Code Words
Written during the Holodomor, in which an estimated 3.8-4.5 million people died, the poetry of 1932-34 overtly approves killing and rejects any display of mercy. Arjan Appadurai, who has studied communal violence in India, argues that the majority (“big numbers,” in his terminology) tend to justify the removal of a minority (“small numbers”) by invoking a perceived threat to survival (Appadurai 2006, 8, 52).
The minority is usually portrayed as violent terrorists, obdurate, and irredeemable enemies. The violent Stalinist rhetoric of 1932-34 conforms to this pattern, with the difference that the attacks are mounted against the majority. Dissenting groups are portrayed as outsider minorities (even though at the time they represented the overwhelming mass of the population, the peasantry). The kulaks (kurkul in Ukrainian) were a particular group identified for removal. This was the code word for Ukrainian peasants who resisted collectivization. The word was closely associated with two other terms, “nationalist” and “saboteur” (or “wrecker”). The latter was generally applied to engineers and specialists who had received their training in pre-revolutionary times. In the atmosphere of total war created during these years, civilians ceased to exist. State propaganda encouraged people to see themselves as frontline soldiers fighting an enemy whose tentacles reached into every farm, factory, and family.The Bolshevik party and its organs of repression are presented as the vanguard of a vast majority, the world proletariat. This key device had previously been employed in Lenin’s writings, which insisted on the need for a ruthless dictatorship and mass terror in the name of imminent world revolution.
The literature of 1932-34 constructs the image of the kurkul, nationalist, and saboteur as the outsider, linking this cluster of words to others: subversive, spy, Westerner, and capitalist. The enemy is depicted as better off than the rest of the population, a parasite and degenerate, therefore requiring extermination. The aim of this writing is to stimulate vengefulness among the kombedy, or Committees of Poor Peasants, who were being organized to help carry out grain expropriation and food confiscation. Another aim is to condemn anyone who has defied Bolshevik rule. These individuals are treated as defectors from a unified mass army, opponents of Soviet economic and agricultural policies, and heretics who refuse to believe in the approaching millennium.