special settlements “The liquidation of the kulak as a class—dekulakization for short—was an integral component of collectivization and vital to its realization. Dekulakization was Stalin’s first Great Purge. It was a purge of the countryside: an endeavor to remove undesirable elements and to decapitate traditional village leadership and authority structures in order to break down village cohesion, minimize peasant resistance to collectivization, and intimidate the mass of the peasantry into compliance.” (Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 7.) Special settlements were not—legally—a form of imprisonment, but they were under the direct control of the OGPU. They were often just areas of uninhabited forest where kulaks were dumped and told to build shelter for themselves. From 1933 their importance diminished as the importance of the network of labor camps increased.
we are all human beings Robert Conquest writes, “The Party’s...rationale for everything done to the kulaks is summarized with exceptional frankness in a novel [by Ilya Ehrenburg] published in Moscow in 1934: ‘Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.’” ( The Harvest of Sorrow, 143.)
all their pay went into special books They were therefore only able to spend their pay in particular shops.
‘Dizziness from Success.’ On March 2, 1930, Stalin published in Pravda an important article, “Dizziness from Success,” that marked a partial and temporary retreat on his part.
they dug up vegetable gardens Robert Conquest writes, “Their technique consisted of beating people up and of using specially issued tools—steel rods about five-eighths of an inch in diameter and from three to ten feet long, with a handle at one end and a sharp point—or a sort of drill—at the other, to probe for grain.” ( The Harvest of Sorrow, 229.) And Conquest quotes from a memoir by a former activist, Lev Kopelev: “I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it.” ( The Harvest of Sorrow, 233.)
subkulak parasites Peasants who were considered hostile to collectivization, but who were too poor to be considered kulaks, were labeled “subkulaks.”
one big show Grossman is alluding to a visit made to the Ukraine in late summer of 1933 by the French radical leader Edouard Herriot. Conquest quotes the following account of the preparations made to receive Herriot at a collective farm near Kiev: “A special meeting of the regional party organization was held in Kiev for the purpose of transforming this collective farm into a ‘Potemkin village’...experienced agronomists were made into brigade members of the farm....Furniture from the regional theatre in Brovary was brought, and the clubrooms beautifully appointed with it. Curtains and drapes were brought from Kiev, also tablecloths. One wing was turned into a dining-hall, the tables of which were covered with new cloths and decorated with flowers. The regional telephone exchange, and the switchboard operator, were transferred from Brovary to the farm. Some steers and hogs were slaughtered to provide plenty of meat. A supply of beer was also brought in. All the corpses and starving peasants were removed from the highways in the surrounding countryside and the peasants were forbidden to leave their houses. A mass meeting of collective farm workers was called, and they were told that a motion picture would be made of collective farm life, and for this purpose this particular farm had been chosen by a film-studio from Odessa. Only those who were chosen to play in the picture would turn out for work, the rest of the members must stay at home and not interfere.” ( The Harvest of Sorrow, 314–15.) Not all foreigners, however, were duped. As Malcolm Muggeridge reported in the early summer of 1933: “On a recent visit to the Northern Caucasus and the Ukraine, I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and the peasants. The battlefield is as desolate as in any war and stretches wider; stretches over a large part of Russia. On the one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldier members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.” (Quoted in The Harvest of Sorrow, 260.)
on the stove A Russian stove was a large brick or clay structure taking up between one-fifth and one-quarter of the room it stood in. Sleeping places were often arranged in relation to it. Sometimes a sleeping bench was attached to one side of it; sometimes people slept on a wide shelf above it; often people slept directly on the warm brick surface of the stove itself.
The whole village had died “Of a Ukrainian farm population of between twenty and twenty-five million, about five million died—a quarter to a fifth. The casualty rate varied considerably by area and even village, from 10% to 100%....Time after time, officials tell of entering villages with few or no survivors, and seeing the dead in their houses. In villages of 3,000–4,000 people...only 45–80 were left.” (Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 249–51.) Tim Snyder’s estimate for the number of deaths in the Ukraine is three and a half million. (“The Real, Ignored Holocaust” in The New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009.)
chalked on your back The translator and editor Natasha Perova has written of the queues she remembers from her own postwar childhood: “There were activists who supervised the queue and wrote numbers on your palm with an indelible pencil. There were also roll calls from time to time. Sometimes someone’s number would get erased accidentally. That was a tragedy. Then they started writing numbers on people’s arms or elbows to keep them safe. In some queues they chalked numbers on backs to prevent cheating, but that was rare.” (Personal correspondence.)
people stripped of their civic rights That is, those who had been designated as belonging to the category of citizens “deprived of rights which they have used to the detriment of the Socialist Revolution.”
bread rings Similar to Italian bread sticks, but in the shape of small rings.
