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In the early days, at least, the heart of the Siberian program sought to exploit the rich surface iron deposits at Magnitogorsk in the Urals, and the seemingly inexhaustible coal deposits (which in some places lay in strata 300 feet thick) of the Kuzbas in Central Siberia. By connecting these two great untouched sources of raw material into one immense metallurgical combine, Stalin hoped to acquire an iron and steel base equal to that of the United States. Centuries before, Genghis Khan’s own prospectors are said to have set up in the region smithies that forged the arsenal of swords, knives, and lances that advanced his armies to the west. And on August 27, 1734, Gmelin had noted in his diary: “This whole Neighborhood between the Irtysh and the Ob is so full of the most costly Ores that, even if the Work be mightily pressed forward, nevertheless several Centuries may pass before this Treasure is exhausted. Whereby it must be regarded as a crowning Mercy in these Parts there is no need to lay out costly Mines with costly Machines. The Ores do all lie on the Surface of the Earth.”695 During World War I, some exploration of the Kuzbas had finally begun, and by 1928 coal output was double what it had been in 1917. By 1932, the iron and steel plants at both Stalinsk (later Novokuznetsk) and Magnitogorsk had gone into production, and by the end of the decade their mammoth blast furnaces together were producing about 3 million tons of pig iron, or 20 percent of the national total a year. By 1940, coal production had reached 22.5 million tons. Other Siberian projects concentrated on the mining of gold, tin, tungsten, molybdenum (used in special alloy steels), as well as minerals like mica and fluorspar. In the Far East, investment went into the oil fields of northern Sakhalin, port development, aircraft and shipbuilding, munitions plants, and other defense-oriented manufacturing, as Russia kept a wary eye on the Japanese occupying Manchuria to the south.

Across Siberia and elsewhere – in Central Asia, the Volga Basin, and the Ukraine – not only traditional industries were expanded but numerous others created which Russia had never before possessed. Plan by Five-Year Plan, Stalin continued his frantic industrial march. In time, cotton combines, electrical stations, and other new structures went up, with an increase in Siberia of industrial production of over 13 percent. The populations of many cities increased by two to three times, and all the primary minerals and fuels – coke, coal, oil, and sundry ores – were forced in ever greater quantities from the ground. In 1940 alone, Siberia produced 32 billion kilowatt-hours of electrical energy, smelted 1,536 tons of cast iron and 2 million tons of steel, mined 39 million tons of coal, and exported 51.9 million treble meters of wood.

Everything went to fuel this industrial juggernaut, and in its wake the Russian countryside itself was devoured. Although the government’s original agricultural policy had envisaged a gradual collectivization of farms – whereby individual, privately owned holdings would be amalgamated into large state cooperatives – Stalin became impatient to impose state controls in order to ensure the supply of food to cities, factories, and mills. Peasant resistance provoked official wrath and furnished an excuse to accelerate the pace. Stalin accused the so-called “kulaks,” or prosperous peasants, of hoarding grain, and (as Lenin had done ten years before) dispatched requisition squads to the countryside to take it by force. Some of the “hidden” grain they found was seed, but they took it anyway, ensuring that famine would return. Many outraged peasants chose to destroy their holdings rather than yield them up for nothing to the state, and in reaction, on December 27, 1929, Stalin decided to liquidate the kulaks as a class.

Although some kulaks were usurious moneylenders who also exploited the field hands they employed – justifying their epithet, “the tight-fisted ones” – most were simply thrifty and industrious members of village communities, who, wrote a contemporary, “had worked hard, saved money, and acquired not only some property but skill in certain trades.”696 A number had been able to give their children a good education, producing doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals which (in the eyes of the state) linked them with the old bourgeosie. But in practice, in fact, it was hard to say exactly who a kulak was. “Anyone who employed hired labor,” write the authors of Utopia in Power, “was considered a kulak, but so was anyone who owned two horses, two cows or a nice house.”697 Before long, the state found it convenient to brand as a kulak anyone, rich or poor, who resisted collectivization. Local Party organizations were also directed to round up draft animals and cattle, pigs, poultry, and sheep. Some 25,000 operatives were sent to the villages to force compliance, but in yet another act of collective defiance, thousands of peasants slaughtered their livestock rather than give in.

