The OGPU secretly reported that some of the volunteers tried to rape village women and lusted for power. (“If I command it, you must do it, whether to jump into water or fire, otherwise it’s a bullet to the forehead.”)173 Administrative chaos ensued in many places. Even conscientious 25,000ers were not well versed in management or agronomy, and most faced material hardships on-site, as well as armed resistance. “Remember, you sons of bitches, we’ll get even with you,” read notes delivered to 25,000ers in their names.174 Ambushes by peasants with axes and sawed-off shotguns spread fear, concretizing the Manichaean propaganda.175 But the orgy of confiscation occurred alongside rampant idealism.176 Some 25,000ers reported indignantly that kommuna—not artel—collective farms had been imposed; others wrote earnest letters about “violations of socialist legality” (to the very authorities who committed them), risking charges of playing into the “kulak’s hands.” Many of the 25,000ers had escaped villages not long before and imagined that they were helping to overcome darkness and bring modern life to the countryside.
WRATHFUL SPRING
Early OGPU reports had been channeling Stalin’s delusion that “middle” and “poor” peasants were “turning toward the collective farm,” but soon enough the secret police reported mass resistance. (“Down with collectivization!” “No one is taking an ounce of grain from here!”) In March 1930 alone, the OGPU would register more than 6,500 spontaneous “anti-Soviet group protests.”177 Peasants could not coordinate their opposition across regions, had no transregional leaders or access to the press, and were armed, if at all, only with hunting rifles. This was by no means a “civil war.” Of the 2.5 million peasants who joined protests, according to the secret police count for the year, most did so nonviolently, refusing to join the collectives. Still, peasants would assassinate more than 1,100 rural officials and activists in 1930. Another weapon was arson, “the Red Rooster,” set loose on administrative buildings.178 Most frequently, protesters destroyed their own livestock: already one quarter of the country’s farm animals had been lost, a higher proportion than during the cataclysmic civil war. Almost half the mass peasant actions in 1930 would occur in Ukraine, where, in strategic regions bordering Poland, revolt overtook every inhabited settlement. Many villages elected their own leaders, ringing church bells to signal mobilization. Hundreds of leaflets were printed, in thousands of copies: “Down with Soviet power!” “Long live a free Ukraine!”179
Stalin had been warning of how “liquidation of the kulaks” and the “sharpening of the class struggle” would encourage “imperialist intervention” in the USSR.180 Had the “imperialists” been anywhere near as aggressive as he and Soviet propaganda painted them, they would have taken full advantage of his reckless destabilization.
Almost no one had foreseen Stalin’s stunning turn to complete liquidation of the kulaks, but now came another bolt from the blue: on March 2, 1930, Pravda published his article “Dizzy with Success,” castigating local functionaries as “blockheads” caught up in “communist vainglory” who “feared acknowledging their errors.” Stalin took no responsibility himself for the dislocation. “The collective farm must not be imposed by force,” he admonished. “That would be stupid and reactionary.”181
Despite his apparent retreat, intended to ease the pressure, the OGPU reports on domestic rebellion kept coming: uprisings in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Central Black Earth region, Siberia’s Barabinsk steppe.182 Enraged especially about the overthrow of Soviet governing bodies along the frontier with Poland, Stalin privately ripped into the OGPU “to stop making speeches and act more decisively” (March 19, 1930). An offended Vsevolod Balytsky, Ukraine OGPU chief, claimed to the republic party boss, Kosior, that he was already doing just that, from a command post in the field. Orjonikidze, dispatched to the scene, wrote that peasant rebellions in border regions were being smashed “using machine guns and, in some places, cannons.”183
Trotsky, of all people, published an open letter to the Communist party (dated March 23) condemning the “adventurism” of violent collectivization and breakneck industrialization. Very few Soviet Communists could read the exile’s text, but they did not have to.184 The Pravda issue with Stalin’s article was reselling for 3, 4, or 5 rubles in the countryside, and peasants were gathering to listen to it being read.185 One peasant in the Lower Volga observed, “We have two governments—one in the center that writes to take back everything and the other local one that does not want this.”186 In fact, some local officials did reject Stalin’s retreat. “If they saw someone with a newspaper, they beat them harder and condemned: ‘So, you’re reading comrade Stalin’s article,’” M. Kvasov wrote, in a letter published in Peasant Newspaper, apropos of a village assembly on March 27. “When the peasants showed the party cell secretary, Petrov, Stalin’s article, they declared, ‘You are concealing the party line.’ But Petrov answered coldly: ‘You, comrades, are non-party, and this does not concern you. Don’t believe everything in the newspapers.’187 Local officials began to accuse Stalin of “right deviationism.”188
In the regime’s urban strongholds, money was giving way to barter amid galloping inflation, coins (which contained silver) were being hoarded, and even cigarettes could not be had. “At Moscow Tricotage no. 3,” a trade union functionary wrote in his diary (March 14), “one worker gave a speech stating, ‘Stalin wrote a correct article, only late. Bukharin wrote about this half a year ago and now it is being done Bukharin’s way. Ilich was right, saying, “Don’t trust Stalin, he will ruin you.” ’”189 Moscow provincial party boss Kārlis Baumanis—who had been ahead of Stalin in publicly promoting wholesale collectivization—was now made a sacrificial lamb, accused of extreme leftism. Kaganovich replaced him as party boss for Moscow in April 1930, while remaining a Central Committee secretary. Dispatched to Western Siberia that month (Roberts Eihe, the party boss there, was said to have appendicitis), Kaganovich got an earful, but he forced the local party bureau to adopt a secret resolution condemning as “leftist” their complaints against Stalin’s scapegoating of them.190
Nikolai Kin, a worker in the southern Ukraine city of Kherson, sent Stalin a blistering rebuttal to “Dizzy with Success,” detailing how the Central Committee was at fault, the party’s authority was damaged, and regime policies were self-defeating: “We are liquidating the kulak, and developing orphans and the indigent, throwing the children of kulaks, who are guilty of nothing, on the street.” Stalin responded privately. “Time will pass, the fury will subside, and you will understand that you are incorrect from beginning to end,” he wrote (April 22), admonishing Kin not to take pride in being a worker. “Among workers all kinds of people are found, good ones, bad ones. I know old workers with long experience in production who are still following the Mensheviks and even now cannot emancipate themselves from nostalgia for the old capitalist masters. Yes, comrade Kin, all kinds of workers are found on the earth.”191