Whatever might have been the original blueprint of this, it early
became evident that the Soviet Union could only carry out its work
of industrialization and collectivization, if everything were forced
into a single plan. In connection with this, the various republic
commissariats had been reduced to All-Union commissariats and all
independent power of judgment or planning had been removed from the
local organs. If it were a question of developing a mine, of building
a new factory, of introducing a new and more profitable crop, of
constructing a new road or railroad, the authorities of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic had to refer the matter to Moscow and receive the
permission to act from the central authorities of the Union. How could
it be otherwise?
The central government had assumed the responsibility for the
development of the country and it could not carry this on, if the
local communities or republics had the power to meet any but the most
primitive needs without consultation and permission. Moscow had decided
how industry was to be developed, which branches were to be built in
the RSFSR, which in Ukraine, which in the other republics. That plan
was almost absolute and, warned by the fate of the fallen Communist
leaders, the new successors were ultra-cautious in venturing to express
an opinion.
The OGPU had been remodelled into the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat
of Internal Affairs, but this was placed under the same Yagoda who had
been the head of the OGPU and he merely assumed greater powers and
greater responsibilities for the safeguarding of the Soviet order.
The crying need of the Ukrainians was for consumer goods. Odesa and
Kharkiv requested that they might be given the power to build textile
mills to supply the needs of the local population. The request was
denied, for the authorities had decided that the textile industry was
to be concentrated in the RSFSR. The iron and steel cities requested
that they might be given the permission to build factories to complete
the fabrication of certain delicate types of machinery. The request was
refused because it was to be only in the Moscow area that such articles
were to be made. It was to be the task of Ukraine to furnish the raw
material, the iron ore from Kryvy Rih, the coal of the Donbas, and to
prepare the semi-finished pig-iron and other forms of semi-fabricated
material that were needed by the central plants.
The plan not only provided for construction. It went even further and
specified the exact amount of products that were to be turned out by
each individual plant. While it was possible to secure some profits
from the over-fulfillment of the plan, regardless of the effect that
this might have upon the plan as a whole, any under-fulfillment was
treated as a gross failure of obligation to the state.
This led, in turn, to additional restrictions on the freedom of the
workers. Punishments were ordered for tardiness, for absence from
employment even for a single day without a satisfactory reason, for
an attempt to change the place of employment. These regulations were
not the product of the governing bodies of the republics but of the
Union authorities themselves and they were transmitted from Moscow
to the national republics through the liaison between the All-Union
commissariats and their subordinate organs.
It was the same with agriculture. Moscow knew what each collective
farm, each kolkhoz, each sovkhoz was to furnish, and woe to the group
that failed. The famine had been the result and that had been used
to break the spirit of resistance of the Ukrainian villagers. The
government specified the acreage that was to be devoted to wheat, to
barley, to all of the crops that could be raised and it did no good
if the local agronomists pointed out new methods, new possibilities.
Their actions were interpreted as merely a defiance of the central
government, a new case of wrecking or of sabotage and were treated
accordingly. In the first rush of collectivization, the network of
agricultural centres that had been developed in Ukraine during the
twenties as a responsible answer to the local appreciation of the
problem was wiped out and most of their leaders paid the penalty
for their temerity in standing by their own studies and their own
achievements.
There were only the slightest concessions finally made to the peasants.
They were allowed to sell a certain amount of the surplus grain to the
government at a somewhat higher price. The individual families were
allowed to possess about an acre of land on which they could raise
their own produce, provide their winter food as a result of their own
labors and they were allowed to sell their own produce in what may
best be described as a legalized black market, but this meant merely
the privilege to sell themselves in some of the larger local centres,
and to many of these they were allowed to go only if they secured the
appropriate permits from the heads of the collective farms and the
local representatives of the NKVD.
Even these slight concessions, while they could not bring prosperity
to the peasants on the collective farms, rendered it possible for them
to keep body and soul together despite the steadily dropping standard
of living and the almost complete lack of consumer goods which were
furnished in quantity only to the inhabitants of the more favored
regions, as Moscow and Leningrad. At the same time, the peasants
felt, ever more bitterly, the fact that the new conditions of living
prevented almost all those home manufactures which in the earlier
period had enabled them to compensate in some degree for the lack of
proper articles of industry.
There was thus a growing material impoverishment of the village
communities and a loss of the old spontaneity and gaiety that had
marked Ukraine even under the hardest conditions of the past. Attempts
were made to utilize this for forcing peasants to leave the villages
and join the industrial masses in the cities and work in the new
plants. Others were encouraged to leave the country for less populated
districts in the east, while, on the slightest suspicions, whole
families were deported, separated and exiled, and their places taken by
people from other Soviet republics who were brought in to destroy the
racial unity that formerly existed in the villages.
