6

A Wolf to Man

The idiocy of village life…

 -KARL MARX

KONSTANTIN AND ILYA SOLZHENITSYN WERE VICTIMS OF ONE OF the great wars of the twentieth century, a war in which only one side was armed. Robert Conquest begins his powerful and passionate book The Harvest of Sorrow with this devastating summary:
"Fifty years ago as I write these words, the Ukraine and the Ukrainian, Cossack and other areas to its east -a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants-was like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbors. At the same time (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims."
The evidence for what happened is as cumulative and overwhelming as the evidence for the Jewish Holocaust; yet for decades the facts were as distorted and suppressed as the holocaust would have been had Nazi Germany won the Second World War. "One thing is striking," wrote a Soviet author in 1972: "in not a single textbook on contemporary history will you find the merest reference to 1933, the year marked by a terrible tragedy.” In the West, liberal educated opinion did not want to hear anything bad about the brave Soviet experiment; and, like the Auschwitz gas chambers, the tales brought back by a few honest journalists and writers were vastly beyond a good liberal's imagination, so were not believed.
Lenin had warned that terror, and economic terror, must and would return. Possibly he would have been more temperate than Stalin, yet he too would have known that the peasants had to be crushed. The Russian intelligentsia, from which the liberal and socialist movements of the nineteenth century sprang, had contradictory ideas about the peasants. In one sense they saw them as the soul of Russia, patient, enduring, and sincere, free of the falsities brought by wealth. "He does not try to seem what he is not," wrote Alexander Herzen. The narodniki (from narod, people) went into the villages in the 1870s, hoping to stir revolutionary thoughts in these good, simple souls; but found no response. Mostly, in fact, the result was mutual antagonism. The narodniki movement had largely died out by the time the idealistic Isaaki Solzhenitsyn felt its appeal. But Isaaki came from the peasants himself, and understood them; the urban intellectuals concluded merely that the peasants were backward and mulish, the "dark people." The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, described them as "barbarian tillers of the soil, cruel and merciless, beasts of burden whose life provided no opportunity for the luxury of thought," and Lenin saw them as "fiercely and meanly individualistic." For Stalin, so Khrushchev tells us, peasants were scum.
A scum comprising 90 percent of the Russian people.
The poorer ones could be herded into collective farms; but those with a little more enterprise, the so-called kulaks, [literally, kulak means "fist"-i.e., "tight-fist"] were a class enemy that had to be destroyed, either by deportation or death. Most of them had only a few cows and horses. Only one in a hundred farms had more than one hired worker. The average kulak's income was lower than that of the average rural official persecuting him. In reality the term was a mere convenience, as vague as "Fascist" would become. Any peasant whatever was liable to dekulakization
The humane Maxim Gorky, in 1922, had expressed the hope that "the uncivilized, stupid, turgid people in the Russian villages will die out, all those almost terrifying people ... and a new race of literate, rational, energetic people will take their place." Now Stalin was intent on granting his wish.
Stalin could kill two birds with one stone. The second bird was the Ukraine. Ukrainians stubbornly went on struggling to assert their linguistic and cultural separation from Russia. One of the central tenets of Marxism-Leninism was that the proletariat has no country. Nationhood was a characteristic of capitalism, said Lenin, and the aim of socialism was to merge nations. Classless, urban, international, without private conscience or private values, without property, without a spiritual dimension-this was to be the new Homos sovieticus.
On 29 December 1929 Stalin announced laconically in Pravda: "We have gone over from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulak to a policy of liquidating the kulak as a class." On 30 January 1942, ten days after the Wannsee Conference had reaffirmed the "final solution," Hitler proclaimed in a broadcast speech: "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews." The latter, a genocide of race, the former, of class, though also with a nationalist (anti-Ukrainian) element.
The victims, those who were not summarily dealt with, were ordered to leave their villages, where they had lived all their lives, and were sent off to the taiga and the tundra. Women gave birth on the way, and the guards threw the dead babies out of the train. Up to 20 percent of the deportees died en route. If there was no established settlement at the end of the journey, they were set down in the frozen wilderness. The weakest and youngest died. By 1935 it is estimated that out of eleven million deportees a third, mostly children, had perished; three or four million more survived a few years longer before succumbing.
Vasily Grossman, a Jew who also wrote powerfully about the Holocaust, has described a typical departure scene:
From our village ... the "kulaks" were driven out on foot. They took what they could carry on their backs: bedding, clothing. The mud was so deep it pulled the boots off their feet. It was terrible to watch them. They marched along in a column and looked back at their huts, and their bodies still held the warmth from their own stoves. What pain they must have suffered! After all, they had been born in those houses; they had given their daughters in marriage in those cabins. They had heated up their stoves, and the cabbage soup they had cooked was left there behind them. The milk had not been drunk, and smoke was still rising from their chimneys. The women were sobbing-but were afraid to scream. The Party activists didn't give a damn about them. We drove them off like geese. And behind came the cart, and on it were Pelageya the blind, and old Dmitri Ivanovich, who had not left his hut for ten whole years, and Marusya the Idiot, a paralytic, a kulak's daughter who had been kicked by a horse in childhood and had never been normal since.
