1958 Publication abroad of Doctor Zhivago ; under pressure from Soviet authorities, Pasternak declines to accept the Nobel Prize
1961 The KGB confiscates the manuscript of Grossman’s Life and Fate
1962 Publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1964 Fall of Khrushchev. Death of Vasily Grossman.
1974 Solzhenitsyn deported after publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago
1985 Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power; beginning of the period of liberal reforms known as perestroika; the next few years see the first publication in Russia of Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and of important works by Krzhizhanovsky, Platonov, Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn and many others.
1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union
A Note On Collectivization and the Terror Famine
These events are so tragic, and so vast, that they can seem entirely beyond understanding. Even Stalin’s Great Purges of 1934–39 are easier to understand; they were a successful attempt on Stalin’s part to destroy, or terrify into submission, any members of the Soviet elite who might conceivably oppose him. It is harder to understand why a ruler should choose to destroy a huge part of the peasantry that had, until then, produced much of the nation’s wealth.
What blinds us, perhaps, is the Soviet emblem—the hammer (representing the workers) and the sickle (representing the peasants). The Soviet government referred to itself as a “workers’ and peasants’ government”—and we have been too ready to believe them. In actual fact, few of the Bolsheviks ever seem to have had much sympathy with the peasants. Most of them probably felt much the same as Lenin’s friend, Maksim Gorky, who once declared, “You’ll pardon my saying so, but the peasant is not yet human...He’s our enemy, our enemy.” In 1917 Lenin had done his best to buy the support of the peasants with his slogan “Peace, Bread, and Land”; he had encouraged peasants to seize their landlords’ estates and burn down their houses. Nevertheless, even then, the peasants had voted not for the Bolsheviks but for the Socialist Revolutionaries, whom they rightly saw as more likely to represent their interests. And after 1917, after encouraging the peasants to rise up against their landlords and therefore destabilize the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks found themselves having to fight a fifteen-year war—with an uneasy truce in the mid-1920s—in order to reassert the power of the central government. The Bolsheviks saw the peasants not only as subhuman but also as wily proto-capitalists whose whole way of life threatened their cherished project of a strong, centrally planned State.
The first measure Stalin took was to collectivize the peasants, to destroy the independence of the individual peasants. Collectivization was imposed throughout the entire Soviet Union. Stalin’s second measure was directed primarily against the Ukraine; Ukrainian peasants were, for the main part, wealthier, and their opposition to collectivization was particularly strong. The story of the Ukrainian famine is still not widely known, even though Robert Conquest told it more than twenty years ago in The Harvest of Sorrow. I am grateful to Donald Rayfield for allowing me to include the following paragraphs to provide some general background to Grossman’s own painfully vivid account.[1]
A famine which struck all the grain-producing areas of European Russia, and especially Ukraine, reached a climax in the summer of 1933. It began years earlier, however, when Stalin in the winter of 1929 and 1930 dispossessed, exiled and killed millions of the more prosperous peasants and harassed the remaining peasantry into surrendering land, animals and tools into collective farms; it was made inevitable in the second and final wave of collectivization in the winter of 1930–1931, when a disorganized and disillusioned peasantry was effectively enslaved. This achievement Stalin proclaimed to a congress of peasants in February 1933 to be one “such as the world has never known before and which no other state in the world has tried to achieve.” At the same time Stalin and his henchmen resolved to industrialize the Soviet Union by selling grain in order to buy machinery from America, Britain and Germany.
By June 1932, as a result of grain confiscation—khlebzagotovka, compulsory targets for grain to be delivered to the state—the Ukrainian countryside was already starving. The Secretary of the Ukrainian party, Stanislav Kosior, received letters from young communists, horrified to see, as they put it, “collective farmers go to the fields and vanish and a few days later the corpse is found and...the next day they find the corpse of the man who buried the first one.”
The peasants’ attempts to evade grain confiscation or to glean grain from the field were severely punished. The Soviet secret police, OGPU, under the personal supervision of its ailing head, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and its ambitious deputy, Genrikh Yagoda, represented in Ukraine by Karl Karlson, monitored the situation and sent squads of men to enforce the containment of the starving peasantry, to punish (or occasionally to condone) cannibalism, and to keep the foreign press away from the countryside. They kept a tally, wherever they could, of deaths, as well as calculating how little food was left in what used to be Europe’s breadbasket. Their statistics are one of the foundations for calculating the size of the catastrophe that ensued.
Our sources of information are varied and none are comprehensive or, in themselves, conclusive. Contemporary sources include letters to relatives abroad (Soviet post offices still accepted such letters until 1935), letters to newspapers (which were then passed on to the secret police), and statistics from registry offices, which in most famine-struck areas soon gave up registering deaths. They also include tallies kept for certain months in some areas by OGPU itself, and of course correspondence between party leaders, which was classified until the 1990s. A very few testimonies came from foreign journalists and diplomats, ingenious enough to evade the bans on travel and honest enough to publish stories that were often as unpalatable to their readers in the West as to the Soviet authorities. Later sources for judging the extent of the catastrophe come first from the census figures of 1937, when a deficit of several million in the predicted population of the USSR had to be concealed. In post-Soviet times demographers have been free to look at the age structure of the population and of its mortality in Ukraine before and after the famine, to extrapolate for the Ukrainian countryside as a whole from data for a few areas or a few months the numbers of deaths over the famine period.
