Dizzy with Success

Stalin backtracks, March 2, 1930

How well did Joseph Stalin know history?

A seminary drop-out, he of course knew a thing or two about past eras, but it would be a stretch to assume that he had extensive, in-depth knowledge of history. It does appear, however, that where he felt they were relevant to him, Joseph Vissarionovich did indeed draw lessons from the past.

One of the most important qualities for politicians – the ability to get their way at any cost – seems to be something Stalin came by naturally, without any book learning. But there was one recurring theme of Russian history in which the cunning and resourceful tyrant was well versed: “the Kind Tsar and the Evil Boyars.” According to this popular conception, the Russian tsar was viewed as benevolent and all injustice perpetrated by Moscow (it was assumed) was the work of an evil inner circle of boyars or courtiers. Boris Godunov, for example, was a wise and relatively humane tsar for his time, but he was scorned because he came from the ranks of the boyars, and, without giving it a second thought, thousands of his countrymen threw their support behind the numerous pretenders who came along to proclaim themselves “true” tsars.

At what point in his development did Soso* become aware that in order to secure power he had to create the image of a just (albeit stern) tsar? Can we find any clues to this from our current vantage point?

By all appearances, he began to draw on this lesson of history rather early. Even in the mid-1920s, when he was battling the United Opposition of Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, Stalin understood exactly what buttons to push in the public consciousness. The opposition was calling for the creation of a mighty industrial infrastructure – and where would the money come from? Of course from the peasants, from the “petty bourgeois” peasants, who, as owners of private property, could be easily scorned. They could serve as a sort of “internal colony” to be the exploited by the proletariat… Stalin, however, would not stand for this.

But wait – isn’t that exactly what Stalin himself did? Wasn’t he the one who launched forced industrialization, wasn’t he the one who began the mad race of the Five Year Plans, committing thousands of workers to the cold ground, creating huge factories, and starving millions of peasants who were supposed to pay for the future military might of the USSR with their suffering? Yes, but that was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1925-26, when he was fighting the oppositionists, Stalin said just the opposite.

He vilified the opposition for attempting to undermine the alliance between the working class and the peasantry: How can we possibly call for robbing the peasantry? How can we possibly turn our backs on the working peasant? No, Comrade Stalin would not let Trotsky and company harm the rural proletariat…

This was our first glimpse of Stalin as Tsar-Defender.

And just two years later (just two!), before a new generation had come to the fore, before the sound of past slogans and arguments had faded, the policy of the party changed and the country heard the at first unfamiliar and later very familiar but no less awful word “kolkhoz.” Initially, persuasion was used on the peasants. Then that persuasion became increasingly forceful. Finally, they were given no choice. More and more collective farms were established, and the peasants had to hand over their cattle, grain stores, and horses.

On November 7, 1929 an article by Stalin appeared in Pravda entitled, “The Year of the Great Break.” Readers were “informed” that the majority of peasants had already decided, on their own initiative, to part with their property and begin a new life devoted to the cause of building communism on the collective farm. The kolkhoz was now, it turned out, home not only to the poorest of peasants (who had no property to forfeit), but middle peasants as well, perhaps not the most prosperous subset of rural peasantry, but certainly the most numerous. This being the case, it was high time to move to mass collectivization and completely do away with private property and hired labor in the countryside.

This marked the beginning of one of Stalinism’s cruelest and most horrifying episodes. During the brutal winter of 1929-1930, party leaders and kolkhoz chairmen dragged, herded, and shoved the unfortunate peasantry into collective farms. Throughout the entire country, they “dekulakized” prosperous peasants (i.e., kulaks) – sometimes to the delight of their poor neighbors and sometimes to their horror. Even those kulaks who had accepted the inevitable and been willing to join the collective farms were now “unmasked.” It turns out that they had actually just been playing along in order to sabotage the building of socialism from within.

Everywhere churches were being closed, converted into clubs or warehouses, and priests were being arrested. Kulak families were herded like cattle into exile, and a huge proportion of them did not make it to their remote destinations, done in by hunger and disease along the way.

Stalin cunningly manipulated people, inciting the rural have-nots against the haves, and those who lacked the stomach to plunder their neighbors were given a helping hand by workers dispatched from the cities, who had been informed that people were starving because the kulaks and their henchmen were killing off cattle and destroying grain supplies.

As one woman later recalled, now a school principal but then a young komsomol member who had been sent to the countryside during the horrors of 1929, her heart ached for the starving and freezing peasants, but it was impossible not to carry out the assignment she had been given by the party. So, with tears in her eyes, she went from house to house with armed members of the proletariat to drag out anyone they had been ordered to consider a kulak.

This process did not always go as smoothly as Stalin would have liked. Today historians are unearthing mountains of evidence – primarily denunciations by NKVD informers – of peasant resistance: attempts to prevent the kulaks from being sent away or to form human chains around churches to stop their destruction, until troops arrived. There are scholars who believe that the USSR was on the brink of civil war during the winter of 1929-1930.

