Many of the peasants who had previously been regarded as middle or prosperous peasants were now listed as kulaks and made subject to dekulaki- zation. In addition, many less prosperous middle peasants and even some poor peasants were deported, after being labeled—to make repression against them easier—with the absurd term kulak henchmen (podkulachniki). ... In some regions 15—20 percent of the peasants were deported; for every kulak deported three or four middle or poor peasants were arrested.38
That is how a History of the USSR published in Moscow thirty years after the events described the situation in the countryside in 1930. In a fit of inexplicable frankness it admitted that the concept "kulak henchman" was absurd. Yet the leadership had used that term to justify the harshest measures against the peasantry.
On the basis of resolutions passed by the Central Committee of the party, the government's Central Executive Committee, and the Council of People's Commissars on January 3 and February 1, 1930, as well as special instructions dated February 4, all kulaks and podkulachniki were divided into three categories.
Organizers and perpetrators of terrorist acts, and those engaged in active anti-Soviet work, were isolated and sent to concentration camps. Kulaks who demonstrated the slightest active resistance were deported to remote regions of the country, where they were put to work cutting down the forests, doing farm labor, etc. The other kulaks remained where they were, but they could not have any land allotments from within the bounds of the kolkhozes.39
Moreover, "during the autumn and winter of 1930-31 additional deportations were carried out affecting the expropriated kulak households."40
Kulaks and their "henchmen" were deported with all of their families, including infants and old people. Hundreds of thousands were shipped in unheated boxcars thousands of kilometers away to remote parts of the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Many died en route; many others died after their arrival, for as a rule they were deported to uninhabitable locations in the forests, mountains, or steppes. In 1937 Walter Krivitsky recalled what he had seen by chance at a railroad station in Kursk in the winter of 1934: "I will never forget what I saw. In the waiting area there were nearly six hundred peasants—men, women, and children—being driven from one camp to another like cattle. ... Many were lying down, almost naked, on the cold floor. Others were obviously dying of typhoid fever. Hunger, torment, and despair were written on every face."41 A quarter of a century later, during the brief period of the Thaw, a number of Soviet writers confirmed what the "defector" Krivitsky had written.
The full story of this first socialist genocide has yet to be written. Chronologically, the first genocide of the twentieth century was that of the Armenians by the Turks. The massacre of Don Cossacks by the Bolsheviks during the civil war likewise approached genocidal proportions. The Turks destroyed a population of a different faith and nationality; the Cossacks suffered during a fratricidal civil war. The genocide against the peasants in the Soviet Union was unique not only for its monstrous scale; it was directed against an indigenous population by a government of the same nationality, and in time of peace.
In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the public disclosure of all its crimes, jurists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, and journalists began the inevitable controversy over whether the German people had known about the Nazi crimes or not. There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. Stalin spoke openly about the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," and all his lieutenants echoed him. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, "dekulakized persons," and "kulak henchmen" died alike. They were not considered human. Society spat them out, just as the "disenfranchised persons" and "has-beens" were after October 1917, just as the Jews were in Nazi Germany.
The great proletarian humanist Maxim Gorky invented a formula to justify this genocide: "If the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed." Gorky's article containing this formula was printed simultaneously in Pravda and Izvestia on November 15, 1930, then publicized in speeches and lectures, in newspapers and magazines, and over the radio. "We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for it by history, and this gives us the right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed."42
Official sources note forty-five instances of hostile action against collectivization in Central Asia in early March 1930, involving 17,400 persons, and "rebellions and disturbances in other regions."43 This is a ridiculous understatement of the peasantry's resistance to the kolkhoz: collectivization provoked hostility among the peasants in the Ukraine, Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Kuban, and the Don region. The detailed documentary evidence presumably resides in the KGB archives. Scattered bits of testimony allow us nevertheless to deduce the breadth of the resistance. In the Northern Caucasus and in a number of regions in the Ukraine regular units of the Red Army, backed by air power, were thrown against the peasantry. Frinovsky, commander of the frontier forces of the NKVD, who directed the suppression of the peasant rebellions, reported to a meeting of the Politburo that the rivers of the Northern Caucasus were carrying thousands of corpses to the sea. In some areas Red Army men refused to fire on the peasants and were shot immediately; in other cases small units went over to the rebels.
Once war was declared on the peasantry, the Soviet propaganda machine indignandy denounced cases of resistance, especially the murder of "twenty- five thousanders," the activists assigned to driving the peasants into the kolkhozes.
Passive resistance became the universal form of resistance. The peasants refused to join kolkhozes as long as they had sufficient strength not to yield to threats and force, and they destroyed their livestock as a sign of protest. Livestock transferred to the kolkhoz died from lack of shelter, fodder, and care.
The statistics demonstrate the disaster that struck the Soviet livestock herd. In 1928 there were 33.5 million horses in the country; in 1932, 19.6 million. For cattle the figures were, respectively, 70.5 million and 40.7 million; for pigs, 26 million and 11.6 million; for sheep and goats, 146 million and 52.1 million.44 In Kazakhstan the number of sheep and goats fell from 19.2 million in 1930 to only 2.6 million in 1935.45 From 1929 to 1934 a total of 149.4 million head of livestock were destroyed. The value of these animals and their products (milk, butter, wool, etc.) far exceeded the value of the giant factories built during the same period. The destruction of horses meant a loss of 8.8 million horsepower. In 1935, when there were already 379,500 tractors, the available horsepower was still 2.2 million less than in 1928, when there were only 26,700 tractors.