Passive resistance was suppressed just as fiercely as the active variety. In Voronezh in the summer of 1930 a show trial was held featuring sixteen leaders of the "Fedorovite" religious sect. This movement, headed by a peasant named Fedorov, had arisen in the early years of the NEP in what had been Voronezh Province. The main tenet of their faith was "nonre- sistance to evil," and they sought by every means possible to "avoid evil temptation" or "participation in evil deeds." During the NEP the Fedo- rovites, and other sects such as the Dukhobors, Molokane, and Baptists, were spared persecution by the Soviet authorities, who hoped to use them against the Orthodox church. When the Fedorovites refused to join the kolkhozes, however, they were immediately branded enemies, conspirators, and kulaks. Fifteen of their leaders were sentenced to death (and immediately shot). The sixteenth was condemned to lifelong confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Nearly 2,000 Fedorovites were deported to the taiga and tundra, to meet a slow but certain death. For three months the regions infected with the idea of nonresistance to evil were "combed out." The peasants, praying and appealing to their tormentors, offered no resistance to arrest.
The peasants' passive resistance, the destruction of livestock, the complete disorganization of work in the kolkhozes, and the general ruin caused by continued dekulakization and deportations all led in 1932—33 to a famine that surpassed even the famine of 1921—22 in its geographical extent and the number of its victims. On this occasion, however, the government took no measures against the famine and in fact contributed to tis spread, using it as a weapon in the civil war against the peasantry.
The difference between the two famines was not limited just to the larger scale of that brought on by collectivization. Another difference was that the government denied the existence of the later one. Even to mention it was a crime against the state. In 1921 the Soviet government, however reluctantly, had allowed independent figures to seek help from abroad. In the 1930s nothing was said about the famine, and grain continued to be exported throughout this period. In 1928 grain exports amounted to only 1 million centners; in 1929, 13 million; in 1930, 48.3 million; in 1931, 51.8 million; and in 1932, 18.1 million.
When Terekhov, a secretary of the Ukrainian party's Central Committee, asked at a Moscow conference that grain be sent to save the starving collective farmers of the Kharkov region, Stalin cut him off: "I see that you are a good storyteller. You have invented this tale about a famine, hoping to frighten us, but it won't work!"46 It was impossible to frighten Stalin with "tales" of a famine. If he did not want to save the people dying of hunger, it was not because grain was lacking (the export of grain was evidence to the contrary) but because the famine and the havoc it wreaked vitiated the peasantry as a political force and broke the last vestiges of its resistance.
"For Stalin the peasants were scum," Khrushchev recalled much later in his memoirs. "He had no respect for the peasants or their work. He thought the only way to get farmers to produce was to put pressure on them. Under Stalin, state procurements were forcibly requisitioned for the countryside to feed the cities."47
In the cities the workers were not starving; they merely lived from hand to mouth. The leaders, however, denied themselves nothing. Dmitrievsky, the former Soviet diplomat, described how he had been fed at a sanatorium for "higher-ups" in the Crimea: 'The usual menu abounded in tasty dishes, with everything in which Russia is rich. Breakfast at eight, with eggs, ham, cheese, cocoa, tea, and milk. At eleven, yogurt. Then a four-course midday meaclass="underline" soup, fish, meat, dessert, and fruit. During the afternoon, tea and pastries. In the evening, a two-course supper."48 Walter Krivitsky, who vacationed in similar conditions during the famine, at the former estate of the Baryatinsky princes near Kursk, recounted the self-justifications of the luxuriating Soviet elite: "We are traveling a difficult road to socialism. Many have fallen along the way. We must eat well and relax after our labors, enjoying for a few weeks of the year the comforts that are still not accessible to others, for it is we who are building the happy life of the future."49
The completion of the first five-year plan gave Stalin the opportunity to play benefactor, announcing the great achievements and benefits to the people. Since the very first days of the revolution the party had deceived the workers and poor peasants, in whose name it ruled, by promising them that paradise on earth was imminent. In the late 1920s the deception, both conscious and unconscious, became a lie. During the first five-year plan it became the Great Lie. The Great Terror was preceded by—and is invariably accompanied by—the Great Lie. As a British humorist once said, there are three kinds of lies: a lie, a barefaced lie, and statistics. He was unaware of a fourth kind, Stalinist statistics, and a fifth, the Stalinist lie.
In summing up the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin was not ashamed to announce that workers' wages had risen by 67 percent and that the material conditions of the workers and peasants had improved from year to year. In a popular Moscow anecdote of the period a tourist guide at a zoo points to a crocodile recently brought to the capital and explains that from tail to head it is five meters long but from head to tail it is six. "How could that be?" asks a tourist. "You don't believe it? Measure it yourself," the guide answers. "You'll see." Stalin had roughly the same answer for anyone who wanted to check his figures. Only "sworn enemies of the Soviet system" could have any doubts about the improvement of the workers' and peasants' conditions in the Soviet Union, he declared.50
Fifteen years after the revolution Pravda proclaimed, "For a Communist there is no task more noble than the improvement of the workers' conditions."51 In the fall of 1932, when those words were written, famine and collectivization were at their height. Seventeen years after the revolution Stalin declared: 'There would have been no use in overthrowing capitalism in November 1917 and building socialism all these years if we were not going to secure a life of plenty for our people. Socialism does not mean destitution and privation."52
For all of Stalin's lies, however, collectivization never went smoothly. In late February 1930 it became obvious even to Stalin that the mad dash to collectivize everything, which he himself had ordered at the end of 1929, threatened to end in disaster. Discontent began to penetrate the army, which was composed of the sons of peasants. So Stalin took a step backward, as though intending to retreat. On March 2, 1930, Pravda published his
article, "Dizzy with Success," in which he placed all the blame on those who were following orders, the local party activists. The peasants who had been driven into the kolkhozes read this as the abandonment of collectivization. After all, had he not written, "Who benefits by these distortions, this bureaucratic decreeing of a collective farm movement, these unseemly threats against the peasants? Nobody but our enemies!" After the publication of this article the kolkhozes collapsed like a house of cards. In the central Black Earth region, where 82 percent of the individual farms had been collectivized by March, only 18 percent remained collectivized in May. To the peasants Stalin had become the good and just ruler supreme. All the trouble had been caused by local misrulers.
A step backward had been taken, however, only to prepare the way for ten new steps forward. By September 1931 nearly 60 percent of the farms had been collectivized again; in 1934, 75 percent. Repression against the peasants did not end with the establishment of the kolkhoz system. The aim of collectivization was to "solve the grain problem." The kolkhozes were formed for the convenience of the state, but the appropriate methods for controlling the kolkhozes were not found immediately.