Lefortovo An important Moscow pre-trial prison. In the late 1930s it was notorious for the tortures carried out there. During these years, the corridors and cells were painted black.
numerus clausus An 1887 decree limiting the number of Jews allowed to study in Russian universities. The proportion of Jewish students was limited to 10 percent in cities where Jews had the right to live, 5 percent in other cities, and 3 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These restrictions were removed after the 1917 revolution.
Pale of Settlement The area along Russia’s western border in which Jews were allowed to live. Comprising around 20 percent of the territory of European Russia, the Pale existed from 1791 until 1917 and included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, and Ukraine, as well as parts of western Russia. Jews were, with certain exceptions, forbidden to live elsewhere in the Russian Empire.
district and provincial Chekas; of RevKoms, UKoms, and GubProdKoms; of KomBeds, PolitProsvets, and SovNarKhozes That is, of district-level and provincial-level security organs; of Revolutionary Committees, Regional Committees, and Provincial Provisions and Foodstuffs Committees; of Committees of the Poor, Political Enlightenment Organizations, and Soviets for the National Economy.
Socialism in One Country This theory—that it was no longer necessary to encourage revolution in the capitalist countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone—was first articulated in 1924 by Bukharin. It was only then taken up by Stalin.
Moscow Tailoring Combine Clothes produced by this factory were notoriously ugly. The poet Osip Mandelstam declared ironically during the 1930s, “I am a man of the epoch of
the Moscow Tailoring Combine.”
Golden Library and on the adventure stories of Louis Boussenard The Golden Library was a famous series of classics for young people, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Louis Boussenard (1847–1911) wrote popular adventure novels somewhat in the manner of Jules Verne.
Talmud Torah schools A form of primary school, dating back to the first century of the Common Era, for Jewish boys of modest backgrounds. They were given an elementary education in Hebrew, the Torah, and the Talmud.
everything is real and rational An allusion to Hegel’s famous dictum, much discussed in Russian radical circles during the nineteenth century, that “everything that is rational is real and everything that is real is rational.”
voluntary working Saturdays There was a tradition in the Soviet Union of voluntary working Saturdays ( subbotniki ). Lenin himself participated in the first all-Russian subbotnik (May 1, 1920), helping to remove building rubble from the Kremlin. These voluntary working Saturdays soon ceased to be voluntary—if they ever were.
set Russia on a new path During the June 1917 Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, the Menshevik minister Irakli Tsereteli said that Russia could achieve democracy and victory in the war only if the different political parties cooperated. To his assertion that there was no single party that could take power and maintain order in Russia, Lenin famously declared from the back of the hall, “There is such a party. It is the Bolshevik Party!” To most of those present, Lenin’s statement seemed absurd. The Bolsheviks had 105 delegates; the other parties, between them, had 822.
listened to the Appassionata Lenin said that he once wept after listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata. He famously went on to say that “a revolutionary cannot afford to give way to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat his enemies on the head instead of fighting them mercilessly.” (Slavoj Zizek, Revolution at the Gates [London: Verso, 2002], 197.)
Lenin’s unfinished portrait The lines Grossman quotes are from a once well-known poem by Nikolay Gavrilovich Poletaev (1889–1935). Poletaev is now all but forgotten.
author of one memoir about Lenin Grossman is referring to the author Maria Moiseyevna Essen (1872–1956).
law of the Gospel of Christ This quote is from a famous speech given by Dostoevsky in June 1880, at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow.
the bridges thunder Grossman goes on to refer several times to this famous passage from the end of the first part of Gogol’s Dead Souls (translated by Donald Rayfield [London: Garnett Press, 2008], 267–68):
And what Russian does not enjoy riding fast? How can his soul, which feels the urge to whirl, to take the bit in his mouth, to say sometimes, “The devil take the hindmost,” how can his soul not love riding fast?...Oh, the troika of three horses and a carriage: bird-like troika, who invented you?...Russia, are you not also like the bold troika which no-one can overtake? The road is a cloud of smoke under your wheels, the bridges thunder, everything lags behind and is stranded in the rear. The beholder stops, struck by a divine miracle: is this a bolt of lightning from heaven? What does this awe-inspiring movement mean? What sort of unknown force propels these horses which the world has never seen before? Oh, horses, horses, what horses! Does the howling gale have its source in your manes? Is there a keen ear burning on your every sinew? You have caught the sound of a familiar song on high, you have girded your bronze chests together as one and, your hooves barely touching the ground, you have been transformed into just endless lines flying through the air, and the whole troika flies, inspired by God!...Russia, where are you hurtling to? Give an answer! There is no answer. The bell peals with a wonderful ringing; the air, ripped to pieces, roars and becomes wind; everything that exists on earth flies past, and other nations and empires look askance and stand back to make way for the troika.
our entire history Like the passage Grossman quotes a few lines above, this is from Chaadaev’s letter to A. de Sircour of June 15, 1846.
move from one landlord to another There are two festivals of St. Yury (St. George) in the Orthodox calendar, in the spring and in the autumn. Autumn Yury’s Day, celebrated on November 26, when the harvest has been completed, had a special importance. A Code of Law introduced in 1497 by Ivan III established the two-week period around Autumn Yury’s Day (one week before the feast and one week after it), as the only time of the year when a peasant was free to move from one landowner to another. A century later, Boris Godunov annulled this freedom, thus finalizing the evolution of serfdom.
