First, a system of obligatory deliveries to the state was introduced (and meeting these obligations became "the first commandment of the collective farmer"). The kolkhozes were obliged to surrender between 25 and 33 percent of their products at fixed prices established by the state. Second, the kolkhozes were stripped of all agricultural machinery, that is, of the very tractors that were supposed to make the peasants say, "I am for communism." The kolkhozes had the land and the labor force, but the machinery was held by state-run machine and tractor stations (MTSs) established by a decree of June 5, 1929. In return for its services the MTS took another 20 percent of the harvest, and it was impossible to conceal the harvest from the MTS personnel, since they actually worked the kolkhoz fields. Thus, control was established over kolkhoz production. In addition, "political departments" attached to the MTSs were introduced in January 1933, with the task of monitoring the collective farmers from the political point of view. The head of each political department was flanked by a GPU representative, who could instantly turn word into deed by arresting errant peasants. In January 1933 Stalin spoke ironically about those who believed that after the liquidation of the kulaks there would be no more enemies. He pointed out that storehouse personnel, accountants, and managers could be enemies, too. Immediately 34.4 percent of all employees at storage facilities were arrested and charged with sabotage; the same with 25 percent of all bookkeepers, and so forth.53
Among the more eloquent documents of the period is a secret letter of
May 8, 1933, to all party and government workers and all organs of the GPU, the courts, and the procuracy. This letter, marked "secret, not for publication," was found in the Smolensk archives. It provides a good summary of what happened during collectivization, especially the forms and methods used to carry it out. The letter, signed by Molotov as president of the Sovnarkom and Stalin as general secretary of the party's Central Committee, consisted of two parts: "Regularization of Arrest Procedures"; and "Reduction of Overloading [i.e., an excessive number of prisoners] at Places of Confinement." The instructions under the first part were "to prevent arrests by persons not authorized by law—chairmen of district soviet executive committees, district and regional plenipotentiaries, chairmen of village soviets, chairmen of kolkhozes and associations of kolkhozes, secretaries of party cells, etc." The "etc." was particularly significant. It meant that until then virtually anyone had been able to arrest peasants. The letter put an end to this situation, except for "the Far Eastern Territory, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan," where the continuation of these practices was authorized for another six months.
The second part of the letter showed the results of such mass arrests and indiscriminate power to arrest. The letter stipulated that no more than 400,000 people should be held in places of confinement—other than labor camps and penal colonies. As of May 8, twice that number were being held, because the letter instructed the GPU, the commissariats of justice of the Soviet republics, and the procuracy of the USSR to "undertake immediately to relieve the overloading at places of detention and within a two-month period reduce the number of prisoners from 800,000 to 400,000.
If the overloading of the prisons was relieved, that did not mean that the prisoners were freed, but only that they were dispatched to the camps more quickly. Room was made in the prisons, and the work force in the camps was swelled. The Western journalist William Henry Chamberlin, who was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s, had the following to report about the camps: "I was informed by a reliable source that in the concentration camps in Siberia alone there were close to 300,000 prisoners. The number of Soviet citizens who were deprived of their liberty without the slightest hint of a trial during the years of the five-year plan must be estimated at no less than 2 million."55 The official figure of 800,000 in the prisons alone as of May 8, 1933, suggests that the total number must have been far more than 2 million.
The economic results of collectivization were deplorable. During the first four years of the five-year plan the total harvest of grain diminished, according to official calculations, from 733.3 million centners in 1928 to 696.7 million in 1931—1932. The yield per hectare in 1932 was 5.7 centners. In 1913 it had been 8.2 centners.56 In 1928 the total output for agriculture was 124 percent of the amount in 1913. In 1929 this dropped to 121 percent; in 1930, 117 percent; in 1932, 107 percent; and in 1933, 101 percent. Livestock production in 1933 was only 65 percent of production in 1913.57 Yet in summing up the results of collectivization on January 7, 1933, Stalin was satisfied: 'The party has succeeded in creating conditions which enable it to obtain 1,200—1,400 million poods [394—460 million centners] of marketable grain annually, instead of 500—600 million poods [164—197 million centners], as was the case when individual peasant farming predominated."58
This success was paid for primarily with millions of human lives. The demographic results of collectivization were tragic. The number of victims has never been, and will never be, determined exactly. (The losses of livestock were calculated, on the other hand, down to the last sheep.) Population figures and the data on the birth rate and mortality rate were no longer published after 1932. Stalin took personal charge of statistics. In January 1934, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, the "Congress of Victors," he reported "an increase in the population of the Soviet Union from 160,500,000 at the end of 1930 to 168,000,000 at the end of 1933." Ten years later he would tell Churchill that "the poor peasants" had taken reprisals against "10 million kulaks," of whom the "vast majority" were annihilated, the rest being sent to Siberia.59 In 1935 Molotov reported that in 1928 the kulaks and well-to-do peasants had numbered 5,618,000, but as of January 1, 1935, only 149,000 were left.60 Aleksandr Orlov reports that foreign journalists, including those who praised Stalin's policies, estimated the number of victims of the famine at 5—7 million. The GPU gave Stalin an estimate of 3.3—3.5 million.61 The Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis notes a population loss of 7.5 million between the end of 1932 and the end of 1933.62
After considering all the estimates and accounts, Robert Conquest arrived at the cautious figure of "over 5 million deaths from hunger and the diseases of hunger."63 In a samizdat essay written in the period 1976—1978, I. G. Dyadkin estimated the population loss from 1929 to 1936 at 15.2 million.64 The authorities expressed their opinion of Dyadkin's figures by arresting him.
The monstrous dimensions of this bloodletting become more apparent if we recall the angry indictment Bakunin hurled at the tsarist autocracy: "In the course of some 200 years the tsarist system had destroyed more than a million victims as a result of its brutish contempt for human rights and human life."65 Bakunin included in his total for the "tsarist system" victims of war, epidemics, and other natural disasters that occurred in the course of those 200 years. A comparison of the number of victims in these two periods, 200 years of tsarist rule and a few years of Stalinist collectivization, shows the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism, between an unhurried historical existence and an insane rush toward "progress."
With amazing insight, as early as 1919, Ivan Bunin uncovered "the Bolsheviks' diabolical secret." They wanted to kill human sensibility. "People live by a certain measure," Bunin wrote in his diary,
Even imagination and sensibility are measured. And so you go beyond this limit. As with the price of bread or beef. "What? Three rubles a pound!" (That is still within your frame of reference.) But if the price is raised to a thousand rubles, there will be no more shouts or amazement, only numbed insensibility. "What's that, seven?" "No, my dear, seven hundred." Then you really feel stunned, paralyzed. Because if seven people are hanged, you can still imagine it, but try to imagine seven hundred, or even seventy.66