To appreciate the difficulties of the peasants on the collective
farms, we must remember that the involved bureaucratic system had
ample opportunities for extorting the grain for little or no payment.
Thus the Motor Transport Stations which controlled all the machinery
were supported by payments from the collective farms of grain and
other products in kind and this usually approached 21.5% of the total
yield, while the Stations took over 23% of the crop for the government.
Another 15% was retained by the kolhosp for sowing and for various
insurance funds that were prescribed by law and another 18% was kept
for fodder and for the compensation of the full-time administrators.
Thus, there was barely a quarter of the produce left to be distributed
among the working population and this was the variable quantity since
all of the payments and collections were based not on the actual
harvest but on the harvest as planned by the central authorities. Thus,
in the case of a bad harvest, the share allotted for distribution
was the part that was cut and the government, so far as possible was
provided with its expected supply.
This amount was divided among the individuals and families on the basis
of the labor days which they had worked. In the beginning a labor day
meant labor for a day, no matter how many hours of labor were required,
but even before World War II, this simple definition was replaced by a
specification that it covered a definite amount of work and it might
very easily happen that a slow or poor workman would have to work more
than one day to make a labor day. Thus, there was the possibility
of still further exploitation of the workmen, who could not know
accurately until the end of the year on what they could count.
There was also distributed, likewise in proportion to labor days, a
certain sum of money which the kolhosp received from the government
in return for the sale of grain over the amount collected for the
tax in kind. This was a negligible sum and the average member rarely
received more than one ruble per labor day. This sum was, of course,
insufficient to provide for the goods which the family needed to
purchase, and since their share of the grain was rarely sufficient to
feed them, their situation became hopeless, while of other products
the individual received about one litre of oil, fifty kilograms of
potatoes, thirty-five kilograms of fruit, and five-tenths kilograms of
meat and fat.
The real significance of these figures is shown in the prices that were
charged in the state stores. There a kilogram of bread cost ninety
kopecks, ten eggs brought eight rubles, a kilogram of beef twenty-four
rubles, and a pair of boots four hundred and fifty rubles, while a
farmer’s suit of clothes cost five hundred rubles.
It made the peasant really dependent upon his individual plot of land
if he was to secure any necessities. This was far too small and its
use was bound with many restrictions. Thus, no family was allowed
to hold more than one cow and two calves, one sow, up to ten goats,
an undefined number of chickens and up to twenty beehives. In the
beginning it was possible for the peasant to secure a certain amount
of food for these animals from the common store. He was allowed to
retain the manure and it was thus possible for him to improve his own
individual plot and thus to secure larger returns. It was a liberal
application of such principles that had rendered possible the general
improvement which was noticeable during the years 1934-6, when the
government was endeavoring to make the system of collective farms
workable.
It can be easily seen that the system of allowing individual incomes
was based on a principle opposite that of the New Economic Policy,
for it would require scarcely a legislative enactment to reduce these
amounts while the New Economic Policy presented a norm of profit to the
workers. Yet with each year, once the government was convinced of its
success, it found it possible in various ways to tap this new source of
income for its own purposes.
The favorite method was by taxation. Thus, by 1939 if we should assume
that the average family received in cash four hundred and eighty
karbovantsy, they would be required to pay twenty-two and a half karb.
in taxes, twenty in rent, fifty as a special tax and they would be
required to volunteer to take at least two hundred in government bonds.
Even this did not cover the total payments to the government. With
its usual love of double-talk and subterfuge, the government, which
controlled every branch of human activity in the USSR, talked
of the establishment of socialism and levied indirect taxes on
all transactions so that the actual cost to the villagers of any
manufactured article was about three times what it cost the government
as producer. The whole subject was carefully veiled as a state secret
to protect the Soviet Union against capitalist intrigues but the
unfortunate population were the unwilling contributors to this new
order of life.
Under such conditions it is extremely difficult to pierce the
veil of percentages as to cost and production and give a reliable
estimate as to the amount of money received for the government or the
relationship between the sums spent in maintaining the operation of the
Moscow-controlled factories in Ukraine and the amount spent upon the
needs of the population either individually, as families or as citizens
of the UkSSR or of the UkSSR as a governmental unity within the Soviet
sphere. From those figures which the Soviet has let out, it is possible
to see that the yearly budget of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic has run
from 2½%-5% of the budget of the USSR while the population has been
at least 18% of the total population.
