Mastering State Violence

In light of their perceived insecurity inside and outside of the USSR’s bor­ders, Soviet party leaders would not tolerate any opposition, even if pas­sive in form. Most of the party’s senior leadership had experienced the barbaric events of the First World War, revolution, and the subsequent civil and national wars.

As Sheila Fitzpatrick and David Joravsky pointed out decades ago, the Communist Party leaders acquired a garrison mentality, dividing the world into friends and foes.¹²⁸ The Civil War emerged as their most forma­tive experience, far more than the “Marxist-Leninist ideology, Lenin’s natural authoritarianism, or the conspiratorial traditions of the pre­revolutionary party.”¹²⁹ This horrific ordeal, a byproduct of the Russian Revolution (itself a spinoff of the First World War), taught them to em­brace violence, coercion, intolerance of dissent, rule by administrative de­cree, and a centralization of power.

For Stalin’s men, the application of state violence not only represented a response to “class enemies,” but embodied “a tool for fashioning an ideal­ized image of a better, purer society.”¹³⁰ They believed that hostile capital­ist states encircled the USSR and envisioned an industrialized economy as the first socialist state’s best defence against attack. Industrialization meant collectivization.

Stalin shared the impatience of this Civil War generation, caught in the netherworld between revolution and the implementation of the revolution’s ultimate goals. According to Roman Werfel, one of communist Poland’s leading party ideologists in the 1940s and 1950s, Stalin “represented the calvary charge line of thought: a generation that had grown up with the Civil War and charged ahead with sheer force. Unlike the Old Bolsheviks, it was not used to drudgery, to work that was long-term with no immedi­ate, striking effects.”¹³² For Stalin as for this generation, the era of the New Economic Policy did not produce the adrenaline flow or the metaphorical “comradeship of the trenches” that they had experienced in the past. NEP, after all, represented a detour from their ultimate political goals. Many of those directly engaged in collectivization and grain requisitioning, such as Vsevolod Balitsky in Soviet Ukraine and Efim Evdokimov in the North Caucasus, had served in the same regions during the Civil War and had engaged in grain procurement campaigns during war communism.¹³³ This time they would accomplish their mission.

Industrialization became the first and only priority and coerced grain collections the only means to this end. In this black-and-white world, the party designated anyone who advocated lowering procurement quotas as a saboteur, an enemy of collectivization, industrialization, the socialist homeland, and the entire communist project.

The collectivization drive vilified the Soviet state’s primary enemies, the kulaks and the bourgeois nationalists. Not only did the Bolsheviks smear these groups, they also assessed whether they were “redeemable (and sub­ject to detention and correction) or incorrigible (and hence subject to elimination).”¹³⁴ But the Communist Party never defined the term “kulak” precisely.¹³⁵ Nor did it define the “bourgeois nationalists.” Both became popular and very flexible pejorative terms hurled at all real and imagined enemies.

The mass violence and total dehumanization of the enemy built on the horrors of the First World War, the revolution, and the subsequent civil and national wars and became closely intertwined during the party’s strug­gle to collectivize. The party had to identify their opponents, then delegiti­mize, demonize, isolate, and exterminate these groups, neutralizing their passive supporters. The party’s fears and insecurities intensified during collectivization and the famines, especially since many of its members (in­cluding Stalin himself) identified the prerogatives of “socialism in one country” with Russia itself. Most importantly, Fitzpatrick pointed out that

the Bolsheviks entered the Civil War perceiving themselves as international­ists and unaware that they had any significant Russian identity. In the course of the Civil War, they saw the failure of international revolution, found them­selves adopting quasi-imperialist policies, became defenders of the Russian heartland against foreign invaders and, in the Polish campaign in the summer of 1920, observed not only that Polish workers rallied to Pilsudski, but that Russians of all classes rallied to the Bolsheviks when it was a question of fighting Poles. These experiences surely had great significance for the future evolution of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet regime.¹³⁶

In their long and bloody struggle to gain power between 1917 and 1921, the Bolsheviks learned first-hand how national identities could prevail over class identities. Despite their misgivings, they also realized that they needed to craft policies which outwardly championed both sets of identi­ties, although not with equal emphasis.

During the industrialization campaign, this conflation of state violence and quasi-Russian identity within the ranks of the Communist Party un­dermined the Soviet state’s support for national diversity within its bor­ders.

