wagons had been. And everyone else was just put down in the middle of nowhere; they were left to fend for themselves on the snow. The weak froze to death. Those who were able to work began cutting down trees. They left the stumps where they were, pulled the trunks along the ground, and began building makeshift shelters. They worked without a break, almost without sleeping, so that their families wouldn’t freeze to death. Only later did they have time to build proper log huts—two-room huts, one family in each room. They built those huts straight on the moss, and they filled in the gaps between the logs with moss.
“Those who were fit for work were bought from the OGPU by State logging enterprises. The logging enterprises supplied them with all they needed for work, and with rations for their dependents. The huts they’d built were called a ‘labor settlement,’ and everything was supervised by a ‘commandant’ and by ‘foremen.’ They were paid, apparently, the same as local workers, though all their pay went into special books. Our people are strong, and soon they began to earn more than the locals. But they had to stay within bounds—either in the settlement itself or in the logging area. Later on, I heard, during the War, they were allowed to travel within the region. And after the War, heroes of labor could go outside the region. Some even received internal passports.
“As for those considered unfit for work, my friend said that they were formed into ‘labor colonies.’ These were supposed to be self-sufficient—they were just lent some seed and supplied with rations to keep people going until the first harvest. Otherwise the ‘colonies’ were much the same as the settlements—supervised by guards and a commandant. Later they were turned into cooperatives. There was still a commandant, but the peasants also had their own representatives.
“Meanwhile, back in the village, our new life began. Now that there were no more kulaks, everyone was forced to join the collective farm. There were meetings that lasted all night long—with endless cursing and
shouting. Some people were refusing to join; others said that they didn’t mind joining but that they weren’t going to give up their cows. Then came Stalin’s article in Pravda, ‘Dizziness from Success.’ Once again there was chaos. ‘But you can’t force us to join,’ people protested. ‘Stalin says so himself.’ People began writing declarations on scraps of newspaper, ‘I am leaving the collective to become an independent farmer.’ But after a while the authorities began forcing everyone to rejoin the collectives. As for the property left by the kulaks, most of it simply got stolen.
“And we all thought that no fate could be worse than that of the kulaks. How wrong we were. In the villages the ax fell on everyone—no one was big enough, or small enough, to be safe.
“This time it was execution by famine.
“By then I was a bookkeeper; I had moved on from washing floors. As an activist, I was sent to the Ukraine to ‘reinforce’ a collective farm. The spirit of private property, we were told, was more powerful there than in Russia. That’s as may be—but it’s certainly true that they were having a hard time of it, even harder than we were. I wasn’t sent far. Our own village was right on the border with the Ukraine, and this collective farm was less than three hours away. It was a beautiful place. And the people there were like people anywhere else. And so I became their bookkeeper.
“I think I learned about everything that was done there. It’s really not for nothing that that old man said I should have been a government minister. I only say this because I’m telling you everything—I’m not in the habit of boasting about myself. I could have kept all the accounts without even using paper—it was all there in my head. And when we had training sessions, when our troika had meetings or our bosses got drunk, I took in everything that was said.
“How did it all happen? After the dispossession of the kulaks, the area of land under cultivation dropped sharply, and so did the crop yield. But everyone kept reporting that without the kulaks, our life had immediately started to blossom. The village soviet lied to the district, the district to the province, and the province to Moscow. Everyone wanted Stalin to rejoice in the belief that a happy life had begun and the whole of his dominion would soon be awash with collective-farm grain. The time came for the first collective-farm harvest. Everything seemed in order. Moscow determined the quotas for grain deliveries from each province, and the provinces determined the quota for each district. And our village was given a quota it couldn’t have fulfilled in ten years. All the members of the village soviet were terrified; even the teetotalers took to drink. It was clear that Moscow had put all its hopes on the Ukraine. And so it was the Ukraine, above all, that then got the blame. Everyone understood very well: if you fail to fulfill the plan, you’re a kulak yourself—and you should have been liquidated long ago.