The NKVD Pollsters

Throughout Soviet history, the Communist Party leadership reg­ularly received top-secret reports assessing the attitudes of the Soviet public to party policies. The reports came from two sources: party organs and the secret police.

The party reports tended to give less coverage of anti-Soviet activities, while the secret-police reports largely focused on just such activities. There was good reason for the difference. Empha­sizing negative responses would not be in the interest of party officials preparing the reports, since it could be interpreted as an indication of deficiencies in their own propaganda efforts. Secret-police officials, on the other hand, could only benefit from focusing on negative responses. Dealing with existing or imag­ined opposition to the regime was the raison d’etre of the secret police, and the reports provided, among other things, additional justification for maintaining an extensive and costly secret-police apparatus.²⁴

The credibility of secret-police reports was at the core of the discussion about compliance and resistance under Stalinism in the first issue of Kritika (2000).²⁵ There is good reason to ques­tion the reliability of the information included in the reports, especially when they are mined exclusively for manifestations of opposition to the regime. There seems to be general agreement, however, that when it comes to “negative” statements—those crit­ical of government policy—they certainly cannot be regarded as expressions of the only authentic feelings of the population but can be used to assess the range of responses offered by the Soviet public to a given initiative on the part of the Soviet state.

One way to deal with this question is to distinguish two kinds of endorsements of official policy—those expressed in Bolshevik parlance of the period and those that did not mirror official pro­nouncements. Expressions of approval for Soviet entry into the war that used a vocabulary different from that of party declara­tions and media reports are of special interest. An added benefit of focusing on such expressions is the possibility of identifying sources of support for government policy beyond the party’s own organizational base. The unexpected change of rhetoric in the Soviet media’s justification of the coming military campaign is a case in which such a strategy may be applied to good effect.

I shall try to reconstruct the variety of positive and negative responses to the Soviet invasion of Poland on the basis of thirty- three reports about the reaction of the Soviet public to the out­break of the war filed by officials of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of Ukraine between 27 August and 15 October 1939. These reports have only recently become available to scholars as part of a publication project undertaken by historians from the Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography in Kyiv in cooperation with archivists of the Security Service of Ukraine, and with the support of a number of German governmental and public insti­tutions. Most of the reports were prepared for Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and for Lavrentii Beriia, people’s commissar of internal affairs of the USSR, by the people’s commissar of inter­nal affairs, Ivan Serov, and his deputy, Mykola Horlynsky. They were based in part on reports that Serov and his assistants were receiving from the various regions of Ukraine and from NKVD officials in Red Army units posted in Ukraine. These, too, are included in my analysis.²⁶

On 17 September, the date of the Soviet invasion of Poland and Molotov’s speech to the Soviet people, Mykola Horlynsky sent an urgent request to his subordinates: “I propose that all heads of operational sections of the NKVD of the USSR with a secret service and intelligence in Kyiv present secret-service reports on the reaction of the population to Comrade Molotov’s speech on the entry of our forces into Poland to the head of the Second Department of the NKVD of the USSR by 2:00 p.m.

What did the people of Soviet Ukraine think about the war? To begin answering this question, I shall present a spectrum of both “positive” and “negative” responses without trying to establish how widespread they may have been among the Soviet Ukrainian public in September 1939. In general, the NKVD reports agreed with the Soviet media, claiming that official efforts to convince the population of the legitimacy of government action had been largely successful. “A number of passages of Comrade Molotov’s speech were accompanied by applause,” wrote Mykola Horlynsky on 17 September.

The reaction of students was particularly enthusiastic. “At Kyiv University, Comrade Molotov’s speech was met with shouts of ‘hurrah’ by students,” reads the report. The following report suggested that young people in the provinces were just as enthusiastic: “A number of incidents have been noted of volun­tary reporting to military recruitment offices, with requests for enlistment in the ranks of the RKKA [Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army]. A group of students of the Mykolaiv Pedagogical Institute made a collective appeal to be enlisted as volunteers in the Red Army.” While rank-and-file NKVD agents and their superiors were under pressure not only to find and record but also to fabricate positive responses to Communist Party initiatives, the episodes described above could hardly have been fabricated, as they were easily verifiable.²⁸

What aroused such enthusiasm on the part of students? The information about Mykolaiv students volunteering for the Red Army was preceded in Horlynsky’s report by the statement that “The action of the USSR is being assessed as a step in the direc­tion of starting a world revolution and active struggle against the fascist aggressors.” A student of the Vinnytsia Medical Institute named Benadsky allegedly told an NKVD informer that “our Soviet government will have to bear the red banner of revolution farther west.

The report forwarded by Horlynsky to Lavrentii Beriia on 19 September included information from the regions indicating that not only students but also young workers and peasants were eager to take part in the war. In the city of Osypenko (pres­ent-day Berdiansk), “immediately after Comrade Molotov’s radio address, eighty men presented themselves, twenty of them with their wives, and asked that they be directed to the Red Army to take part in military operations.” Recruits in the Chernihivka region of Zaporizhzhia Oblast “began to demand their speedy enlistment in the army so that they might be in time to take part in military operations together with the whole Red Army.”

It was not entirely clear to the population whether the Soviet troops would simply occupy Western Ukraine and Belarus with­out military action, fight the Poles, or engage the German army as well. R.P Sheiner, the author of a letter intercepted by the NKVD, anticipated a war with Germany. “We had to take this action,” he wrote about the invasion of Poland, “for the Germans would have attacked us in any event, so it is better to strike them on Polish territory than on ours.” Some Red Army officers cross­ing the Polish border on the morning of 17 September believed that they were going to fight the Germans.

