Read Online Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark - Free Book Online Page B

gained at the expense of poor and landless peasants.) Historians of the Soviet countryside have concluded that the images of a socially diverse Russian peasantry, 56
    chapter 3
    riven by class struggle and economic inequality, does not at all fit the real picture of rural life. Instead, there was considerable solidarity among peasants, richer and poorer, especially when facing the incursions of urban communists. Nevertheless, the kulaks became an imagined social enemy, a group that in practice was often defined by own-ing a few head of cattle and oxen or having a tin roof over their huts, but also by real and alleged opposition to collectivization and to communism, and sometimes merely by their religiosity or adherence to Old Believer communities. “From the first days of the Civil War,” wrote Izvestiia in February 1930, at the outset of the dekulakization campaign, “the kulak stood on the opposite side of the barricades from us.” The image of the kulak was abolutely consistent in Soviet rhetoric, remembered the later Soviet dissident Piotr Grigorenko; “this was a bloodsucker, an oppressor, and parasite.”5
    Village priests and their families were included in the kulak category, as were many former landowners. Some villages were simply identified as kulak villages and destroyed in toto by deporting their entire populations, richer and poorer alike. Like the peasants whom Lenin wanted to hang on every hillock in the Tambov region as a warning to the others to cease their rebellions, the kulaks became an imagined class of opponents to be destroyed, so that the rest of the peasantry would at best take up cudgels against them in class hatred and, at worst, silently and obediently join the world of the collective farm.
    On March 15, 1931, the OGPU (security police) issued a memorandum on the kulak problem, which stated that the dekulakization 57
    goal of deporting the kulaks from all agricultural regions was “to totally cleanse [them] of kulaks.” There were essentially two categories of kulaks to be dealt with: the most dangerous would be “immediately eliminated,” while the second would be exiled, a simple formula for punishment of alleged “enemies of the people” that was to be repeated throughout the 1930s. Meanwhile, Soviet activists in the countryside repeated slogans: “We will exile the kulak by the thousands and when necessary—shoot the kulak breed.” “We will make soap of kulaks.” “Our class enemy must be wiped off the face of the earth.”6 These were no mere slogans; the violence perpetrated by the dekulakization gangs, which sometimes included criminals among the rural poor and landless, was horrific. “These people,”
    noted one OGPU report, “drove the dekulakized naked in the streets, beat them, organized drinking-bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc.”7 Even if directed and monitored from the Kremlin, there was much more spontaneous violence involved in the dekulakization campaign than in the later highly focused police actions against national, “asocial,”
    and political victims of Stalinism.8 In any case, between late 1929 and 1932, some ten million kulaks were forced from their homes.9
    The combination of dekulakization and collectivization wreaked havoc in the countryside, prompting what some historians have suggested was a second civil war, as peasants burned their crops, slaughtered their cattle, and attacked the teams of communists and OGPU detachments 58
    chapter 3
    sent from the cities and provincial capitals to ensure that Stalin’s policies were carried out. The talk of class war in the countryside quickly faded, as it became clear that this was really a war of the city against the village, communists against the peasantry as a whole. There were more than thirteen thousand “mass actions” by peasants in 1930
    alone, involving more than three million people.