Voroshilov, on holiday again, had written to Stalin complaining of insomnia and stomach problems. Stalin answered, “I still feel poorly, sleep little, and am not getting better, but this is not manifested in work.” Orjonikidze wrote to Voroshilov (April 9) that he was sick and exhausted and complained about how his first deputy, Pyatakov, worked hard but did not believe in the party’s strategy, and how Orjonikidze needed a trusted deputy who could relieve him as commissar, because “I am rather ill and cannot make it much longer.”438
How did the regime not come apart altogether? How did higher-ups writing and receiving the reports not concede that the situation called for repudiation of regime policies? How did local officials persist in implementing orders?
Lev Kopelev (b. 1912) was a Communist Youth League militant, the editor in chief of an agitation paper, and a 25,000er requisitioning grain in his native Ukraine from late 1932 into spring 1933. He had been arrested, for ten days in 1929, for putting out leaflets defending the “Bolshevik-Leninists” (as Trotskyites called themselves).439 Young and naïve, he had admitted his error. His life rippled with meaning. “The grain front!” he recalled of the procurement campaigns. “Stalin said the struggle for grain was the struggle for socialism. I was convinced we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting kulak sabotage for the grain which was needed by the country, by the Five-Year Plan.” Kopelev noted how a local OGPU operative was the son of a miner and had worked in a mine himself (“We believed him without reservation”), while meetings with villagers took place under religious icons. “Every time I began to speak, I wanted to prove to these people that they were making a serious mistake by hiding the grain”—after all, workers in the cities were putting in two and three shifts yet did not have enough food; Japanese militarists and now German fascists surrounded the country. Villagers were eating grass and gnawing on twigs, denying that they had grain to give, before being hauled off—“and I persuaded myself, explained to myself: I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity,” Kopelev said. He convinced himself that “the famine was caused by the opposition of suicidally unconscientious peasants, enemy intriguers, and the inexperience and weakness of the lower ranks of [party and soviet] workers.”440
Kopelev was “speaking Bolshevik,” or making the revolution personal, internalizing its inescapable vocabulary, worldview, and presentations of self. The regime compelled people to write and recite autobiographies using prescribed categories and ways of thinking. Kopelev was a true believer, but it was not necessary to believe. It was, however, necessary to appear to believe and even the reluctant came to employ the language and thought processes of the regime to view the world through party directives and official reportage—class and enemies, factory output, and imperialist threats, false versus genuine consciousness. This is what gave Stalin’s regime its extraordinary power.441
Even in the hospital with diarrhea, Kopelev devoured the reportage of Five-Year Plan triumphs and Stalin’s catechismal speeches. If doubts crept in, he took inspiration from role models—like the orphaned son of a hired farm laborer who had worked for “kulaks” but become chairman of a village soviet. Stalin purged the Ukrainian party apparatus and replaced the Kharkov party boss with Pavel Postyshev, a Bolshevik originally from industrial Ivanovo-Voznesensk, who now became the number two in Ukraine. Postyshev, Kopelev wrote, “stood in line at grocery stores, cafeterias, bathhouses, and he sat with petitioners in the waiting rooms of various government establishments.” Postyshev opened cafés in factory shops, had flowers planted, and viciously condemned Ukrainian intellectuals as bourgeois nationalists and agents of fascism. “For me, Postyshev became a hero, a leader, a paragon of the true Bolshevik—and not for me alone.”442 In newspaper photographs of turbines and tractors, in live glimpses of freight cars loaded with steel, Kopelev saw the new world coming into being. When a peasant tried to burn down a collectivized barn, Kopelev was confirmed in his conviction that sabotage existed. Capitalist encirclement was a fact. In 1933, he was awarded a coveted place at Kharkov University.443 “I believed,” Kopelev wrote, “because I wanted to believe.”444
CONSEQUENCES
Hay carts were going round to gather the corpses, as during the medieval plagues.445 “I saw things that are impossible to forget until one’s death,” the Cossack novelist Mikhail Sholokhov wrote to Stalin (April 4, 1933) of his native Don River valley. Stalin responded (May 6) that he had directed that the area be provided food aid and that the information in Sholokhov’s letter should be investigated, but he stood his ground. “Your letters create a somewhat one-sided impression,” Stalin wrote. “The esteemed grain growers of your region (and not only your region) carried out a ‘sit-down strike’ (sabotage!) and would not have minded leaving the workers and the Red Army without grain.” He deemed their actions “a ‘quiet’ war with Soviet power. A war of attrition, dear comrade Sholokhov.”446
Stalin was indeed at war—with the peasantry, and with his own Communist party for supposedly going soft at this perilous hour. On May 4, he had received a report from Yagoda on how newly arrived emaciated conscripts were eager for the promised bread toasts and a lump of sugar, while relatives trailed them, looking for handouts. One was overheard to say, “When there were no collective farms, peasants lived a lot better. Now, with collective farms, everyone is starving. If war breaks out, no one will defend Soviet power; everyone will go against it.”447
Japan’s Kwantung Army attempted to seize Jehol, in Inner Mongolia, a springboard for attacking both Peking (Beijing) and Outer Mongolia, the Soviet satellite.448 Chiang Kai-shek’s earlier appeal to the League of Nations had merely resulted in Japan quitting that body, which Tokyo had come to see as a racist Anglo-American conspiracy to emasculate it.449 On the last day of May 1933, Kwantung generals signed a truce with “local” officials in the port of Tientsin (Tianjin), in northern China, that extended Manchukuo’s borders to the Great Wall, gave Japan control of the strategic mountain pass, and created a demilitarized zone extending sixty miles south of the wall and just north of the Peking-Tientsin district.450 Stalin suspected that Chiang, whose signature was not on the truce, was secretly negotiating an end to the war, which would free up Japan to attack him. Presumed Japanese saboteurs were crossing into Soviet territory.451 The dictator received intercepted communications between the British ambassador in Tokyo and the foreign office in London, asserting that Japan’s military buildup went beyond its aims in China and that Japanese army observers viewed war with the Soviet Union as inevitable.452 Stalin had Soviet newspapers publish intelligence excerpts, in disguised form, to expose Tokyo’s aggressive desires.453
The party journal Bolshevik tried to rebut a sense of “the capitulation of the Soviet Union in the face of world imperialism in general and Japanese imperialism in particular.”454 But whether the USSR could even fight a war had become doubtful. On May 7, 1933, the politburo had prohibited the OGPU from imposing the death penalty—the Soviet Far East was granted an exception—and the next day Stalin and Molotov had issued a secret directive to party organizations and OGPU branches suspending mass peasant deportations and ordering release of Gulag inmates guilty of lesser infractions, in light of “the three-year struggle that has destroyed our class enemies in the village.”455 “The moment has arrived when we no longer need mass repressions,” the decree explained, conceding that further “severe forms of repression” could “bring the influence of our party in the village to zero.”456 But then, when Kosior and others in Ukraine had reported on severe repression being undertaken against peasants there, Stalin responded (May 31), “Finally you are beginning to apply yourself in Bolshevik fashion.”457