And then, suddenly, Stalin recalled his history lessons and understood that the image of the kind tsar had to be reinforced every now and then. On March 2, 1930, Stalin, who up to that point had been mercilessly driving local authorities toward rapid collectivization, reversed course.

An interesting depiction of what happened can be found in a book that was one of the most supportive of the cause of collectivization, that most glorified it, Virgin Soil Upturned, by Mikhail Sholokhov. True, there are accounts suggesting that Sholokhov attempted to accurately portray what happened, covering himself by contextualizing these descriptions with the “correct” reasoning of the story’s pro-Soviet protagonists. Whatever the case may be, Virgin Soil Upturned is dreadful from a literary perspective, but intriguing from an historical one.

Here we see Davydov, having just arrived in the countryside to “upturn virgin soil,” discussing kulak policy with a party secretary, who obviously favors acting as moderately as possible.

“You said something to me about being careful with the kulaks. Just what did you mean by that?” Davydov asked.

“Let me put it this way,” the secretary said with a fatherly smile. “There are kulaks who are meeting their assigned grain production targets and there are others who stubbornly refuse. In the second case things are clear-cut: charge them under Article 107 and be done with it. But in the first case it’s more complicated. How would you, for instance, deal with this sort?”

Davydov thought for a moment. “I would give him a new target.”

“Oh, that’s a fine way to do things! No, Comrade, that won’t work. You’d undermine trust in everything we’re doing. And what will the average peasant think then? He’ll say to himself, ‘So that’s the way it is! Soviet power! Pushing the peasant around every which way.’ That, my friend, is childishness.”

“Childishness?” Davydov turned beet red.

“Seems like you think Stalin made a mistake, eh?”

“What does Stalin have to do with it?”

“I read the speech he gave at the conference of Marxists, of those, what do you call ‘em? Those landonomists, er, agronomists?”

Here is a clear sign of the times – this was taking place in December 1929, just when Stalin had called for the “elimination of the kulak as a class” at a conference of “Marxist agronomists,” and thousands of Davydovs, selflessly devoted to him, lashed out against prosperous peasants, driving people almost to the point of rebellion… And then came March 2, 1930.

After a delay due to flooding, on March 20 the postman brought the newspaper with Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success” to Gremyachy Log. It just took one day for every household to get a look at one of the three copies of The Hammer, and by evening they had turned into damp, grease-stained scraps. They read it, gathered in groups, in huts, in the lanes, in back yards, at the entrances to granaries… One would read it out loud and the others would listen, afraid of missing a single word, being as quiet as they possibly could. Terrible arguments broke out all over the hamlet about the article. Everyone interpreted it in their own way, for the most part seeing in it whatever they wanted. And almost everywhere, when Nagulnov or Davydov appeared, for some reason they hurriedly passed the newspaper from hand to hand until, like a white bird flitting about the crowd, it disappeared into someone’s roomy pocket.

“Now the kolkhozes will fall apart at the seams, like rotten clothing!” Bannik exclaimed triumphantly, the first to offer his conjecture.

The women, who had a poor understanding of the matter, thought up their own harebrained theories.

And so it went all around the hamlet:

“They’re doin’ away with the kolkhozes!”

“They’ll give folks back their cows, on order of Moscow.”

“The kulaks will be brought back and signed up for the kolkhozes.”

“They’ll give voice back to thems that lost ‘em.”

“They’ll open the Tubyansky church and hand the seed stock out to the farmers for feed.”

How easy it was for people to believe that something better was coming, especially if that something better was coming from a kind tsar. Now they understood who could protect them, who it was that read all the petitions they had addressed to him, while all the local bosses – all the Davydovs and Nagulnovs – were just getting in Comrade Stalin’s way as he tried to intercede on their behalf. The number of peasants entering collective farms fell sharply throughout the country. A little steam had been let off.

Afterwards they were again herded into collective farms, but however bad things might be, at least they now knew that the people’s defender was sitting in the Kremlin. It was just a matter of how to get word to him…

The famine of 1933, which took millions of lives, was less than three years away.

* “Soso” was Stalin’s earliest nickname, short for Ioseb (Joseph). His full, given Georgian name was (transcribed into Latin): Ioseb Besareonis dze Jughashvili. His first revolutionary nickname was “Koba,” from the Caucasian bandit-hero in Alexander Kazbegi’s novel, The Patricide. Later he adopted the name Stalin, “Man of Steel.”

For a powerful, first-hand account of de-kulakization and collectivization in a Soviet village, search out a copy of Red Bread, by Maurice Hindus (Indiana University Press)

Forced collectivization “was in effect a war declared by the Soviet state on a nation of smallholders. More than 2 million peasants were deported (1.8 million in 1930-1931 alone), 6 million died of hunger, and hundreds of thousands died as a direct result of deportation.” And this was only the first wave of the war. [The Black Book of Communism, Harvard]