A few days after the arrest of those fifteen villagers and the eviction of their families, we were summoned to a meeting by a messenger. It took place in the former house of the same Timish Zaporozhets. The interior of the house had already been completely changed. The inner walls had been removed, and what had been a three-room house had become a type of hall, furnished with crude benches. Now it became clear to all of us that Timish had been a victim of his own house. The officials had arrested him because they needed a large building.
At this meeting we were told that a new administration was about to be established in our village. This at first did not arouse any suspicion in us. Our village was simply to be divided into units and subunits called Hundreds, Tens, and Fives.
I was only a youth at that time and I certainly was not concerned with the consequences of such a division. But later I realized what an inescapable trap that new system of “Cut your own throat”[3] administration was. Through these divisions and subdivisions, the Thousander, with his group of Party functionaries, was able to establish undisputed control over the villagers. Moreover, he was able to detect and destroy any opposition to Party policy and thereby rapidly collectivize the entire village.
Our village comprised about 800 households and 4,000 inhabitants. It was divided into 8 Hundreds, 80 Tens, and 160 Fives, or a total of 248 units. Since each unit had an individual in charge assigned to it by the village soviet (council), our village had 248 subdivisional functionaries or officials. Besides that, a special propagandist[4] was assigned to each Hundred, and one agitator[5] to each Ten and to each Five. This doubled the number of functionaries to 496. In addition, a so-called Bread Procurement Commission was appointed to each Hundred.
These commissions were set up in all villages throughout Ukraine. At first there was one commission for the entire village. Now, at the beginning of collectivization, such a commission was attached to each village subunit, as for example, to each Hundred. Controlled by the Communist Party, these commissions and brigades were organized with the single purpose of securing the collection of grain quotas. Later, when total collectivization and the policy of “liquidation of the kurkuls[6] as a social class” was announced, these commissions became the major force in organizing collective farms and in expropriating kurkuls. In fact, they became the arbitrary rulers of the countryside.
This new bread commission consisted of ten or more members, increasing the number of village subdivisional functionaries by eighty to 576. Finally, there were three permanent vykonavtsi, locally appointed militia deputies, for each Hundred, or twenty-four in all. The permanent vykonavtsi were important officials because they actually performed the function of the local militia, the Soviet police. They could make arrests without any legal formalities. This made 600 subdivisional functionaries, or 75 functionaries for each Hundred. Thus, each unit of a hundred households was controlled by 75 persons. This number could be increased if one included the 35 members of the village soviet and the 17 kolhosp[7] officials. Actually, there were 652 active functionaries for the entire village. In other words, there was one functionary for every six villagers.
The majority of appointees to these subdivisional positions were selected from among the ordinary farmers, and as such, they found themselves in a precarious situation. There was nothing they hated as much as collective farming, yet they became the instrument for its implementation. They were appointed to tasks as soldiers are. There was no choice but to do as they were ordered. The individuals with any function in such organizations or institutions were looked upon as officials, no matter whether they were government employees or not. This title of “official” meant a great deal, for it secured almost unlimited power for those who bore it. Indeed, a representative of an administrative organ or organization was given unlimited rights to command and to demand. Thus, anything with the slightest ring of officialdom became dreaded by the ordinary villager, while the attainment of it gave this same person a tremendous advantage.
An ordinary farmer would become an official as soon as he was assigned to a commission, committee, or some type of brigade or group established for an official purpose.
According to the Communist concept, to be a Soviet official was an honor. Refusal to accept this honor would mean disloyalty to the Soviet regime—an intolerable offense. Anyone who refused to accept an official appointment, or who opposed an official’s activity, incurred a severe penalty as a suspected enemy of the people. This policy had been carried out with such rigidity that few dared to refuse an appointment or to show opposition.
In order to be able to demand of his charges the fulfillment of certain obligations to the state, an official had to meet them himself and set an example. Failure would lead to an accusation of refusal to obey Party and government. Since the task of these officials was collectivizing and gathering foodstuffs, they thus had to collectivize themselves and deliver their quotas.
Previously, there had been one authority in the village, the Village Soviet, elected at the village general meeting, which chose the executive committee with its chairman and clerk. At that time, political organizations such as the Communist Party and the Komsomol did not yet play any important roles within the village administrative system, for membership in these organizations was a rarity in our village.
This kind of self-government was, however, abolished with the start of total collectivization. Both the village general meeting and the village soviet lost their power to the Communist Party, the membership of which was increasing rapidly among our villagers. The Communist Party organization, while replacing the village soviet in all its initiative functions, became master of the village by dictating its will to the village general meeting. As a result, the general meeting became merely a puppet for the Communist Party. So it was with the village soviet. Only Party or Komsomol members or persons of unquestionable loyalty to the Party and the government could be elected or appointed to its executive offices.
