home ... and to continue the struggle in more limited forms,”
wrote Yur. D., in the introduction to the Salzburg edition of the
book,--“Khvylovy assured the possibility of the appearance of a numbers
of plays by Kulish, of the pieces of the Berezil, his own compilation
of the _Literary Fair_, the Ukrainian films of Dovzhenko, the
Ukrainization of the higher schools,--in a word he postponed for five
years the assassination of the great cultural renaissance.”
The other members of the _Vaplite_ joined in their own way with
Khvylovy in painting the contrasts between the high ideals set forth
in the decrees of the Communist party and the sordid reality of the
Bolshevik bureaucracy in the Ukraine, who were making no attempt to
turn the visions of the party principles into the life of the people.
All of the writers were attacked as Khvylovy and sooner or later
silenced, even though for some time they worked with him in publishing
the _Literary Fair_, a medley of works of all kinds with pungent
introductions and comments.
This tendency became so marked that in 1927, Andry Khvylya, one of the
most faithful supporters of the official line of the Party declared of
the story of Valeriyan Pidmohylny, the _Third Revolution_, “It makes it
seem as if Makhno was at the head of the revolutionary movement, that
the villagers were with him, as their earth bore them, and that the
Bolsheviks were running after Makhno and collecting cream, ... that the
Communist Party were a group of plotters, who had no connection with
the masses but through espionage were profiting by the great deeds of
other people.”
Khvylovy found another Communist ally in the person of Volobuyiv. He
was a young Ukrainian economist who utilized the materials on the
Ukraine prepared by Prof. V. Dobrohayev and published in the central
organ of the KP/b/U, the _Bolshevik of Ukraine_, a series of articles
which showed the extent of the exploitation of Ukraine by Moscow.
He proved clearly that Moscow was carrying out a colonial policy in
respect to Ukraine, instead of treating it as an equal republic. This
was a sensational revelation for the twenties. Later the works of both
Volobuyiv and Khvylovy were condemned by Moscow as anti-Communist and
Volobuyiv, shortly after 1933, was exiled to a Siberian prison.
The growing pressure upon Ukraine, the forced collectivization which
was beginning and the beginning of the great famine of 1932-3,
completed the disillusionment of Khvylovy, who up to this time had
maintained a stubborn faith in the principles of Communism and its
aspirations for a better future for the common man. His later works
made it clear that he had lost all hope that the revolution would
accomplish anything except a continuation of the streams of blood that
were beginning again to flow throughout Ukraine. Yet there was nothing
for him to do but to continue his work.
CHAPTER NINE
The Five Year Plan
Lenin and the Communists had never made any concealment of the fact
that the New Economic Policy was only a passing concession to put an
end to the stagnation and demoralization which had resulted from the
civil war and the period of Militant Communism. It was not the adoption
of a definite plan for the future nor was it a sign of a growing
rapprochement with capitalism or a gesture toward the rest of the
world, as the partisans of the Soviets abroad tried to make it appear.
With each step of the recovery of the economy of Ukraine and of the
Soviet Union as a whole, unobtrusive steps were taken to remove the
various concessions which had been made. Year by year, from about
1925, new regulations were introduced by the Commissariat of Finance,
one of the All-Union Commissariats which had the definite object
of suppressing not only the concessions but of tightening up the
restrictions on individual life and preparing the way for socialism
and communism. By one device or another, the Nepmen were broken. Now
the government forbade the state trusts to sell to them as individual
traders either raw materials or finished or semi-finished products.
Agreements which had been freely made by the government were either
suddenly cancelled or were perverted. Obviously false charges
were brought against the various individuals and they were fined
exorbitantly or they were arrested and deported. By the fall of 1927
the sector of private trade had been almost completely liquidated and
the way was open for the central government to do what it would with
the situation.
With the Nepmen disposed of, the way was open for a similar attack upon
the wealthier classes of the peasants and those who had profited by
the operation of the Ukrainian land code which, as we have seen, was
less rigid than were the similar arrangements in the RSFSR, where the
land society was organized far more on the lines of a collective than
it was in Ukraine. It was always possible to apply individually any of
the laws against the leasing of land or the employment of hired help,
for in both cases the provisions had been left vague and indefinite, so
that the authorities could act whenever they so desired. As a matter of
fact, as one of the first measures the administration of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic reduced the period on which a lease could be made from
thirteen to six years and thus it was easily possible to upset many of
the calculations that had been made by the richer and more progressive
landowners.
At the same time the closing of the official markets rendered it
possible for the government to force the peasants to dispose of their
grain at the officially pegged prices which in the grain-growing
districts were considerably lower than they were in the less fertile
areas of the north. If this did not produce the desired results, it
was equally possible to demand the grain tax in kind and to compel the
peasants to turn over, free of charge and under the guise of payments,
additional supplies. All these measures, which were introduced in many
cases personally and not by districts, caused the peasants to feel
themselves becoming steadily more impoverished and less able to resist
the demands of the government.
