Stalin

Sown acreage had shrunk noticeably. Tractive power, seed grain, and fodder were scarce. The spring sowing season had proved short, and wheat sown beginning in late May always produced lower yields and was more susceptible to August rains, which would descend torrentially as early as the beginning of the month. Rust epiphytotics damaged a significant part of the wheat harvest, to the surprise of officials who had failed to identify it.²⁵⁴ Demoralized farmers forced into collectives were threshing and using manure sloppily and showing disregard for collectivized animals.²⁵⁵ Voroshilov had been granted his holiday, and on July 26 he wrote to Stalin about what he saw traveling south: “a scandalous infestation of the grain with weeds” in the North Caucasus.

The defense commissar appeared to be buckling under the pressure, complaining that “when one sees our military cadres, it is enough to make one a misanthrope,” and adding: “I cannot even say that these people do not work; on the contrary, they work until they are exhausted, but with no results.”²⁵⁶ Stalin kept up the pressure. “Six bombers for the Far East is nothing,” he responded (July 30). “We need to send no fewer than 50 to 60 TB-3s. And this needs to be done as soon as possible. Without this, the defense of the Far East is only an empty phrase.”

²⁵⁷

An OGPU report to the “Central Committee” (August 1, 1932) estimated rifles at just 85 percent of needs, stationary machine guns at 68 percent, hand grenades at 55, revolvers at 36, modernized howitzers at 26 percent, 107-millimeter shells at 16 percent, and 76-millimeter shells at 7. Only a third of the projected 150 divisions could be fully outfitted.²⁵⁸ Nonetheless, that same day, the politburo confirmed Kuibyshev’s recommendation to reduce capital investments by a whopping 10 percent—more than that in heavy industry. Orjonikidze exploded. Kaganovich sought to conciliate him (“My friend, the financial situation required it”) while making clear that Stalin had signed on (“We wrote to our chief friend, and he thought it absolutely correct and timely to make cuts”).²⁵⁹ In mid-August, yet another Chinese commander resisting the Japanese managed to flee to Soviet territory, but the Japanese army pursued him. The war minister in Tokyo was said to have been barely restrained from launching an attack on the USSR.²⁶⁰

SUMMER DOOM

Telegrams, letters, and reports swamped Sochi with news of mass death of horses, mass failure to sow crops, mass starvation, mass flight from collective farms, and a bewildering lack of government response.²⁶¹ Andrew Cairns, a Scottish Canadian agricultural expert sent by the Empire Marketing Board, in London, to determine if Western farmers might learn something from Soviet collectivization, managed to travel around Ukraine, Crimea, the North Caucasus lowlands, and the Volga valley from May through August 1932, and he observed women pulling up grass to make soup. Of urban canteens he noted, “As each worker finished his meal there was a scramble of children and one or two women and men for their soup plates to lick, and their fish bones to eat.”²⁶² Throughout August 1932, unsigned editorials in

Pravda lashed out at kulak “machinations” and grain “speculators.”

Stalin also received reports that “spoilage” was exaggerated and that grain was being stolen from slow-moving freight trains or slipped into ample pockets during mowing, stacking, or threshing, or just not being gathered (remaining in the fields to be eaten). He insisted to Kaganovich that just as private property under capitalism was sacred, so state property under socialism had to be recognized as “sacred and inviolable.”²⁶³ The dictator drafted a law, issued on August 7, 1932, that imposed the death penalty for the minutest theft of collective farm grain.²⁶⁴ He congratulated himself (“It is good”) and ordered a follow-up secret directive on the law sent to party organizations.²⁶⁵

Pravda (August 8) placed the pitiless law on an inside page; Kaganovich corrected this the next day with a front-page editorial.²⁶⁶ Other articles called for firing squads no matter the size of the theft. (One could view the compulsory state grain procurements—paying a mere 4.5 to 6.1 rubles per 100 kilos of rye, and 7.1 to 8.4 rubles for wheat, below production costs—as a form of grand theft, even as this enabled black bread to be sold in cities for just 8 to 12 kopecks a kilo.)²⁶⁷ Some politburo members had objected to the law in draft, but in reporting the objections to Sochi, Kaganovich had omitted names.²⁶⁸