And still more sternly carry on his cause From “Lenin,” by Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925). “Lenin” is part of a longer poem, Gulyay-polye, written in 1924 (the year of Lenin’s death) .
“party of a new type” Lenin first used this phrase in 1903. He meant by it that the party would be a disciplined, quasi-military organization—not merely an association of more or less like-minded people.
“Little Apple” and “The Fried Chicken,” “The Fried Chicken” describes how a fried chicken, walking down Nevsky Prospekt, is stopped by the police. Unable to produce his passport or pay a bribe, he is torn to pieces. The last line of the song is “But chickens want to live too!” “Little Apple” is another street song from the same period.
Proletkult A portmanteau of proletarskaya kultura (proletarian culture). This movement, active in the early Soviet Union, aimed to provide the foundation for a truly proletarian art, free from bourgeois influence. Its main theoretician, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928), saw the proletkult as the third part of a revolutionary trinity. While the unions attended to the proletariat’s economic interests and the Communist Party to their political interests, the proletkult would care for their cultural and spiritual life.
boyars The old Russian nobility.
oprichniki The unofficial private army of Ivan the Terrible, used to destroy the power of the boyars, or old nobility. The oprichniki rode black horses, each with a dog’s head and a broom attached to his saddle—a reminder that their duty was “to bite the enemies of the tsar and sweep away treason.”
gravedigger of freedom Grossman is probably alluding to the following passage of The Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
Chronology
1547 – 84 Reign of Ivan the Terrible
1584–1605 Boris Godunov rules Russia; after his death, the country sinks into the period of confusion known as the Time of Troubles
1703 Peter the Great founds St. Petersburg
1762 – 96 Reign of Catherine the Great
1825 Decembrist Revolt: an unsuccessful coup by liberal members of the aristocracy; Tsar Nicholas I comes to the throne
1842 Publication of Gogol’s Dead Souls
1861 Emancipation of the serfs
1881 Alexander II assassinated by members of The People’s Will
1891 Beginning of construction of Trans-Siberian Railway
1905 Birth of Vasily Semyonovich Grossman
1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicates after February Revolution; workers’ soviets (councils) are set up in Petrograd and Moscow; Lenin and his Bolshevik Party seize power in the October Revolution
1918 – 21 Russian Civil War, accompanied by the draconian economic policies known as War Communism; although there were many different factions, the two main forces were the Red Army (Communists) and the White Army (anti-Communists); foreign powers also intervened, to little effect, and millions perished before the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the Whites in 1920 ; smaller battles continued for several years
1921 After an uprising in March by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, Lenin made a tactical retreat, introducing the at least relatively liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted until 1928 ; many of the more idealistic Communists saw this as a step backward, as a shameful compromise with the forces of capitalism; the NEP was not, however, accompanie
d by any political liberalization
1924 Death of Lenin; Petrograd is renamed Leningrad; Stalin begins to take power
1928 – 1937 The first and second of Stalin’s five-year plans bring about a remarkable increase in the production of coal, iron, and steel
1929 Collectivization of agriculture begins
1932–33 Between three to five million peasants die in the Terror Famine in Ukraine
1934 Foundation of Union of Soviet Writers; Grossman publishes the story “In the Town of Berdichev” and the novel Glyukauf, about the life of the Donbass miners
1934–39 The Great Purges; at least a million people are shot and several million sent to the Gulag
1939 Stalin–Hitler pact; beginning of Second World War
1941 Hitler invades the Soviet Union; Leningrad is blockaded and Moscow under threat; Grossman begins to work as a war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda (the Red Army newspaper)
1945 End of Second World War
1946 Andrey Zhdanov, then seen as a possible heir to Stalin, tightens control over the arts
1948 Trofim Lysenko becomes more dominant than ever in Soviet biology, and especially agriculture; genetics is officially declared a bourgeois pseudoscience; around three thousand biologists are fired from their jobs and many are arrested
1953 January 13: Publication of article in Pravda about the Jewish Killer Doctors; preparations continue for a purge of Soviet Jews; Grossman’s recently published novel, For a Just Cause, is fiercely attacked; March 5: Death of Stalin; April 4: Official acknowledgment that the case against the Killer Doctors was entirely false
1956 Khrushchev denounces Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress; millions of prisoners are released from the camps; start of a more liberal period known as “The Thaw”