For Ukrainian famine areas, the death toll from famine in 1932–1933 appears to depend on the methodology and trustworthiness of the demographer involved. One objective fact is that in 1939 there were 28 million Ukrainians, compared with 31 million in 1926, at a time when (barring famine) the birth rate was often twice the death rate. Deaths are calculated on this basis at anywhere between 2.4 and 4 million. More sophisticated studies give a figure nearer to 5 million. OGPU’s tally from December 1932 to mid-April 1933 give a figure of 2.4 million deaths from famine and cannibalism; by extrapolating these figures for the whole of the famine period, we get a plausible figure of over 7 million deaths. Even the Soviet census figures for 1939 indicate a catastrophe: whereas Ukraine in 1928 had 420,000 deaths and 985,000 births, in 1933 it recorded 1,582,000 deaths and only 34,000 births. Secret figures for the Ukrainian countryside show deaths rising from an acceptable 15,100 in January 1932 to a monstrous 196,200 in June 1932, not stabilizing to 12,000 (in a now much smaller population) until the end of 1934.
Thus, nobody can deny that, in the absence of war or severe droughts, a man-made catastrophe taking the lives of millions of Ukrainian peasants occurred. Because of the absence of full records, because death from starvation is not as easily defined as death from a bullet or in a gas chamber, since it may be disguised as dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis or suicide, and because it is impossible to say how many more people should have existed in 1934 who didn’t, we shall never be able to determine the exact figure, but clearly it is of the same order as the catastrophe that struck Europe’s Jews in 1942–1945 or Cambodia’s population in 1975–1979.
Mass murder, of course, requires intent, or at
the very least the obvious prospect of death as a secondary result of the murderer’s actions. The figures for grain production and for grain confiscation in Ukraine, there is no doubt, were fully available to Stalin and Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoyan, Menzhinsky, and Yagoda, the henchmen most responsible for overseeing the Ukrainian famine, and could by simple subtraction only have led them to conclude that millions would die in these areas. Stalin himself deliberately toured the lower Volga area in August 1933, just after the climax of the famine, and saw for himself, without the slightest regret, what he had done. The correspondence of the Politburo members reveals a full awareness and determination to see the whole process through to the bitter end.
Some of today’s neo-Stalinists will admit this, but justify it on the grounds that (a) the grain was needed as the sole means for purchasing modern technology and (b) industrialization was essential to build a Soviet Union strong and well-armed enough to save itself from its enemies. The most cynical neo-Stalinists might add that there was a problem of surplus peasantry in Russia, a problem solved a century earlier by similar famines in countries such as Ireland, or elsewhere, as in Scandinavia, by mass emigration, and that one quick famine was preferable to many more decades of malnutrition. All these arguments are, of course, indefensible: the near defeat of the USSR by Nazi Germany shows that forced industrialization did not save the Soviet Union, so much as the desperation of its people and the help of the Allies. And the state of agriculture in post-Soviet societies is no argument for the murder of so many peasants. Were any of the perpetrators of the famine alive and available for trial, they would therefore have no defence in law against a charge of mass murder.
[1]Rayfield’s article, “The Ukrainian Famine of 1933: Man-made Catastrophe, Mass Murder, or Genocide?”, is included in full in Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston, Canada: Kashtan Press, 2008) 87–93.
People and Political Organizations
Abakumov, Viktor Semyonovich (1908–1954): Head of the MGB (formerly known as the NKVD, later as the KGB) from 1946 to 1951. He directed the 1949 purge known as the Leningrad Affair. He was arrested before Stalin’s death “for lack of zeal in combating the Doctors’ Plot.” After Stalin’s death, he was accused of complicity with Beria, although in fact he and Beria were rivals, and executed.
Avvakum (c. 1621–1682): Russian priest who led the opposition to Patriarch Nikon’s reform of Russian Orthodox rituals. He was imprisoned, exiled, and finally burned at the stake. His autobiography, written in a vivid, conversational Russian, is considered a masterpiece.
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814–1876): Along with Prince Kropotkin, the most important Russian anarchist; an opponent of Marx.
Bandera, Stepan Andriyovych (1909–1959): One of the leading figures in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a Ukrainian political movement created in 1929 with the aim of establishing an independent Ukrainian state. The military wing of the OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, created in 1942, was a major Ukrainian armed resistance movement.
Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich (1811–1848): The most important nineteenth-century Russian literary critic; a radical and a Westernizer.
Benckendorff, Count Aleksandr Khristoforovich (1783–1844): A Russian statesman, now best remembered for having established the Third Section—a secret police force—under Nicholas I and for having been, in effect, Pushkin’s personal censor.
Beria, Lavrenty Pavlovich (1899–1953): Head of the NKVD from November 1938 until December 1945, after which he was deputy prime minister until Stalin’s death. During the first months after Stalin’s death, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev formed a ruling troika. In June 1953, however, Beria was arrested, and in December he was executed.