The collectivization drive of 1929-33 and the purges of the 1930s occurred throughout the USSR, but they acquired a specifically anti-Ukrainian orien­tation when applied in the Ukrainian Republic and in the Ukrainian­speaking areas of Russia.¹³⁷ Inasmuch as the Ukrainian SSR constituted the USSR’s most important non-Russian republic, its primary grain exporter, a region with extensive natural resources, and a rising industrial manufacturer, the Soviet leadership understood that it had to secure Ukraine internally as well as externally from threats from neighbouring Poland and a resurgent Germany. Party leaders exaggerated their anxieties concerning the fulfilment of grain procurement quotas and interpreted all of their problems through the prism of internal and external threats to Soviet national security, espe­cially popular resistance to Soviet power in the Ukrainian countryside.¹³⁸

After the introduction of the collective farm system throughout the Ukrainian SSR, the assessed grain quotas constantly rose and the state’s agents gained control of most of the grain within Ukraine’s borders, but not necessarily the anticipated amount. The authorities in the field, much less the centre, did not necessarily understand that their unrealistic de­mands on the countryside created political, socio-economic, and logistical bottlenecks which reduced the total amounts of grain they would gather there. Coming from urban environments and wedded to their Marxist ide­ology, they misunderstood the nature of the crisis in the world grain markets and most assumed that the peasants were responsible for their own problems - and should suffer the consequences.

The republic’s extensive peasant opposition to collectivization remind­ed the Soviet leadership of the civil and national wars of 1918-21 and con­vinced them that the party had to introduce extraordinary measures to break the peasants, who in Stalin’s mind waged a “war by starvation” against Soviet power.¹³⁹ In his view, the peasants were the aggressors and the workers, urban residents, and the Red Army the victims.¹⁴⁰

This interpretation prompted the outbreak of famine, which in conjunc­tion with the overall ideological purification of Ukrainian society in the 1930s, led to genocide. Inasmuch as the Bolsheviks believed in the class struggle and judged famines from the standpoint of this historical process, they would employ the food supplies they controlled as an instrument of that struggle.¹⁴¹ Even if the food or emergency seed loans Stalin and the Politburo approved for starving regions reached these areas, it did not nec­essarily mean that the local cadres would or should deliver them to the majority of peasants. The Bolsheviks, after all, did not consider all famine victims to have a moral right to state provisions. Because the government controlled access to grain within the borders of the USSR, its agents would not feed “counter-revolutionaries.” This was a political decision. For Stalin and his acolytes, the famine disposed of class enemies “more efficiently than deportation,” “increased the grain balance by reducing the rural over­population” (especially in Ukraine, the USSR’s most densely populated republic), and augmented “the disciplining/punishing/socializing/(re)edu- cating of the rural population.”¹⁴² Hunger and mass starvation, they imag­ined, purged the countryside’s counter-revolutionaries and expedited the Ukrainian peasantry’s political re-education. With the famine, Stalin in­creased grain requisitions and intentionally provoked the Holodomor. This was a political decision, not an economic one.

Not only did the authorities seek to subordinate the peasants to the state, they also wanted to subject the Ukrainian members of the Soviet body poli­tic, whom they considered problematic, if not disloyal, to their procrustean bed of ideological conformity. By the late 1920s and early 1930s Stalin could not even trust most of the senior party leaders in Ukraine. In an 11 August 1932 memo to Kaganovich, he criticized the republic’s political leaders (who had started to defend Soviet Ukrainian prerogatives) and formulated plans to replace them, claiming that counter-revolutionaries and Pilsudski’s agents had heavily infiltrated the 500,000-member Communist Party of Ukraine. Without the introduction of “extraordinary measures” and without Ukraine’s transformation “as quickly as possible into a real fortress of the USSR, into a genuinely exemplary republic... we may lose Ukraine,” he asserted.¹⁴³ Ukrainization’s implementation in Ukraine and Russia (espe­cially in the North Caucasus) had reinvigorated large anti-Soviet groups, and they had to be crushed, he concluded.¹⁴⁴

In light of such ruthless logic, which blamed the victims, collectivization in the grain-producing areas led to famine, which congealed into an impro­vised genocide, which encompassed not just the peasants, the reservoir of the nation, but also the Communist Party of Ukraine, the intelligentsia, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church. These leading groups (the “brain” and the “soul” of the nation, as Raphael Lemkin described them) set and defined the boundaries between the Ukrainians on the one hand and the Poles, Russians, and the Soviet regime on the other.¹⁴⁵ Stalin and his men took advantage of the collectivization and grain-requisition crisis to subdue Ukrainian peasants and to destroy the Ukrainian elites.

