On the final day, Stalin, putting on a folksy air, too, warned biblically that he who did not work would not eat, but promised that each collective farmer would have a cow (“prolonged applause”).411 He scolded those who underestimated women (“Women on the collective farms are a great force”). He acknowledged that “quite a number of people, including collective farmers,” had been skeptical of party policy, but dismissed the idea of a third way, individual farming without capitalists and landowners, because it would inevitably give rise to a “kulak-capitalist regime.” Silent on the famine, he asserted that “the multi-million-mass poor peasants, previously living half starving, have now become middle peasants in the collective farms, they have become well-off. This is an achievement that the world has not seen before.”412
On February 27, a fire consumed the German Reichstag, and a young, unemployed bricklayer, recently arrived from the Netherlands, was found inside and arrested. He was a member of the Dutch Communist party. The Nazi party was still a minority in the parliament, but now Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending the governments of Germany’s federal states and most civil liberties “as a defensive measure against the Communists.”413 Dissolution of parliament and snap elections, which were scheduled for March 5, afforded Hitler a campaign of intense hysteria about Communist subversion. The Nazis still won only 43.9 percent (288 of 647 seats), but with their partners, the German National People’s Party, who won 8 percent, they had a governing majority.414 Hitler had been handed power, but now he seized it, proposing an Enabling Act to promulgate laws on his authority as chancellor without the Reichstag for a period of four years. It required a two-thirds vote. Only the Social Democrats, twelve of whose deputies had been imprisoned, voted against the measure, which passed 441 to 94.415 Soon the Nazis were the sole legal party in Germany.
Hitler—who had become a German citizen only in 1932—was dictator of the country, upending the traditional conservatives.416 “With few exceptions, the men who are running this government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” the American consul general wrote in a message to the state department. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”417
Elements in the Nazi movement—assisted by colluding police—exuded fanatical delight in physically annihilating leftist property, institutions, and people. Hitler fulminated against “Judeo-Bolshevism” as a worldwide conspiracy.418 At the same time, he received the Soviet envoy, Lev Khinchuk, on April 28, 1933, and shortly thereafter allowed Germany to ratify the long-delayed extension of the 1926 Berlin treaty, ostensibly reaffirming good bilateral relations.419 “The cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy is the maintenance of peace,” Izvestiya editorialized (May 6). “In this spirit, the Soviet Union does not wish to alter anything in its attitude to Germany.” But Radek penned an essay in Pravda (May 10) noting that the fascist regimes led the way in “revision of the robber baron peace of Versailles,” and warning that this would entail “the creation of a worse Brest-Litovsk peace.” He hinted at a Soviet effort to cozy up to Poland.420
Communist parties outside the USSR numbered 910,000 members, and the German party had accounted for 330,000 of them, the second largest after China (350,000).421 But Hitler crushed them. This left the French and Czechoslovak parties, with just 34,000 and 60,000 members, respectively, as the next largest. Communists in France and Czechoslovakia pressured Moscow to abandon the “social fascism” policy. But in spring 1933, when seven Social Democratic parties issued a joint public appeal for a nonaggression pact with Communists, Stalin approved instructions “to step up the campaign against the Second International,” arguing that “it is necessary to emphasize the flight of Social Democracy to the fascist camp.” This stance was shared by many of the foreign Communists he had gathered at Comintern HQ.422 The long-standing civil war on the left persisted.423
EDUCATION OF A TRUE BELIEVER
Upward of 50 million Soviet inhabitants, perhaps as many as 70 million, were caught in regions with little or no food.424 More than a million cases of typhus would be registered in 1932–33, and half a million of typhoid fever.425 The OGPU claimed in a report to Stalin (March 1933) that it had interdicted 219,460 runaways in search of food, sending 186,588 back to their points of origin and arresting the others.426 Human and animal corpses littered county roads, railroad tracks, the open steppe, the frontiers. Peasants ate dogs and cats, exhumed horse carcasses, boiled gophers. The Dnepropetrovsk OGPU reported to Kharkov (March 5, 1933) “on the rising cases of tumefaction and death on the basis of famine, verified and confirmed in documents by physician observation.” The regional OGPU boss sent tables with the numbers of starving families by county, and named conscientious laborers who were starving, adding that a traveling commission had delivered grain from the reserves to the suffering areas.427 It was, of course, too little too late.
Death and disease wracked the entire Soviet wheat belt—Ukraine (including the Moldavian autonomous republic), the North Caucasus (including the Kuban, Stavropol, and Don provinces), the Middle and Lower Volga valley (from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan, including the Volga German autonomous republic), and the Central Black Earth region—but also Vologda and Arkhangelsk in the north, the Urals, and the Kazakh autonomous republic.428 Party officials begged for emergency aid to “save the lives of many people from starvation death,” as the ethnic Kazakh official Turar Ryskulov wrote to Stalin (March 9, 1933).429 An OGPU operative assembled a summary of starvation in the cities in the Urals, Volga valley, and North Caucasus, underscoring the negative effects on workers’ political mood.430 Reports of cannibalism in Ukraine were averaging ten per day. Parents were killing one child and feeding it to the others; some prepared soup stock and salted the remaining flesh in barrels to preserve it.431 The secret police reported on cannibal bands that targeted orphans: “This group cut up and consumed as food three children, including an eleven-year-old son and an orphan whose parents perished from starvation.”432
Reports and letters to Stalin’s office were graphic.433 The documents show that he became livid not when he learned that people were driven to eating human flesh but when he learned that an American correspondent was given permission to travel to famine-stricken regions (“We already have enough spies in the USSR”).434 When even the unsqueamish Kaganovich confirmed the catastrophe, it evidently got through to the dictator.435 On March 20, 1933, the politburo, with Stalin signing the protocol, resolved to supply more tractors (though fewer than requested), send more food aid to Ukraine, allow free trade in foodstuffs in Kharkov and Kiev, and mobilize all internal resources for the sowing campaign.436 (That same day, the politburo directed the OGPU to remove guns from the population.) 437