Stalin

All told, around 5 million people were “dekulakized”—by the police, by their fellow peasants, or by choosing to flee, with an untold number perishing during deportation or not long after. Up to 30,000 heads of households were summarily executed. OGPU operatives improvised colonization villages, soon rechristened “special settlements,” which were intended to be self-sufficient, but despite a torrent of decrees, actual settlements with housing would be formed only belatedly.⁴² The dispossessed who survived the journeys in cold, dark cattle cars to the taiga had to make it through the first winter in tents or under the open sky.⁴³ They helped build the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, and other Five-Year Plan showcases. The self-dekulakized and peasants who were dispossessed but not internally deported sought livelihoods at the same construction sites, provoking accusations of “infiltration.”⁴⁴ The deputy OGPU plenipotentiary to Eastern Siberia reported mass flight from the special settlements, too, because of “severe living conditions and the food situation,” as well as “epidemic diseases and high mortality among children.” People, he wrote, “were completely covered in filth.”

⁴⁵

All the while, the regime was supposed to be facilitating the planting for the next harvest, the first in which the collective and state farms would predominate.⁴⁶ The Five-Year Plan had originally envisioned a 1931 harvest of 96 million tons, and as late as the end of 1930 the harvest was estimated at 98.6 million, far larger than the best prerevolutionary harvests.⁴⁷ But in 1931, a cold spring followed by a summer drought—a fatal combination—struck the Kazakh steppes, Siberia, the Urals, the Volga, and Ukraine.⁴⁸

Stalin got warnings of lagging harvest preparation as well as locust infestation and ordered some actions, but the regime seems not to have perceived the danger.⁴⁹ Kalinin wrote to the holidaying Avel Yenukidze (May 27, 1931), the secretary of the central executive committee of the Soviet, about the “unprecedented weather” in Moscow (“It’s just like the hot south; rain is rare and brief”) yet still asserted that “by all data the harvest should be good.”⁵⁰ He made no mention of the devastating loss of draft animals (slaughtered animals do not consume grain, but they do not pull plows, either).⁵¹ Matters were most dire in Russia’s Kazakh autonomous republic, where the regime had decided that, in order to overcome “backwardness,” it would force-settle nomads.

⁵² This region was the country’s main meat supplier, but it was made a destination for several hundred thousand deported kulaks, further diminishing land for herds and increasing claimants on local food. State procurements took such a large proportion of the grain grown here that herders and their animals were effectively left to starve.⁵³ Reports reached Moscow of significant deaths among Kazakhs from famine and of mass flight to Uzbekistan, Siberia, Turkmenistan, Iran, and China in search of food.⁵⁴ Only the mountain territories of Dagestan matched the depth of starvation and epidemics seen again in 1931 in the Kazakh autonomous republic, a territory larger than Western Europe.⁵⁵

Urban rationing, meanwhile, was mired in bureaucracy, while investment in housing, health care, and education took a backseat. Stalin attended both days of a conference of industrial managers (June 22–23, 1931).⁵⁶ In a rousing closing speech, he stressed no-excuses fulfillment of plan targets, while enumerating six conditions for industrial development, such as promoting higher-education graduates and factory workers into administration, and observed that “no ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia,” a euphemism for the emerging Soviet elite. His other conditions included expanding trade and differentiating workers’ wages to stimulate productivity. “Socialism,” Stalin concluded, “is the systematic improvement of the position of the working class,” without which the worker “will spit on your socialism.”⁵⁷

“SPRINGTIME”