About the time of the Thousander’s arrival, two institutions were introduced into our village: the Special Section and the Workers and Peasants Inspection. Both became horrors in our lives.
The Special Section was a branch of the GPU,[8] the political secret police. Officially, the Special Section was represented by only one man who occupied an office in the building of the village soviet, and always wore a full dress GPU uniform. The recruiting that went on behind his doors, and the identity of his secret agents, remained a mystery. However, it was generally believed that one agent was planted in each Hundred to inform the GPU of the activities of each villager in that particular Hundred.
The Workers and Peasants Inspection was a local branch of a commissariat[9] of the same name. Today it is known as the Commission of State Control. It was in charge of checking practices of the government agencies, and the loyalty and efficiency of officials. With the decree of total collectivization, the Party and government delegated the commissariat to control the fulfillment of this policy.
The Workers and Peasants Inspection was also represented in our village by one man. He was an outsider, of course. A commission of five local people was appointed to assist him. He also maintained his own secret agents who spied on the local officials. When he found “discrepancies,” he assumed the role of both arbiter and judge. His decisions were final.
3
“Cut your own throat” is an expression I use here to describe the new village administration, established at the onset of collectivization in which the farmers were forced to take active part and which eventually destroyed them. In other words, the farmers were put in a situation where they destroyed themselves through their own actions, i.e., they cut their own throats.
4
Propagandist was the official Communist title of a person whose duty it was to spread and disseminate Communist ideas and ideology. During the collectivization of farmers, the propagandists served as the eyes and ears of the Communist Party. They were the ones who introduced the Party’s policy of collectivization to the population at “grassroots” level. They were usually appointed from among the Party and Komsomol members.
5
Agitators differed from propagandists in that they were supposed to stir up and mobilize the people for support of a certain course of action. But, in reality, there was not such a difference between them. Anyone with a mouth tuned to the Party line was qualified to be appointed an agitator. Even children were given this title and sent from house to house with propaganda materials in their hands and prefabricated phrases in their mouths.
6
The Ukrainian word kurkul (Russian kulak) was the official definition of a village usurer in the Soviet Union. Any farmer who employed hired labor, who possessed heavy machinery, or hired out such machinery, or contracted to work on other farms, who leased land for commercial purposes, etc., was branded kurkul. This definition found ready recognition in the West, and consequently we hear here that kurkul means a rich or well-to-do farmer. Such translation or interpretation of this epithet can be misleading because the Communists applied this label indiscriminately to all farmers, even to genuine paupers.
During the collectivization this label was widely used, and it became an epithet of abuse for all those farmers who refused to join the collective farm. The policy of “liquidation of kurkuls as a social class,” introduced by the Communist Party in 1929, resulted in the disappearance of millions of farmers labeled as kurkuls. Many of them were simply murdered; others were starved to death during the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine; and still others were deported to the “corrective labor camps” or to the concentration camps. The label kurkul was attached to anyone, even to nonfarmers, who showed the slightest sign of disagreement with or opposition to Communist agricultural policy during that time. The possession of a one-room house, a cow, and a few chickens, or the possession of a house with a tin roof or board floor was enough to be labeled as a kurkul.
7
Kolhosp is the Ukrainian acronym for collective economy or collective farm (
8
GPU is the abbreviation for Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, or State Political Administration. It is the name of the Soviet secret police which replaced the Cheka in February 1922. See also Chekist (note 2). In 1923, the GPU was renamed OGPU, which meant United State Political Administration. But the acronym GPU continued to be used popularly even after 1923. OGPU remained a separate institution until 1934 when it was absorbed into the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. In 1941, the People’s Commissariat for State Security (in Russian, Narodnyi kommissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti) was created, known under the acronym NKGB. Thus state security was divorced from the NKVD, but not for long. With the beginning of the war with Germany in June 1941, state security was returned to the NKVD until 1943. It existed as a separate agency until 1946. When the people’s commissariats were redesignated as ministries, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, or MVD as its abbreviation). The People’s Commissariat for State Security became the Ministry of State Security (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or MGB). Thus the NKVD and NKGB became the MVD and MGB. During the power struggle that followed Stalin’s death, the MVD absorbed the MGB, but then the security service was once more divorced from the MVD. In March 1954, the state security agency emerged as the KGB, which is an acronym for Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, meaning the Committee for State Security.
9
Commissariat was the name given to central government departments, corresponding to ministries, during 1917–1946. In 1946, these People’s Commissariats were renamed ministries.