Stalin

But on the final day, Stalin arrived in the hall. “It is sometimes asked whether the pace can be reduced a bit, and the speed of development restrained,” he stated. “No, this is impossible!” His reasoning was revealing: “To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beat up. But we do not want to get beat up! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten up by the Mongol khans. She was beaten up by the Turkish beys. She was beaten up by the Swedish barons. She was beaten up by the Polish-Lithuanian pans. She was beaten up by the Anglo-French capitalists. She was beaten up by the Japanese lords. All beat her—because of her backwardness, her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. Such is the law of the exploiters: beat up and rob the backward and the weak, capitalism’s law of the jungle. You are backward, you are weak—and therefore you are wrong; therefore you can be beaten up and enslaved. You are mighty, therefore you are right, therefore we must handle you carefully.” He concluded: “We are a hundred years behind the advanced countries. . . . We must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.”³²

The dictator tapped into Russia’s perennial torment over relative weakness vis-à-vis the West, and more recent fears of foreign forces ganging up on the socialist motherland. One participant would recall that Stalin “literally opened a valve through which the steam could be released.”³³ But he challenged bosses to get out of their offices. “There are many people among us who think that management is synonymous with signing papers,” he said. “This is sad, but true. . . . How is it that we Bolsheviks, . . . who emerged victorious from the bitter civil war, who have solved the tremendous task of building a modern industry, who have swung the peasantry on to the path of socialism—how is it that in the matter of the management of production, we bow to a slip of paper? The reason is that it is easier to sign papers than to manage production.” He enjoined them to “look into everything, let nothing escape you, learn and learn again. . . . Master technology. It is time Bolsheviks themselves became experts. . . . Technology decides everything. And an economic manager who does not want to study technology, who does not want to master technology, is a joke and not a manager.”

³⁴

DROUGHT AND REGIME SABOTAGE

Who, precisely, was a kulak—an owner of three cows? Four cows? Criteria could be murky. But centrally imposed quotas forced answers.³⁵

Naming “kulaks” often involved preemptively denouncing others to save oneself or settling old scores. “Socialism was a religion of hatred, envy, enmity between people,” a group from Kalinin province (formerly Tver) wrote to Socialist Husbandry (March–April 1931).³⁶ Some peasants were motivated by class-war sentiments, but the quotas could be met only if many middle and poor peasants suddenly got classified as “kulaks.” Those who refused to join the collectives became “kulaks,” no matter how poor. The designation “kulak henchman” made anyone fair game, and ambitious secret police officials exceeded their quotas.

³⁷ According to the OGPU’s own classifications, many of those swept up in antikulak operations were petty traders, “former people,” priests, or random “anti-Soviet elements.”³⁸ The haste, arbitrariness, and wanton violence facilitated the operation by inciting chaos and fears of things slipping out of control, spurring further harsh measures.³⁹

Stalin ordered a second wave of internal deportations beginning in late May (through early fall 1931), which proved nearly twice as large as the previous year’s.⁴⁰ He relied on local party bosses but especially the OGPU, and on the barbed rivalry between Yagoda and Yevdokimov for his favor.⁴¹