With the villages compelled to yield the last pound of grain, etc.,
that could be extracted by force, and receiving in return almost
no manufactured goods, the position of the city workmen and the
intelligentsia was little better. The wages of the workmen were always
insufficient, the housing conditions were hardly endurable, and the
only point of betterment was that the larger places and some of the
plants especially favored by the regime received more manufactured
goods of a poor quality and at a high price which the fortunate people
might be able to secure. They could also, if they still had preserved
any valuables, dispose of them through the Torgsin stores which sold
imported wares for foreign currency and precious metals.
Of course, neither in city or village did any of these restrictions
apply to the more important Communists who possessed their own stores
at which the government supplied them with the necessary articles to
allow them to live in comfort and luxury as a welcome investment for
the regime. The line of demarcation between the poor and the rich, the
ordinary people and the Communists, became steadily greater, until it
was often wider than it had been in the old tsarist Russian empire.
All these measures which had been adopted in Moscow were in theory
supposed to apply to all sections of the USSR equally, but it was not
long before the natives of Ukraine realized that however impartial the
laws might seem, they were not sufficiently flexible to take account
of local and republican differences. The central regime was interested
in advancing and developing the Moscow industrial area and it expended
on this in various grandiose efforts, as the Moscow subway, enormous
sums of money. It is safe to say that the expenditures in that one
area alone equalled the entire budget and money spent by the central
government in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It classified Ukraine as
one of the regions where the supply of manufactured goods was less
necessary.
The crushing of the Ukrainian Communists, the suicide of Khvylovy and
Skrypnyk, no less than the complete altering of the land code of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the substitution of the new
policy of collectivization, showed perfectly well where the real power
of the USSR lay in the thirties and it was accompanied by such acts as
the introduction of Russian as the standard language of instruction and
of the army. This was followed by the formal transfer of the Ukrainian
divisions to the Red Army and a number of other acts which completed
the subordination of the UkSSR. Already in 1930, during difficulties on
the Soviet-Manchuria borders, the Red Army had not hesitated to greet
the Communist Party with news of its victories and allowed this even
to take precedence over a notice to the Soviet government which had
hitherto claimed to be predominant.
To regularize all these changes of practice, Stalin ordered a new
constitution and this was approved on December 5, 1936. It was a marvel
of inconsistencies, for it was drawn up to express all of the old
slogans and the modern facts.
Here was, in Article 17, the old talk of the right of free withdrawal
of any Union Republic from the USSR but there was also a provision
that the Supreme Soviet could annul any action of any Union Republic
contrary to its wishes. There was a careful definition of the three
classes of Commissariats but when the book is read critically it is
easily seen that the only subjects within the competence of the Union
Republics were Education, Local Industry, Communal Economy and Social
Security and their decisions could legally be upset by Moscow. Article
15 provided for almost full independence, subject to Article 14, which
made the Presidium of the Moscow Communist Party and of the USSR the
almost undisputed master of the Union Republics, and Art. XIII, read in
conjunction with this, made it possible for the Presidium to amend or
change any article of the entire Constitution.
Along with all the democratic phrases in many articles was the
confirmation of the unified state budget and the provision that any act
of any subordinate Soviet could be easily nullified.
At the moment the democratic nations of the west were so preoccupied
with the threat offered by the Nazis that they were thinking only of
efforts to make a common popular front with the Soviets. They found a
convenient possibility in the new Constitution and they were little
disposed to pay any attention to all those phrases which formally and
almost explicitly nullified all that they wished to see.
Thus, the legal basis was provided for the extension of the power of
the Moscow government. Once the new Constitution was adopted and in
force, the last rights of the Union Republics were nullified _de jure_
as well as _de facto_ and the central government was given a free hand
in its work of bending all the Union Republics to its will. The stamp
of state approval was set upon the new system of administration and
with that accomplished, there was small reason why the regime should
not go further with its work of russification and unification.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ukraine in the Late Thirties
With the power of Moscow thus defined and reasserted by the free vote
of the Moscow-controlled Communist representatives of the various
independent republics that formed part of the USSR, the way was open
for the next step. Stalin had not only prepared himself legally at
home by a clever use of contradictory expressions but he had taken
advantage of the good will of the liberals and progressives of the rest
of the world by exploiting the distrust which they felt for Hitler and
the Nazis and had infiltrated Communists through the media of popular
fronts into nearly all the governments that boasted of their democracy.