Some, taken to the far Siberian North, were shipped down the great rivers by raft, and were mostly lost in the rapids. Imagine a man, woman, and two or three children, plucked from the mild Kuban, hurtling down the icy, wild Yenisei.
But we should steel ourselves against bourgeois compassion. Or so argued Ilya Ehrenburg, writing as Robert Conquest says with "exceptional frankness" in a novel of 1934. "Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything."
What is it about the twentieth-century mind that it so readily dealt with masses, categories, rather than considering people as individuals?
In July 1932, decisions were taken which ensured that millions from the Ukraine, Kuban, Don, and Lower Volga would die of starvation in the next year. Collectivization and dekulakization had wrought havoc with the harvest, and poorish weather had further damaged it; nevertheless, the famine was deliberate; in those regions-and those regions only-that the regime wanted to lay waste, impossibly large requisitions of grain for the towns were ordered. Bands of activists were sent into the villages to make sure every last ear of wheat was collected. Watchtowers were erected in the fields. The peasants toiled, and starved. They had witnessed the deportations; fools that we were, wrote Grossman, we thought there could be no worse fate than that.
Women and children whose limbs were swelling up, and who did not have the strength to rise, were threatened with shooting unless they gave up hoarded grain. "In the terrible spring of 1933," writes Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn's prisoner-friend at the Marfino sharashka, "I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses-corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov ... I saw all of this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me out to take away the peasants' grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to 'fulfill the bolshevik sowing plan in shock-worker style.'
"Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe."
He "reasoned"-that potent twentieth-century word!-that the ends justified the means; that for the sake of the triumph of Communism everything was permissible, even to destroy millions of people. "All is permitted, if God does not exist."
Kopelev was unmistakably a noble individual. He suffered imprisonment [or the "crime" of trying to save POWs and German women and children from Red Army atrocities. Solzhenitsyn and numerous others have borne witness to his human decency. Yet even he was caught up during his student years in an evil that, as he confessed, could never be expiated, only lived with.
During the collectivization and famine, idealistic Communists, as well as intellectuals from other countries, fell prey to the same disease that consumed the Nazis. Indeed, there were doubtless a few-a very few-SS officers who sincerely believed that humanity would ultimately gain from the liquidation of the Jewish race; SS men who suffered while doing their duty, but believed "the ends justified the means." Himmler congratulated the SS, and himself, for having "stuck it out" and remained "decent fellows." We could say-he told the weary soldiers-"that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it."6.  It was indeed a remarkable achievement on the part of the SS if their souls suffered no injury. Likewise the Communist activists. Two leading lights of the Labor movement in Britain, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in fact, congratulated the Soviet Einsatzgruppen in similar terms: "Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could take so momentous a decision." This from a book called Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.
The village schools were closed, as the famine took hold, and the teachers withdrew to the cities. What was the point of teaching those doomed to die? The starved victims ate everything: all the worms, leather, glue. Some mothers cradled their aged, birdlike children and went on telling them stories even when they could hardly speak themselves; others started to hate the children who were making them suffer so much; they ran away from their endless crying. At first they went to the railway line and held up their ghastly, swollen-bellied children, pleading with the travelers for help. A few crusts were sometimes thrown out. But then the order came that the train guards should pull down the blinds while traveling through the country. But the final stage, Vasily Grossman observed, was when they just lay in their huts and did not even wish to eat.
Conscience, where it exists, can be eased by the argument that those being killed are not really human. The Nazis were masters of this; whether the victims were "life unworthy of life," the severely handicapped, or simply a Jewish bacillus. Again a "bacillus" himself, Grossman relates how small children became "kulak bastards," "bloodsuckers," "swine." A woman activist explained, "I told myself they weren't human beings, they were kulaks." The military personnel guarding them on their month long journey "were not vicious. They merely treated them like cattle, and that was that." Conveniently, people in extremis often behave in a way which supports the idea that they are subhuman. Those who became cannibals, for instance; women who went mad and cooked and ate their own children. Hundreds of Ukrainian cannibals were reportedly serving life sentences in Baltic-White Sea Canal prison camps in the late thirties.
The vigilantes staring down from their watchtowers to make sure some woman wasn't stealing a few grains of corn for a dying child did not need to become cannibals. They had plenty of food. A Party restaurant in Pohrebyshcha ... "Day and night it was guarded by militia keeping the starving peasants and their children away .... At very low prices, white bread, meat, poultry, canned fruit and delicacies, wines and sweets were served to the district bosses. At the same time, the employees of the dining hall were issued the special Party-worker ration, which contained twenty different articles of food.
"Around these oases famine and death were raging.”