On the other hand, the All-Union Commissariats which took precedence
over those in the individual Soviet republics and which were, in
reality, staffed only by Russian Communists, effectively broke the
power of the localities or of the republics to have any special
voice in the management of their own affairs. This was, in its turn,
skilfully explained by stressing the superior requirements of the Union
which, on any closer analysis, turned out to be the interests of the
Russian area. Thus, at the XVth Congress of the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolsheviks), a Russian who was at the time the chief of the
Ukrainian State Planning Commission remarked in an unambiguous manner:
“It seems to me that we must assign perfectly clear tasks, to emphasize
that the national republics are to fulfill certain functions in the
economic system of our Union, and that on the basis of the fulfillment
of a certain mission, which is to be a part of the joint mission--the
industrialization of our Union--is to be founded the growth of the
economy of the national republics.”
In the next few years the sense of these remarks was to become
perfectly clear, although it was apparently not noticed even by the
more ardent Ukrainian Communists. It was to the effect that the economy
of the national republics was to be fitted into the general picture of
the Union and that the planning committees were to coordinate their
work in such a way that there would be little or no place left for the
initiative of the authorities of any republic. This did not require any
action by any of the various republican governments, for step by step
the central regime in Moscow gradually made more and more of the local
Commissariats mere operating agencies under the control of All-Union
Commissariats as these were increased in number and in scope by the
vote of the Presidium of the Union or by the decisions of the All-Union
Communist Party.
In this connection the final liquidation of the Ukapisty as a group
in 1925 was significant. They had definitely cherished the hope that
sooner or later they would be able to win recognition as a special
Ukrainian Communist Party with their own seat in the Communist
International. That was now becoming merely a subsidiary organ of
the Russian Communist Party and there was no longer any reason for
maintaining the fiction of an independent existence. The foreign
Communist Parties had definitely sunk to being poor relations of the
Russian Party or the All-Union Party. Their representatives were
exiles from their native lands under Russian protection and under
those conditions they speedily ceased to have any voice in the work
of the Comintern, which existed only as a Russian propaganda organ
abroad. It was therefore unrealistic for the Ukrainian Communists to
build any real hopes on the Comintern or on the building of a separate
Ukrainian Communism and the abolition of the Ukapisty was but a formal
recognition of this fact.
Yet this obvious truth apparently was overlooked by Skrypnyk and, to a
lesser extent, even by Khvylovy, who was absorbed in his everwidening
discussion of the cultural significance of Ukrainian Communism and the
role and mission of the Ukrainian Communists. While these were talking
and arguing about certain ideas, the central authorities in Moscow were
cleverly laying plans for removing from the field of practical politics
and administration the very basis of local government for which they
were fighting.
In the same way, reform of the administrative divisions was under way
with the concealed purpose of changing the boundaries of the local
sub-divisions, so that they would have a purely economic basis. This
was done by the elimination of the central areas, the _gubernias_
and the _okrugs_ and the introduction of a two-step system of
administration, the _kray_ or _oblast_ and the _rayon_ or region, which
was designed on a purely economic purpose and was admirably adapted for
the elimination of local and even republic feeling.
By these and other administrative measures the essential features of
the New Economic Policy were eliminated but they were done so gradually
and locally that a large part of the population only realized the
situation when the process was too far advanced to be affected by any
scattered protests.
At the end of 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and
this ended the long feud between him and Stalin for the control of the
Party. Trotsky had quite consistently fought the New Economic Policy
as a needless concession to capitalism and within a few months of his
rival’s defeat, Stalin reversed his policy and openly adopted a more
rigid system of controls similar to those which he had attacked Trotsky
for urging.
As a matter of fact the pretext for a distinction between the Soviet
government and the Communist Party was wearing thin. It was a needless
piece of propaganda, once the regime felt itself sufficiently strong.
There was no longer the need of maintaining non-party men in places
of apparent authority and with his practical sense, Stalin speedily
allowed the system to lapse into the limbo of obscurity and made the
Communist Party openly what it was, the dictatorial party dominated
directly from Moscow.
Once this was decided, the way was open for the establishment of the
First Five Year Plan which was frankly drawn up so entirely in the
central offices that the local Commissariats of the different republics
ceased to have their former significance in the state and became, for
the most part, mere subsidiaries to be watched and checked at every
turn or at every manifestation of a tendency toward independence.
There was no longer any talk of the independence of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic with its powers to maintain diplomatic representatives
abroad or with the pretense that it was handling its own affairs under
the guidance of the All-Union Communist Party. The role of the Russian
element in the state kept on increasing and once more it was possible
to revive the old arguments as to the need for definite russification.