Next came the bewildering series of trials which were now held in
Moscow. In quick succession Yagoda, the dreaded head of the NKVD, was
removed from his post, arrested and shot by his successor Yezhov,
whose name was soon to become even more detested. Then, in a series
of three public trials which extended from the end of 1936 to 1938,
nearly all of the old Bolshevik leaders who had played important roles
in Soviet life during the period of Lenin’s domination were condemned
for counter-revolutionary activity and either shot or sentenced to long
terms of deportation, from which they did not return. The list included
such names as Bukharin, the former theoretician of the Party, Zinovyev,
the master of the Leningrad Soviet, the leading supporters of Trotsky,
Rykov, etc. At the same time Marshal Tukhachevsky, the commander of
the Red Army in its unsuccessful drive against Warsaw in 1920, Marshal
Yegorov, the leader of the southern wing of that army with which Stalin
himself had served as political commissar and most of the other leading
officers were removed and suffered the same fate on the ground that
they were intriguing with Hitler or with the capitalist imperialists.
The Yezhovshchina, as it was called, raged over the entire territory
of the Soviet Union and was directed with especial fury against all
the leading men in all walks of life, directors of government offices,
directors of factories, directors of collective farms, and army
officers, if they could possibly be suspected of being disloyal to the
Stalinist regime or of having independent thoughts.
The world looked on in amazement, for the Moscow regime seemed to have
gone completely mad in its accusations and suspicions. The charges that
were made against the outstanding personalities seemed fantastic and
contradicted everything that any one knew of the character and actions
of the outstanding Communist leaders. To some it seemed as if the
revolution were devouring its own children, for Stalin was executing
men for proposing policies which he had later adopted himself, as he
had in the case of both the right and left deviationists from the
general line of the party. To others it seemed an alarming example of
the infiltration of all forms of life by the agents of Nazism. All
agreed that the actions were extreme and far reaching.
As the purge of the administrative machinery went on, its range
increased. Once the head of a bureau or a factory were implicated, the
way was open to charge all of his subordinates who had not denounced
him with being accessory to his crimes and they were called up and
punished or, in rare cases, were acquitted and promoted. The storm
continued until late in 1938 when Yezhov himself was removed and
suffered the same fate at the hands of the Georgian Beria, who guided
the NKVD through World War II.
If such was the fury in the RSFSR, it can well be imagined what were
the results in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Communists had set the
fashion of accusing their opponents of bourgeois nationalism. When
the storm broke, Postyshev, who had been sent down in 1933 to wipe
out bourgeois nationalism, to organize the famine and to break the
Ukrainian renaissance, was among the first to go. He was removed and
disappeared at the hands of Kaganovich, who reemerged for a while as
the strong man of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lyubchenko,
who had been appointed the Prime Minister of the UkSSR on the single
program of suppressing Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, was called to
Moscow to confront the self-confessed leaders of the nationalists and,
on his return to Kiev, he shot himself. His successor, Bondarenko,
disappeared without a trace.
Who were these self-confessed leaders? Prominent among them was A.
Khvylya, who had been the champion of the general line against Khvylovy
and Skrypnyk and who had been the dominant figure in the attack on
the Ukrainian literary men and scholars. For years he had resorted
to all kinds of attacks to bring Ukrainian grammar and language
closer to Russian. He now “voluntarily” confessed that he had worked
against the “elder brother” and had joined and aided in developing a
secret military force several million strong for the sole purpose of
separating Ukraine from the USSR and he swore that in this he had the
active aid of Lyubchenko and most of the officials of the UkSSR. Finis.
Zatonsky, the Commissar of Education, was accused of another crime. He
had drawn years before the fire of Gorky for suggesting that a mixed
language be introduced into Ukrainian schools as the means of absorbing
Ukrainian into Russian. He had speedily withdrawn his recommendations
under fire and all had seemed forgiven. It was not, and Zatonsky
disappeared in the holocaust.
It then came the turn of the writers. Men like Kulyk, who had run
roughshod over the older writers and had called for their liquidation,
were now found guilty of bourgeois nationalism and with them most of
the authors who had emerged during the shattering of the Ukrainian
renaissance and who had celebrated the turning of the Ukraine into a
collectivized and industrialized state. Each and every one of them
confessed that they had been guilty of bourgeois nationalism and they
received the due reward for their crimes.
There was hardly a family in Ukraine which did not suffer the
accusation of at least one member. The survivors who have escaped
abroad have given lurid tales of the extent to which the feeling of
distrust and suspicion spread among all classes of the population.
Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters hardly
dared to speak to one another, to say anything lest their closest
friends and relatives had been compelled to join the NKVD or had turned
informers for their own selfish purposes. For one arrest of a guilty
bourgeois nationalist, a hundred people who had done nothing amiss and
had scarcely dared to think, were deported.