On August 7,1932, Stalin issued a decree defining all collective farm property as state property, and making “unauthorized” use of it a capital crime. This was followed on January 11, 1933, by a resolution of the Central Committee warning against “anti-Soviet elements, penetrating the kolkhozes (collective farms) in the capacity of accountants, managers, storekeepers, brigadiers and so on, often in the capacity of leading officials of kolkhoz boards.” Such elements were said to be “trying to organize wrecking, putting machines out of order, sowing badly, squandering kolkhoz property, undermining labor discipline, organizing the theft of seeds, secret granaries and the sabotage of the grain harvest.”698 By the end of the year about a third of the supervisory or technical personnel involved in agriculture was under arrest. Over the next two years, 50 to 60 percent of the homesteads in Siberia had been collectivized, and by 1934, about 75 percent of all peasant holdings throughout Russia had been similarly transformed. In Siberia, eight hundred state machine tractor stations also equipped the huge new state farms.

In some respects “dekulakization” hit Siberia harder than anywhere else. The comparatively prosperous Siberian peasantry made a natural target, and whole hamlets as well as individual homesteads were seized as kulak nests. In one Western Siberian region alone, in just one year (1932), 43,000 families were “removed” (most to concentration camps or Arctic settlements in the Siberian north), while hundreds of thousands of “kulaks” were also deported to Siberia from other provinces of the empire. “I will never forget what I saw,” wrote one eyewitness. “In the waiting room of the railroad station there were nearly six hundred peasants – men, women, and children – being driven from one camp to another like cattle... Many were lying down, almost naked, on the cold floor. Others were obviously dying of typhoid fever. Hunger, torment, and despair were written on every face.”699

It had taken a long time for Siberia to develop agriculturally, and for its promising arable lands to be populated by an enterprising and capable peasantry. The territory had even recovered remarkably after the Civil War, and proved able to feed much of the country in the first decade of Soviet rule. And now this structure was destroyed at a single stroke.

At least fifty thousand once-productive Buryats and Mongols fled south to Inner Mongolia and China, and the Amur and Ussuri Cossacks, long established along the frontier, abandoned their villages and crossed en masse into Manchuria – joining others who had fled before. Like peasants elsewhere, many Buryat, Mongol, and Yakut herdsmen slaughtered their own livestock rather than see them incorporated into collective herds, and throughout Russia the grain harvest also fell dramatically, with the most tragic results. Famine spread across rural Siberia as well as the Ukraine, the Kuban, and areas of the Don and Volga rivers, and it is estimated that up to 7 million died.

By 1934, some of Stalin’s colleagues had become convinced that the country itself might not survive his rule. The Leningrad Party chief, Sergey Kirov, seemed a promising candidate to replace him, but Stalin had him assassinated, then proclaimed his death a catastrophe in order to use it as a pretext to launch a terror campaign. Show trials of prominent figures were followed by the arrest, execution, and exile of countless others for alleged complicity in a vast anti-Communist conspiracy. “Every morning,” writes Robert Conquest, “Stalin would initial numbered lists of named victims” – 3,182 such death warrants were signed by him on December 12, 1937, alone – “while his henchmen were issuing massive quotas for the random killing of ‘enemies of the people’ in every region and city. Since every person arrested was forced to denounce dozens of accomplices, the tally of the condemned soon swelled to unmanageable proportions. The purpose was to destroy through fear not just the opposition, such as it was, but the very idea of dissent.”700 In the year of the Great Terror (1937-38), more than 1 million were executed and an estimated 7 million sent to concentration camps.