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Book Review by Michael R. Marrus
Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
December 20, 1986
Stalin's war against the Soviet people during the thirties slipped out of
the consciousness of the West almost as soon as the gruesome details were
reported, and eventually this particular page of infamy, while vaguely
known, has been supplanted in the public consciousness by the crimes of
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Yet it is well to remember, as Robert
Conquest's powerful book obliges us to do, that the forced collectivization
of agriculture decreed by the Soviet master and his party likely cost the
lives of more people than perished in all countries as a result of the First
World War. According to Conquest, extrapolating plausibly from Soviet
statistics, the toll may be an almost unthinkable 14.5 million - some 11
million peasants killed, the majority from the Ukraine, with 3.5 million
arrested and dying later in camps. Underscoring the particularly
devastating impact upon the Ukraine, Conquest estimates that the dead from
the accompanying man-made famine alone approach 5 million, almost 20 per
cent of the entire population of Soviet Ukraine.
What began this tidal wave of killing was a deep unease on the part of
Josef Stalin and the Soviet leadership in 1928, who feared that they were
about to face a severe grain shortage. In hindsight, we can see how
distorted were the perceptions in Moscow of this supposed agricultural
shortfall, and how ignorant were so many of the bureaucrats who misjudged
the economic performance of the rural population. But deeply suspicious of
the peasantry under the best of circumstances, and unhappy with previous
failures to end individual farming and a rural market economy, Stalin and
the party were ready to use force to transform the economic foundation of
Soviet society.
At the end of 1929, the Kremlin decreed that millions of peasants from
individually owned farms would be forced into agricultural collectives, or
kolkhozes, seen in the eyes of the Politburo as pliant providers of Soviet
agricultural needs. In defiance of the facts, Soviet ideologists hammered
out an appropriate Marxist terminology to explain what was going on:
throughout grain-producing areas, it was said, resistance to this
"scientific" scheme was being organized by so-called "rich peasants," or
kulaks; with his customary brutality, therefore, Stalin decreed "the
liquidation of the kulaks as a class."
The result was a catastrophic onslaught on millions of peasant
households. At first, party activists and local officials bullied and
brutalized peasants, forcing them to surrender their homesteads and their
possessions; deportations, arrests and killings soon followed, as terror
generalized. The violence mounted to full-scale rebellions in various
places, with regular troops engaged for months - for example, suppressing
peasant risings.
Resistance took various forms, usually reflecting the hopeless,
desperate anguish of a doomed population. Particularly in the Ukraine there
were "women's rebellions" - spontaneous uprisings of peasant women who
attacked the local kolkhozes to demand the return of confiscated farm
products. With a colossal impact on the Soviet economy, peasants
slaughtered their animals by the millions rather than see them seized. For
two terrible years the fighting raged.
As the dreadful process of "de-kulakization" continued, Stalin ordered
a further assault on the recalcitrant peasantry - what Conquest calls the
"terror-famine" of 1932. Moscow, writes Conquest, knowingly decreed grain
procurements from the Ukraine and elsewhere exceeding by far what the local
population could produce. Communist brigades roamed the countryside,
forcing agriculturalists to disgorge the little they had been able to
produce under conditions of severe dislocation. Grain sat unused in "state
reserves" while the local population starved. By the middle of 1932,
according to one estimate given by Conquest, nearly 3 million people took to
the roads, desperately seeking food, pressing toward towns or cities, and
occasionally attacking granaries where the food was often left to rot.
Border troops barred the way to prosperous areas in Russia proper, and
the wretched population was simply left to die. Entire villages were swept
away, and towns of 3,000 to 4,000 people sometimes had only a few score
survivors.
Scarcely a word of this was reported by the Soviet government, whose
officials stubbornly denied there was anything amiss. The Soviet press,
even in the Ukraine, remained stonily silent. Grim reports seeped out to
the West, where newspapers carried scattered accounts of the catastrophe.
But steady denials from Moscow and a systematic campaign of false
information were enough to fool many onlookers, or silence those who
entertained doubts. Conquest highlights the gullibility of Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, "the doyens of Western social science," whose antipathy
toward the peasantry and sympathy for the Russians' vast project of social
engineering blinded them even after a visit to the country in 1932 and 1933.
And they were not alone.
Conquest's well documented book provides a crushing indictment of the
Soviet experience in a measured and sober fashion. About the terrible
impact of collectivization and the terror-famine, he leaves little doubt.
But historians continue to dispute the motivation behind this terrible
episode. In Conquest's view, Stalin's mutilation of the peasantry in 1929
combined with an explicit attack on the Ukraine and its national culture -
resuming an effort that had been suspended after the forcible incorporation
of the Ukraine into the Soviet Union in the early twenties.
Stalin's policy, according to this interpretation, was genocidal in its
aims, designed to eliminate both the social basis for Ukrainian national
identity and its intellectual and cultural leadership. Against this view,
others argue that the Soviet dictator was primarily inspired by his goals of
industrializing the Soviet Union on a particular model. They see Stalin as
moved primarily by his desire to discipline peasants from traditional
regions of agricultural surplus rather than by hostility to Ukrainian
nationalism.
In Conquest's own showing, the repression and man-made famine wrought
havoc outside the Ukraine - in the North Caucasus, the Volga region, and
Soviet Central Asia, where the proportionate impact upon the Kazakh people,
for example, was even greater than upon Ukrainians.
But however assessed, there is no doubt that we are dealing with a
crime of terrible proportions - a continuing blot upon the Soviet leadership
that has not yet acknowledged what happened. The lasting impression from
this book is of appalling waste. "By the end of the thirties," Conquest
notes in his epilogue, "the average Soviet citizen was worse off than before
the revolution."
Michael R. Marrus is the author of The Unwanted: European Refugees In The
Twentieth Century.
Canadian Ukrainian Committee: http://www.ukar.org/famine02.htm
For personal and academic use only
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