As in the Holocaust, living people were sometimes thrown into mass graves, to save an extra lorry trip. The Kuban and the Don suffered extremely. Every day two mysterious, empty trains would leave Kavkaz, moving in the direction of Rostov. A few hours later they returned, full of corpses of famine victims collected from various villages; the dead were secretly buried near some quarries. Even some of the North Caucasian cities (though not, it would seem, Rostov) experienced famine; 50,000 of a population of 140,000 died in Stavropol, and similar numbers in Krasnodar. The Cossacks had been largely wiped out, from death and deportation. A Party official reported desolation in the countryside; the fertile land overgrown with weeds; hedges, fences, and gates had gone, used for fuel; houses falling to pieces. No work, no grain, no cattle.
Inevitably the former Shcherbak estate, in Stavropol province-what was left of it after the destruction of the Civil War period-would have shared in the devastation.
Total deaths, from deportation and famine, 1930-34, are estimated to have been at least fourteen million. Around seven million died in the famine, including five million in the Ukraine and a million in the North Caucasus. Three million of the famine victims were children.
However, George Bernard Shaw "did not see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of india rubber inside?" Friends had loaded him up with canned food, but he had thrown it all out of the window on crossing the border, he told a Russian audience. There were gasps; but they failed to discourage the jovial speaker. He knew the tales of shortages were "poppycock"-hadn't he just had a marvelous meal? Before leaving for home, he told his hosts: "When you carry your experiment to its final triumph, and I know that you will, we in the West, we who are still playing at socialism, will have to follow in your footsteps whether we like it or no.". They should have asked the keen-eyed Irishman to man one of the watchtowers. The British embassy lamented that it was impossible to persuade educated opinion in the democracies that anything terrible was taking place. In the USA, "it was a bad time for a writer to become known as an anti-Communist or even as a member of a dissenting radical faction .... To have one's name on a Communist-sponsored appeal or protest considerably enhanced one's standing in the cultural community." Artists, by repute so independent-minded, love to huddle together under a left-leaning shelter. Diana Trilling, who learned quickly, recalls with shame the raised armed, fist-clenched oath of allegiance to the Revolution, the singing of "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation. / Arise, ye wretched of the earth! ... "The idiocy of urban life, perhaps.
Arthur Koestler, who visited Russia in 1932-33, saw for himself the prisoners of Soviet starvation; saw dead children who "looked like embryos from alcohol bottles." In Kharkov, he felt how unreal it was to be reading the local papers, full of young people smiling under banners, giant combines in the Urals, rewards to Stakhanovite workers-and not one word about the famine, the epidemics, the dying out of whole villages. A blanket of silence covered the whole enormous land.
Starting in 1928 there had been a renewed assault on religion. Priests were deported, and sometimes shot; churches were closed, and turned into workers' clubs, cultural institutes, granaries. Bells were sent for scrap. By Ironically, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's wife, became a devout churchgoer in these years; her religious feelings consoling her-or perhaps adding to her torment-for her sense that she was married to a monster, and (it was not unconnected) the belief that she was a sister to her own children. At a banquet, the night before she committed suicide or was murdered, she shouted at the revelers: "I hate you all! Look at this table, and the people are starving!"
Stalin wept over her death; and we know what happens when dictators weep. Auden has told us: "the little children die in the street."
There were other ways besides the attack on religion-rather droll, dramatic ways-of destroying "the idiocy of village life." One such is related by Shostakovich. In the Ukraine, blind bards, called Kobzars, wandered from village to village, reminding people of the heroic past with their songs. During collectivization, the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Folksingers was announced. The Homeric figures "came to the Congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the Congress, they say. It was a living museum, the country's living history; all its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all those pathetic blind men killed."
At intervals Stalin would complain that officials had been overzealous, and should be punished for their excesses. For a while there would be a slight easing. Then the "excesses" would begin again. Finally Stalin had what he wanted, a docile peasantry in collectives. Almost half the USSR's people were again serfs, since they could not change their place of abode without permission. Serfs without any escape into the realm of the spirit.
To engage with what happened to the Jews, we have to assist us the familiar searing images of the Nazi death camps and ghettos, from the Allied advances of 1945. But there were no liberations of the camps and settlements in the incomprehensible wastes of Siberia; so, added to the deliberate suppression of the truth, we have nothing visual to help us imagine tl1e unimaginable. One can say "At least fourteen million died" in a split second, and the words have little meaning. The dead, too, are not the only, or often the main, victims. A single image, and a still-alive victim, to focus on. One poor Ukrainian peasant refused to join the kolkhoz. He was arrested, beaten up, and deported. "His wife then hanged herself in their barn and a childless family took in their little boy. He spent his time haunting his deserted home, coming back to them only to sleep on the oven, never speaking.”
Try to imagine the little boy, coming day after day to the empty house.
Try to imagine his feelings, his suffering. Multiply by fourteen million. Impossible examination questions.

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