The Soviet Union’s Communist Party did little to alleviate the famine of 1932-3, in sharp contrast to the tragedy of 1921-2, when the Soviet gov­ernment authorized Western relief agencies to help combat the disaster. Despite warnings from local officials, party leaders increased the quotas for grain in 1933, requisitioned all available reserves, and forced the starva­tion of millions. The party’s fusion of the extreme ruthlessness unleashed during collectivization, the dismantling of Ukrainization, and the launch of vociferous attacks on “Ukrainian nationalism” produced a toxic envi­ronment conducive to genocide, defined as the effort to destroy any na­tional group in whole or in part.¹⁴⁶

In this radicalized political climate, the Stalinist regime conflated social and national/ethnic categories. Stalin’s men verbally and physically assault­ed anyone in a leadership position who proudly identified himself or her­self as a Ukrainian, and blurred the overall Ukrainian identity with peasants, “kulaks,” and “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” the sworn enemies of the communist order. They blended class enemies and national enemies into a stew of counter-revolutionaries and refused to nuance the differ­ences between the two. Taken together, collectivization, the Holodomor, anti-Ukrainization, and the purges represented a devastating set of attacks on all things Ukrainian, seriously undermining this national group demo- graphically, politically, and psychologically over the long run.

Stalin, the party’s most important expert on the national question, un­derstood that the peasantry “constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peas­ant army, nor can there be.” This assertion bolstered his 30 March 1925 claim that the “the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question,” and not just in Yugoslavia.¹⁴⁷ In Stalin’s mind, the peas­ant and national questions were linked, especially in a geopolitically im­portant region such as Ukraine.¹⁴⁸ If peasants and prominent Ukrainian cultural and political leaders opposed Kremlin orders to denude the coun­tryside of grain, they revealed themselves as disloyal Soviet citizens. Stalin set the tone: Annihilate these enemies. Show no mercy. Party activists in the field, intoxicated by the prospect of building the brave new world that Soviet founders envisioned, enthusiastically expanded on it.

Stalin took advantage of the collectivization and grain-requisition crises and escalated them (especially after early August 1932 and then again in mid-November, shortly after his wife’s suicide) in order to subdue the Ukrainian peasants and the elites. When he and the party inaugurated de­kulakization and mass collectivization he most likely did not intend to starve millions, but in stoking chaos in the countryside, disrupting the rhythms of peasant life, and introducing large-scale grain requisitions, he generated the subsequent famines, which provoked peasant resistance, which often turned violent. Since the Soviet state possessed a monopoly of the tools of coercion, it won control of the countryside. In confronting the peasants, the Communist Party risked losing its ability to feed the cities and satisfy its urban supporters. It was a reckless gamble, which Stalin won.

In this all-or-nothing struggle, there would be no compromise. As Stalin defined the situation, he and the party sought to build a better future for all Soviet citizens, including the peasants. Inasmuch as the “dark masses” refused to accept Stalin’s goodwill, he became enraged and struck out against them. To punish them, he employed the easiest means at his dis­posal, grain requisitioning to the point of starvation. Stalin understood that the grain requisitions undertaken in 1921-2, 1928-9, and 1932 led to famine and that raising the quotas after August 1932 would do the same. In addition to destroying the independent peasantry and bringing the countryside under central control, he also emasculated the Ukrainian cul­tural, political, and religious elites. By focusing on the peasantry and the elites, these two policies became an improvised genocide.

Although everyone regardless of their national background suffered collectivization and the grain requisition campaigns in the countryside, Stalin and the senior party leadership were aware that of the four main grain-growing regions in the USSR, the Ukrainian SSR possessed the high­est number and percentage of peasants (nearly 90 per cent of the peasants identified themselves as Ukrainians in 1926) who could be mobilized along national lines against the Soviet state. The peasant question, according to Stalin, also represented a national question. In line with this thinking, the Stalinist regime targeted the peasants in the fertile grain-growing Ukrainian SSR not just because they were peasants, but because they also were Ukrainian peasants.¹⁴⁹