It was relatively a simple matter for the government to administer
industry as it wished. It had retained control throughout the period
of the New Economic Policy of the leading factories and industrial
enterprises and the workers had been deprived of any of the rights
which they might have imagined themselves possessed when they took over
the plants. They were by now completely dependent for their conditions
of work and for their employment on the whims of the plant managers who
were themselves directly under the central authorities in Moscow. The
government built new plants where and as it wished and was not bound to
consult any one as to its purposes and measures.
The peasants were less tractable, for especially in Ukraine they still
felt themselves the masters of their own fate. The new philosophy
looked upon them, too, as the servants of the state and determined
to collectivize them in one way or another and to force them into
collective farms, whether they wished it or not.
In this process the first step was to break the peasant power of
resistance and the regime saw clearly that this was based upon the
financial power of the richer and the middle peasants. Whereas Lenin
and the earlier Soviet regime in Ukraine had grouped together the
middle and the poor peasants and had supported them against the richer
peasants and the large landowners, the policy was now changed and the
middle and the richer peasants were grouped together and opposed to the
poor peasants. This multiplied enormously the hostile and unsympathetic
elements of the population but by holding out tempting offers to the
poor peasants, the Communists succeeded in fanning anew the flames of
class hatred in the villages and in producing the desired effects.
Along with the adoption of the Five Year Plan, the All-Union Congress
called for the strengthening of attempts at collectivization. As a
result, the amount of grain demanded and the amount of taxes were
rapidly raised with the avowed purpose of ruining the kulaks and
kurkuls, as they were called in Ukraine. Increased pressure was put
upon all classes of the rural population to join collective farms and
in some districts this was so effective that almost seventy per cent of
the land was turned over for organization on a “voluntary” basis.
As a further step in the same direction there began in 1928 and also
in 1929 a furious attack on the richer and middle peasants and a
growing insistence on the need of “dekurkulizing” the villages. This
meant nothing more or less than the elimination from the countryside
of all those people who had prospered under the New Economic Policy.
The property of the richer and more prosperous peasants was completely
confiscated and they with their families were deprived of all their
rights, often including the house where they had lived or the shacks
into which they could crawl for shelter. With superb inhumanity the
Bolsheviks would drive formerly wealthy peasants and their families
from their homes in the middle of winter and leave them without food or
clothing and would threaten any of their relatives or friends who dared
to give them any relief.
In the first stages of the process, cases were known where some of
these richer people were moved out of the Ukraine with their goods and
cattle, but as the Communists settled down to their work, they simply
seized everything for their own use and that of the collective farms
and contented themselves with shooting or deporting their enemies,
often to the far north for work in the forests or to northeastern
Siberia for work in the mines and in the more remote parts of the
wilderness.[1]
[1] A graphic account of this dekurkulization was given in a DP camp by
Sh., a former peasant of the district of Kharkiv:
“On May 22, 1929, all my property, tools, cattle, building and clothing
were confiscated. I and my family (my wife, six small children and my
mother), were left without means of livelihood; we stayed with people
like old folks, ate what we were given, although people were forbidden
to give to us. On November 27, in spite of the fact that there was snow
on the ground and 15 degrees of frost, I and my entire family, without
clothes and half-naked, were put out of the house. Until February,
1930 I lived in another house which was half fallen down. On February
28, I, my wife and six children (my mother had disappeared; I do not
know where) were arrested and with other dekurkulized persons were
sent to the railroad station. There we were packed into freight cars
as sardines in a barrel and travelled for 11 days, without knowing
our destination. We were fed once every two days. Many perished from
cold and exhaustion. We finally reached the station of Makarikha near
Kotlas, district of Archangel, and in 40 degrees of frost, we were
detrained in the woods in the snow.
“Then all those able to work were driven to forest operations 300
kilometers from Kotlas. They drove us half shod in the intense cold.
They fed us on the way 300 grams of bread, 5 grams of barley and 3
grams of salt per person a day. Many died on the way. Many, unable to
walk further, were shot on the spot. There we cut wood and they treated
us very badly. The norms of work were abnormally high. We lived in huts
which were holes we dug ourselves. Of the many thousands of people who
came there more than half died of exhaustion, hunger and cold.
“Of the members of the families of kurkuls who remained at the station
of Makarikha, more than half froze. Among these were my sons Ivan and
Fedir; a third son Hryhory died of exhaustion. Later all the children
up to 14, including three of mine, were returned to Ukraine but I have
no further news of them. They probably perished. In 1932, first my wife
and then I escaped by hiding in cars loaded with wood. I found work in
the Don Basin. In 1937 my wife was arrested suddenly and shot in the
prison of Artemivsk in the Don Basin. I escaped because I was living
under an assumed name. Now I am a DP and living in Germany in an IRO
camp.”