Most of the initial criticism of the Soviet invasion of Poland recorded by NKVD agents came from the ranks of the intel­ligentsia. Svitozor Drahomanov, the son of Ukraine’s most in­fluential political thinker of the nineteenth century, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and a translator at the Art Publishing House in Kyiv, allegedly stated in the presence of an NKVD informer: “In essence, this is the fourth partition of Poland, carried out by arrangement between Stalin and Hitler.... All that is going on may be called the victory of Hitlerism, which is the highest stage of the development of capitalist society.” Drahomanov expressed his critique of official actions in language borrowed from recent Soviet propaganda and Vladimir Lenin’s writings on the nature of imperialism. He was not the only one to attack the regime from the standpoint of Marxist orthodoxy and anti-fascism. A graduate student at the Institute of Folklore of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences named Lanovy reportedly declared in the presence of a government informer: “And what will the whole world say? They will say that we are dividing Poland together with fascist Germany. England and France will declare war on us, which means that we will be fighting them together with Germany. What will the Western communists and the workers of the world say then?”³¹

The sudden U-turn embodied in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact certainly undermined the Soviet regime’s credibility among many of its international and domestic supporters. For years the regime had attacked fascist Germany as the main threat to peace, prepared the population for a possible alliance with the Western democracies, and placed heavy propaganda emphasis on com­munist and proletarian solidarity in the world-wide fight against fascism. The USSR was at the forefront of that struggle—the greatest hope of all peace-loving peoples.

The apparent hypocrisy of the Soviet regime also drew strong criticism from students, who were the most enthusiastic support­ers of the regime. “The shift in our policy has been too abrupt,” said a student from Kyiv named Rybchynsky. “Only a month ago we were offering assistance to Poland against the aggressor, and now we are condemning it at every turn and have even taken over part of its territory.” Some students resorted to irony. “Our papers cast fascism and Hitler in the darkest colors. Now it turns out that those were all lies. Hitler is conducting the war in most humane fashion; he is not devastating the population or cultur­al treasures,” said a student of the Kyiv Construction Institute named Velednytsky.

Also questioned was the social component of the Soviet lib­eration paradigm. “It would have been better not to liberate the people of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus from the lords’ oppression, for things are no better among us. They will feel that in a while,” opined the medical student Gomerbarg. Even the least controversial claim, that of fraternal ties with the peoples of the newly occupied territories, was ridiculed. “It is very strange to hear assertions about our brethren in the West,” said the Kyiv student Zalizniak. “Now we call them brothers, but if that broth­er had written you a letter earlier, you would have suffered for it.” True believers from the ranks of the Red Army could also be quite critical. They were dissatisfied that their commanders had canceled a sharpshooting exercise known as “Shooting the Fascist.”³³

During the first few days of the invasion, Horlynsky reported to his superiors that there were no negative responses recorded among workers. Nor were there any reactions, either positive or critical, attributed to peasants in the reports. But soon reports be­gan to arrive from the regions, and while they also focused largely on critical opinions attributed to the intelligentsia, there were growing references to critical statements by workers and peasants alike. Some of these repeated arguments noted in reports on the mood of the intelligentsia, but there were also new themes and ar­guments. Their underlying motives were protest against economic hardship, refusal to fight for Soviet rule in case of a German- Soviet conflict, and readiness to exploit the war in order to settle scores with the regime. A worker from Odesa named Tsukanov allegedly said in the presence of an NKVD informer: “Hitler is attacking Poland and will go on to attack our communists. The war is only a few days old, and we already have nothing.”

A peasant named Hustovydyn in Sumy province allegedly tried to disrupt a meeting on the occasion of Molotov’s speech, saying, “The Soviet government has stripped me bare and reduced me to poverty. Not a single idiot will go to the front.” Kalynychen- ko, a peasant from Kirovohrad Oblast, told his fellow collective farmers: “The war will solve everything. We suffered for a long time; now there is less time to wait. Soon we will live without collectives.” His attitude was shared by another peasant named Krosalo, who stated: “Even if the Germans take us over, we will be none the worse for that. On the collective farm, you are still hungry and threadbare. In 1933, Soviet power was guilty of starv­ing many people to death.”³⁴

We cannot assess the popularity of either positive or critical opinions among the Soviet public presented in the NKVD re­ports. Many objects of NKVD surveillance managed to survive into the late 1930s precisely because they were able to keep their mouths shut or make neutral or pro-Soviet pronouncements when they suspected that they were dealing with an NKVD informer. A forty-eight-year-old Ukrainian woman who came from a dekulakized family and worked on the Soviet railroads commented as follows to interviewers of the Harvard Refugee Interview Project: “Generally, people in the Soviet Union worked hard and were silent; they were afraid to talk too much or to ask for some information because of the common terror and because many Soviet agents and spies were among the people. Especially former ‘kulaks,’ people like my husband and me, were silent and worked hard.” Whether genuine or not, both positive and nega­tive statements contained elements of people’s real thinking, not constructed for the sake of the informer.³⁵

What we do know, both from the reports and from other sources, is that resentment among the peasantry based on the out­comes of collectivization and the Great Famine of 1932-33 was an ongoing concern, and that the urban population, including that of Moscow, Leningrad, and capitals of the republics, suffered from shortages of food and manufactured goods that grew worse in August and September 1939. The public was generally confused by the recently signed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not understanding on which side, if any, the Soviet Union was entering the war. Some of the people “polled” by the NKVD were concerned about what Britain and France would say regarding the Soviet invasion of an independent and embattled state.