On 31 May 1931, the Politburo’s industrial supremo Sergo Orzhonikidze was reverently shown around the nearly complete factory buildings. Orzhonikidze ordered the construction to be completed by 15 July, and the installation of the production lines to begin immediately afterwards. Unsurprisingly, given the unspoken penalties for failure, the job was done on time.
By 25 August 1931 the first trial tractors were coming off the assembly line. On 25 September the factory director sent a telegram to the Central Committee reporting that the KhTZ would be ready to start full production on 1 October as planned, just fifteen months after the ground had been broken.
Twenty thousand people assembled in the giant machine hall for the official opening. Demyan Bedny, the ‘proletarian poet’ whose pseudonym meant Demyan the Poor, was there to record the event in verse, as was a delegation of dignitaries from Moscow. A biplane flew over the site, scattering leaflets with a poem entitled ‘Hail to the Giant of the Five Year Plan’. The foreign journalist with the yellow rubber boots was there too, ‘just as sloppy, but less confident’. Varvara, the peasant girl whom he had scoffed at, had been to the factory school and was now a qualified steel-presser.
Grigori Ivanovich Petrovsky, head of the All-Ukraine Central Committee of the People’s Economy, cut the ceremonial ribbon, walked inside the hall and rode out on a bright red tractor covered in carnations and driven by champion woman worker, Marusya Bugayeva, as the factory band played the ‘Internationale’. It was followed by dozens of other tractors. One collective farm worker shouted, records the Temp special issue on the opening, ‘Comrades – But it’s a miracle!’
The Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil published the factory management’s telegram verbatim: ‘October First opening of Kharkov Tractor Factory invite editorial representative attend celebrations opening factory – Factory Director Svistun. Party Secretary Potapenko. Factory Committee Director Bibikov.’ The magazine composed a special poem in honour of the event, ‘To the Builders of the Kharkov Tractor Factory.’
But behind the universal jubilation, further catastrophe was unfolding in the countryside. The KhTZ’s tractors came too late to make an impact on the 1931 harvest, which, after the ravages of collectivization, was disastrous. The projected ‘grain factories’ were producing little more than half of what the same countryside had yielded five years before. The peasants’ only way to protest against the loss of their land and homes was to slaughter their animals and eat as much of their food supplies as they could before the commissars came. Eyewitnesses from the Red Cross reported seeing peasants ‘drunk on food’, their eyes stupefied by their mad, self-destructive gluttony, and the knowledge of its consequences.
Unsurprisingly, they worked unwillingly for the new state farms. Yet the state demanded grain not only to feed the cities but also to export for hard currency in order to buy foreign machinery for projects like the KhTZ. Soviet engineers were sent to the United States and Germany to buy steam hammers, sheet steel rolling machines and presses with trunkloads of Soviet gold, all earned from selling grain at Depression prices. The KhTZ’s American steam hammer, which Bibikov was later accused of sabotaging, cost 40,000 rubles in gold, the equivalent of nearly a thousand tons of wheat, enough to feed a million people for three days.
In October 1931 the Soviet government requisitioned 7.7 million tons of a meagre total harvest of 18 million tons. Most went to feed the cities, strongholds of Soviet power, though two million tons was exported to the West. The result was one of the greatest famines of the century.
During the expropriations of 1929 and 1930 individual villages had starved if they resisted the commissars, who punitively confiscated all the food they could find. Now, as the winter of 1931 set in, hunger gripped the whole of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Millions of peasants became refugees, flocking to the cities, dying on the pavements of Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov and Odessa. Armed guards were posted on trains travelling through famine areas so they wouldn’t be stormed. One of the most haunting images of the Russian century is a photograph of hollow-faced peasants caught selling dismembered children for meat on a market stall in the Ukraine.
The new vast fields of collective farms had watchtowers on the perimeter, like those of the Gulags, to watch for corn thieves. A law was introduced mandating a minimum of ten years of hard labour for stealing corn – one court in Kharkov sentenced 1,500 corn gatherers to death in a month. The towers were manned by young Pioneers, the Communist Children’s League (for children aged ten to fifteen). Fourteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov became a national hero in 1930 when he denounced his own father to the authorities for not handing over kulak property to the local collective farm. The tale-telling Pavlik was subsequently, perhaps not unreasonably, murdered by his grandfather. The story of this young revolutionary martyr became front-page news in Pravda and prompted books and songs about his heroism.
‘There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,’ wrote Boris Pasternak after a trip to the Ukraine. The young Hungarian Communist Arthur Koestler found the ‘enormous land wrapped in silence’. The British socialist Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev, where he found the population starving. ‘I mean starving in its absolute sense, not undernourished,’ he wrote. Worse, Muggeridge found that the grain supplies that did exist were being given to army units brought in to keep starving peasants from revolting. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet Union, convinced he had witnessed ‘one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.’
Even hardened revolutionaries like Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin were horrified. ‘During the Revolution I saw things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot be compared to what happened between 1930 and 1932,’ Bukharin wrote shortly before he was shot in 1938 in the Purges. ‘In 1919 we were fighting for our lives… but in the later period we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men together with their wives and children.’
The famine was not just a disaster – it was a weapon deliberately used against the peasants. ‘It took a famine to show them who is master here,’ a senior Party official told Victor Kravchenko, a Party planning apparatchik who defected to the US in 1949. ‘It has cost millions of lives… but we have won the war.’