Bernstein, Eduard (1850–1932): An important German Social Democrat, the founder of the reformist, nonrevolutionary current of socialism known as evolutionary socialism.
Blok, Alexandr (1880–1921): The finest of the Russian symbolist poets, referred to by Anna Akhmatova as “the tragic tenor of the epoch.”
Bolshevik: In 1903, the Russian Social Democrat Party, a Marxist party founded in 1898, split into two factions: the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks, led by Martov. Bolshevik means “majority,” and Menshevik means “minority,” but these names are deceptive—the Bolsheviks were, in fact, the smaller faction. They astutely managed to acquire their more impressive name as a result of winning one particular vote, relating to the composition of the editorial board of Iskra, the party’s main organ.
Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600): An Italian occult philosopher and cosmologist. Burned at the stake by the Inquisition, Bruno is sometimes seen as one of the first martyrs for science. He was remarkable for both his intelligence and his courage. In Russian culture, however, his name has become a byword for fanaticism; he has often been contrasted with Galileo, who was, of course, more ready to compromise.
Budyonny, Semyon Mikhailovich (1883–1973): A civil war hero and ally of Stalin.
Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich (1888–1938): One of the most important of the Old Bolsheviks. In 1926 Bukharin became president of the Communist International, or Comintern. From 1926 to mid-1928 Bukharin was an ally of Stalin; it was Bukharin who first outlined the Stalinist theory of Socialism in One Country. According to this theory, it was no longer necessary to encourage revolution in the capitalist countries, since Russia could and should achieve socialism alone. From mid-1928, Bukharin opposed Stalin’s program of crash industrialization and forced collectivization, supporting a continuation of the more liberal policies (the New Economic Policy) that had been in force since 1924. Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in late 1929; he and his supporters were by then known as the Right Opposition, or Right Deviationists. In 1934 Bukharin was “rehabilitated” by Stalin and appointed editor of Izvestiya. Bukharin was arrested in 1937 and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. He was tried in March 1938, in the last of the Moscow Trials, and executed soon afterward.
Bulgakov, Sergey Nikolaevich (1871–1944): A Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and economist. After a period as a Marxist, he returned to Orthodoxy and, in 1903, published From Marxism to Idealism. He published another important book, Unfading Light, in 1917 and was ordained as a priest in 1918. After rising to prominence in church circles, he was expelled from Russia in late 1922.
Catherine the Great (1729–1796): Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796. Marrying into the Russian Imperial family, she came to power with the deposition of her husband, Peter III, and presided over a period of growth in Russian influence and culture. During her reign the Russian Empire expanded southward and westward at the expense of both the Ottoman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. She wanted to be seen as an enlightened despot and corresponded regularly with Voltaire. At the same time, however, she did more to tie the Russian serf to his land and to his lord than any sovereign since Boris Godunov.
Chaadaev, Pyotr Yakovlevich (1794–1856): An important Russian writer and thinker. His Philosophical Letters are highly critical of Russia’s intellectual isolation and social backwardness. Only the first of these letters was published during his lifetime; the others circulated in manuscript. This first letter began the long battle, so important in nineteenth-century Russian thought, between the Westerners and the Slavophiles.
Chapaev, Vasily Ivanovich (1887–1919): A Russian Civil War hero. Chapaev is the title of a famous 1934 film based on his exploits. He is also the subject of countless Soviet jokes.
Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich (1873–1952): A founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Minister for agriculture in the provisional government in 1917, and chairman of the Constituent Assembly before it was disbanded by the Bolsheviks in January 1918.
Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich (1828–1889): Revolutionary writer and philosopher, the founder of the populist movement, and an important influence on Lenin. In 1862, after being arrested and
imprisoned, he wrote the novel What Is to Be Done? This was an important inspiration for Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries. The hero is ascetic and ruthlessly disciplined; in order to develop strength for his work as a revolutionary, he sleeps on a bed of nails and eats only meat.
Chichibabin, Aleksey Yevgenyevich (1871–1945): An important chemist who won the Lenin Prize in 1926. After being allowed to go to Paris in 1930, he defected and chose to remain there.
Comintern: The Communist International (also known as the Third International) was an international organization founded in Moscow in March 1919. Its aim was to fight “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.” The Comintern held seven World Congresses altogether—the last was in 1935—but it had lost its importance by the late 1920s. It was officially dissolved in 1943.
Constituent Assembly: A democratically elected constitutional body convened after the October Revolution. It met for thirteen hours on January 5 and 6, 1918, before being dissolved by the Bolsheviks, who had won only about a quarter of the overall vote. The Bolsheviks had 168 deputies; the Socialist Revolutionaries around twice as many.
Cunow, Heinrich (1862–1936): A German Social Democrat theoretician, critical of Marx.
Degaev, Sergey (1857–1920): An active member of the People’s Will, and at the same time an agent for the tsarist secret police, or Okhranka . He betrayed several important revolutionaries. He admitted his guilt after being questioned by his comrades and was ordered, under threat of death, to assassinate Colonel Sudeikin, the head of the Okhranka. After assassinating Sudeikin in 1883, he emigrated to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life under a false name.