They followed this up at the end of 1929 by providing for the
compulsory collectivization of all the land. Private holding of
land was abolished and so was private use. The peasants were forced
into collective farms to which they had to contribute all of their
livestock, agricultural implements and tools. Then they were left
nothing that they could call their own except a small garden plot that
was assigned to each family for the purpose of raising those types of
vegetables that it was not profitable to raise in large quantities,
because the collective farms were occupied with those types of
agriculture that were selected for them by the central authorities in
Moscow.
The immediate result differed in different places. In Great Russian
territory, where the principle of the community ownership of land
had definitely taken root, the peasants complied without too much
hesitation. In Ukraine and Kuban, where the older style of Ukrainian
agriculture had been long in vogue, the peasants became sulky. They
killed off large numbers of their cattle and livestock of various
kinds. The government, seeing this tremendous loss, then tried to
eliminate from the collectives and liquidate in one way or another all
of those who had been guilty of disobedience to the order requiring the
peasants to contribute all their wealth.
There developed almost a civil war in some sections of the country
as discontent rose and the peasants were prepared to die rather than
to yield. Nevertheless, this time the government was not prepared to
concede anything, as it had in 1921, and despite remarks by Stalin
that in some details the Communists had become dizzy from success, the
regime held its course and even continued to apply the screws more
tightly. The result was the famine of 1932 and 1933.
CHAPTER TEN
The Famine
In 1921, the great famine which had swept over Ukraine had been the
result of a failure of the crops, a prolonged drought and the excesses
of Militant Communism which had demoralized the country. The Soviets,
more or less unwillingly, allowed the despatch of foreign assistance
and this saved the lives of millions. There was to be no interference
in the punishment of the obstinate peasants this time.
In the fall of 1929, just as compulsory collectivization was being
introduced, the government in Moscow made an important change in the
agricultural set-up, for it transferred the Commissariat of Agriculture
to the central group by establishing an All-Union Commissariat which
was to be in control of all agriculture in the Soviet Union. This
meant that in Ukraine all of the work which had been previously done
by the local authorities was now transferred to Moscow. The republic
commissariats ceased to have the power to pursue individual plans for
improving the conditions of the soil, for varying the crops as their
own advisers decided or as the population felt it necessary. Everything
was to be done from the centre and the Ukrainian Soviet Government
was compelled to hand over all of its research stations and other
institutions to Muscovite control. This put a stop to the intensive
development of Ukrainian agriculture which had been fostered by the
Ukrainian land code and introduced the new system in which the peasants
were in the same position as the workers in the factories.
At the same time the central regime ceased to make public the actual
figures of production on the ground that they might betray to outside
nations important facts as to the Soviet development. From this time
on estimates and achievements were given only in terms of percentages
in reference to a prior date. Still the already published data were
so scanty and incomplete that it became increasingly more and more
difficult to secure an actual picture of the progress in the Union as
a whole and still more so in any of the separate Soviet Republics, for
the central regime rarely broke down what little information it gave
out among its constituent parts.
It was not long before another change was made in the methods of
collecting the products from the collective farms. Under the new
system, the farms did not contribute according to their crop but
according to the amount of land which they proposed to sow. This amount
was due to the government, even in those cases where there was a
complete failure of the harvest not under the control of the workers.
In other words, if a crop failed because of bad weather conditions, the
peasants were compelled to hand over just as much produce as if they
had had a bumper crop.
It can be easily seen that such a measure was merely another device for
weakening the economic position of the village and the independence of
the collective farm. At the same time the establishment of official
tractor stations in place of the old locally controlled centres which
sent crews and machines into the countryside gave the government
another weapon for the exertion of pressure upon the peasants and even
the Communists who were in charge of the farms and these crews likewise
were paid not on the basis of their work but of the theoretical area
which was to be sown. Later this was again changed to the total area of
the farm whether it was suitable for any special kind of agriculture or
not.
These measures only increased the discontent among the peasants
who once again began to limit their work to the minimum necessary
to maintain themselves on a steadily dropping scale of living. To
counter-balance this the Council of Commissars in Moscow passed a
decree in February, 1930 allowing the local authorities who were, of
course, handpicked by Moscow to resort to extreme measures against
the kurkuls, to confiscate their property and then to dispose of them
by sending them and their families to concentration camps, to special
settlements in the far north or eastern Asia or merely by expelling
them from their home district. These measures were so vigorously
applied that it has been estimated that by the end of 1932, some
2,400,000 persons had been removed from Ukraine to parts unknown. These
were naturally the more prosperous, the more progressive and energetic
persons who had profited by the New Economic Policy and had accumulated
some capital.