Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

These men were interested only in class war, in eradicating kulaks, although less than 2.5 percent of Russia’s peasantry were prosperous enough to be classified as such. But Iagoda, Evdokimov, and Krylenko marked out over 5 percent of peasants for destitution, deportation, and, in many cases, extermination. Kulaks were divided into three categories: “hostile”—to be shot or put in camps, “dangerous”—to be exiled to nonarable land in the far north or to Kazakhstan, and “not posing a threat”—to be dispossessed and released in their own region. By the end of January 1930, Molotov’s commission had put 210,000 households, 1.5 million human beings, in the first two categories. Kulaks were evicted into the freezing winter, their neighbors forbidden under pain of sharing their fate to give them food or shelter. Their money—even their savings books—was confiscated together with any property not in their hands or on their backs. Those that survived the trains to Siberia were at the mercy of one of OGPU’s most vicious chiefs, Leonid Zakovsky, who had not built even shacks to house them.

On paper the campaign was a success: by mid-February 1930 Molotov was able to report that some 13.5 million households—over half of the peasantry—had handed over land, livestock, and tools to collective farms. Given that the kulaks had left everything behind, the poor and middle peasantry should have prospered since they now had more arable land and equipment per head. Some poor peasants were given warm clothes and shoes stripped from kulaks—gifts that Iagoda hoped might win their loyalty. In fact, many collective farms existed only on paper, in regions where all that had happened was decimation of the population and disruption of the economy. The peasantry slaughtered that winter half the draft and meat animals in the country. “For the first time they are eating all the meat they want,” commented a Red Army officer. But the promised tractors had not been built, and when they were many did not work—and now there were often no horses to pull the plows.

The fate of those left on the land was grim; that of the kulaks was as horrific as the fate of Poland’s Jews under Hitler—“Auschwitz without ovens” as one survivor later put it—the only saving grace being Iagoda’s improvised tactics which left enterprising or lucky kulaks with the hope of escaping death. Iagoda’s letter to his subordinates Stanisław Messing and Gleb Bokii had a Stalinist logic: “The kulak understands splendidly that collectivization of the countryside means that he must perish, he will resist all the more desperately and viciously, which we see in the villages. From planned uprisings to counterrevolutionary kulak organizations and terrorist acts.”³⁴

The kulak, Iagoda argued, must have “his back broken” by spring. Gleb Bokii was to organize more camps and locate wildernesses, some well above the Arctic Circle, where deported kulaks could be left unguarded to die, out of earshot or sight, of starvation, cold, and disease.

There were difficulties in moving over a million peasants. Trains of cattle trucks—each train carrying up to 2,000 deportees and watched over by guards who killed at the slightest provocation—crawled over Russia’s railways, already overloaded in a country virtually without motor roads. The inhabitants of provincial cities were horrified by the spectacle at their railway stations of crowds of starving and louse-ridden kulaks, middle peasants who had been rounded up to meet the targets, and poor peasants classified as “subkulaks” for expressing pity for the kulaks. Urban workers steeled themselves to walk over corpses on the pavements. OGPU was worried only when areas hitherto unscathed were panicked by tales of what was about to happen.

At all times Stalin knew in detail what was happening. Iagoda gathered almost daily for Stalin and Molotov statistics from all over the country on arrests, deportations, executions. Naive young communists wrote letters describing the sickening atrocities on the trains to Siberia and in the Arctic tundra. To counter resistance, more OGPU cadets and frontier guards were rushed in. Food, tools, even barbed wire failed to arrive; there was no funding. Junior OGPU officials, motivated by fear of responsibility rather than pity for their victims, complained about the Commissariat of Trade, which failed to provide food. Even the theoretical rations per adult kulak could not stave off death in unheated barracks in a Russian winter: 300 grams of bread, 195 grams of potatoes, 100 grams of cabbage, 75 grams of salt herring—1,300 calories.