Name: The Harvest of Sorrow
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Robert Conquest

5 (Perfeito)

The destruction of Ukraine by the Russians was not a swift process, nor a continuous one, let alone something not planned by the State. There are many evidences that the government knew exactly what was doing. The attack on peasants can be divided in a few stages: 1- The Civil War of 1920-1 2- The NEP 3- The dekulakization ordered by Stalin in 1927 4- The war on kulaks that were already in kolkhozes Before the Revolution, additionally to the work in farms, the peasants also engaged in side-work (varying from 12% to 44% of their income). 1/3 of the commercial and industrial establishments in Moscow were owned by them. However, few owned the land, most leased from landlords. There were reforms to consolidate land into continuous property, but they were aborted by the 1917 revolution. In the beginning of the Revolution, the Russian revolutionaries already started attacking the nationality of Ukraine. Twice they tried to impose a government that curbed their language and culture. Twice they failed. In the third time they accepted their autonomy and leaders, although temporarily. Sverdlov, to the Central Executive Committee in May 1918: "We must place before ourselves most seriously the problem of dividing the village by classes, of creating in it two opposite hostile camps, seeing the poorest layers of the population against kulak elements. Only if we are able to split the village into two camps, to arouse there the same class war as in the cities, only then we will achieve in the villages what we achieved in the cities". In May 1918, the government defined that surplus grain was the double of peasants needs. They changed it in January 1919, by the more fluid “state needs”. The requisitions started in order to break the peasants. They were met with resistance. Villagers had solidarity with each other. So Lenin sent city dwellers to populate the village soviets, trying to dilute the votes. Facing the brink of destruction, the government adopted the NEP. They later on disguised it "scientifically" by saying they needed to first have some capitalism to later on reach socialism. Naturally the taxes were extremely high, disguising the “requisition”. The "left" (Preobrazhensky) and the "right" (Bukharin) of the Bolshevik party only differentiated themselves on the extent of terror needed to reach socialism and duration of NEP. The left wanted to actively foster industrialization using resources from the peasants. The right felt that socialist economy was more efficient than market economy, and preferred prudence: moving to socialism via cooperatives. Originally, the Kulak word described the lender of money to peasants. It then evolved to a broad definition of rich peasant. Not even the Soviet government could define it properly. If using the definitions they later set (having hired employees and certain assets, like cows) 3-5% of the peasant households were kulaks, responsible for 20% of the grain production. Poor peasants was even harder to define. They agreed on that those who were poor were those who not owned horses. Then came the Second Attack on Kulaks, ordered by Stalin, in 1927. Not even the poor peasant sided with the government, as they saw in the kulaks the example to be followed. During that period, Soviet statistics already have shown that most kulaks were ruined by taxation and requisition. It was indeed a war on any element that seemed to have opposed the new order. It is estimated that 400 million roubles were confiscated from the kulaks (170-400 per household, about $90-$210 at the official exchange rate). This is a meager number, indicative of how poor they were: "He has a sick wife, five children and not a crumb of bread in the house. And that's what we call a kulak! The kids are in rags and tatters. They all look like ghosts. I saw the pot on the oven - a few potatoes in water. That was their supper tonight". The average income of the kulak was lower than the income of the official persecuting them. And the cost of deportation was probably higher than the income from confiscation. The government has defined 3 categories of kulak: 1: Those to be shot or imprisoned. Quota maximum 63.000, decided by local OGPU. Actual number: 100.000 2: Families of group 1. Exile. No more than 150.000 households. 3: Loyal. Should be sent to kolkhoz. Total of all 3 categories: 1.065.000 families. Plan was to dekulak 4-5% of farms. Numbers reached 15-20%, which amounted to more than 7 million people. The fate of kulaks varied in cruelty and terror: deportation to wilderness, arrests followed by shootings (sometimes 100/day in some jails), deliberate pillaging of property, locals were arrested if tried to help… Even women rebellions occurred, the “Babsky bunty”: They traditionally relied on cow's milk and they tended the farm animals, so they demanded their property back. There were massive rebellions against the collectivization, so the Soviet government even used artillery to destroy them. Even though, collective farms collapsed in some areas, like in Southern Ukraine. At first, peasants sold their cattle before going to kolkhoz. But then they started slaughtering them: 42.6% of the cattle was lost, as well as 65.1% of the sheep (numbers told in the XVII party congress in 1934). The kolkhoz had all the incentives to NOT produce anything: incompetent managers who often get drunk; soil not properly cared for; animals not fed; plants not reaped; etc. Stalin said that the kulak may have been defeated but not exterminated. Therefore, the class war must happen within the kolkhoz, and so it begins the genocide. Grain requisition was based on "maximum yield of total acreage". Goals were therefore impossible high, and party members said that if the peasant wants to starve the party then they should starve them instead. Even not when grain collection was at 41% and people dying Moscow relaxed the goal. In one Ukrainian village an activist describes operations. "In some cases they would be merciful and leave some potatoes, peas corn for feeding the family. But the stricter ones would make a clean sweep. They would take not only the food and livestock, but also "all valuables and surpluses of clothing", including icons in their frames, samovars, painted carpets and even metal kitchen utensils which might be silver. And any money they found stashed away" The agents of State and Party did not, of course, suffer the famine: "Almost all the people in our village are swollen with hunger except for the head of the collective, the brigadiers and the activists". A woman seven months pregnant in Kharsyn village, Poltava province, was caught plucking spring wheat, and beaten with a board, dying soon afterwards. In Mala Berezhanka, Kiev province, the head of the village Soviet shot seven people in the act of plucking grain, three of them children of fourteen and fifteen (two boys and one girl). Brigades would now make complete formal searches every couple of weeks. Even peas, potatoes and beetroots were finally taken. It aroused suspicion not to be in a starving state. One activist recalls: "I heard the children...choking, coughing with screams. And I saw the looks of men: frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad, daring ferocity". Another tells of how 'babki', a game with cattlebones, played by the children from time immemorial, died out when all the old bones were streamed in cauldrons, ground up and eaten. Yet another tells of a village (not in Ukraine) that 'cattle died for lack of fodder, people ate bread made from nettles, biscuits made from one weed, porridge made from another'. Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat. The peasants were usually infuriated into revolt by the fact that there was grain available to feed them, often within miles of where they starved. In Tsarist times, when lesser famines raged, every effort had been made to help. As a Soviet novelist writes of 1932-3, 'Old people recalled what the famine had been like under Czar Nicholas. They had been helped then. They had been lent foo. The peasants went to the cities to beg "in the name of Christ". Soup kitchens were opened to feed them, and students collected donations. And here, under the government of workers and peasants, not even one kernel of grain was given them'. For not all the grain was exported or sent to the cities or the army. Local granaries held stocks of "State reserves". These were for emergencies, such as war: the famine itself was not a sufficient occasion for their release. The warehouses in the Poltava province are described as 'almost bursting' with grain. Rebellions still existed, but they were extreme cases, when people seized grains, torched crops, killed party secretaries but were then arrested, shot and sentenced 5 or 10 years. The regular thing to do was to flee to the cities, try going to Romania (also shot at the border) or get bread from Russia and return to Ukraine (bread was seized again at the border). The Ukrainian authorities knew that the famine was happening. Chubar, Khatayevich, Zatonsky, Demchenko, Terekhov, Petrovsky were all in the countryside and saw the situation. Chubar words in a Kiev conference of the government: "the government is aware of this, but cannot help it". Petrovsky told the peasants that would report to Moscow, but never did so. Moscow also knew, as Molotov visited Ukraine in 1932 and reported that district officials told him that there was no grain and the peasants were starving. Therekov, First Secretary of Kharkov Provincial Committee, told Stalin that famine was raging. He was dismissed as a storyteller. Stalin's wife (Nadezhda Alliluyeva) told him! It was dismissed as Trotskyite rumor. The Soviet government official story was that the famine never happened. And they recruited western journalists to spread this lie, like Bernard Shaw and the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty. If foreigners on diplomatic missions visited the USSR, the government would first "prepare" the visit to them. Dead and beggars were removed and sent miles away without permission to return. Activists and Komsomol people were sent to "populate" the area. New employees were recruited and given new uniforms and tools. Food was displayed in store but the locals were forbidden to buy. In 1938, private plots were responsible for 21.5% of the total Soviet production, occupying only 3.8% of the cultivated land. Since the private plots were more productive, the Government had to assign private inspectors to check if peasants were working at their lots instead of at the kolkhoz. Via taxation, the government got 37.25% of the meat, 34.5% of the milk and butter, and 93.5% of the eggs that it got from the entire kolkhoz/sovkhoz system. No “requisitions” were ever made, because Ukraine had already been destroyed.

The Harvest of Sorrow - Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

Robert Conquest

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