Introduction Hope and Horror

October Song

In his evocative poem “October Song,” Dan Georgakas described the way in which the October Revolution inspired millions: “The lights went on all over Europe. / Nothing / can ever be the same.”7 The revolution pulled into public political life millions who were striving to find a way out of the morass of war, famine, and despair to which they had been condemned by the old regime. It was a revolution underpinned by enormous mass movements of people, most of these unplanned, uncoordinated, and spontaneous.8 These movements provided the immediate background to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November, an event that has gone down in history as the October Revolution (based on the Julian calendar).

Isaac Steinberg, who had for a few months served as the People’s Commissar of Justice in the post-October regime, by 1919 would find himself in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, following his arrest by his former Bolshevik allies. He was to become one of the harshest and most eloquent critics of the regime. Nonetheless, in a book published in 1953, only a few years before his death, he clearly identified the emancipatory feel of the momentous events of 1917:

The October Revolution brought tremendous exaltation to vast sections of the Russian people. After eight months of frustrated expectations, there was now a profound sense of relief…. The deepest sensation which October aroused in the people was joy. In city, village and Army people rejoiced in the fullness of their liberation, in the limitless freedom that now summoned their creative efforts.9

Iulii Martov (born Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum), another harsh critic of the regime, according to P. Iu. Savel’ev and S. V. Tiutiukin, believed that “Russia after 25 October 1917 was in many ways reminiscent of France under the Jacobin dictatorship, with Lenin playing the role of Robespierre and with its red terror and bold experiments in social leveling.”10 Martov was a principal leader of the Mensheviks and vociferously opposed many Bolshevik policies, including the resort to executions and mass terror, suppression of elections in the soviets, and deployment of armed soldiers to the countryside to forcibly seize grain from the peasants. However, this “did not detract from his high opinion of the imperishable democratic gains of October: the liberation of the country from the Entente’s [the wartime alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia] imperialist influence, the overthrow of the propertied classes, and the radical elimination of all remnants of serfdom…. These, in Martov’s eyes, were the progressive features of the Russian events of October 1917, their historical justification, and their everlasting significance.”11

Significantly, however, Martov and his co-thinkers did not call the events of October a revolution. According to Leopold Haimson, they “insisted on calling October an ‘overturn’ (perevorot).”12 This word has an ambiguous (and evolving) meaning. In 1917, it was often used interchangeably with revolution (revoliutsiia) and uprising (vosstanie) to describe both the events of February/March and October/November. However, by the mid-1920s, the term revoliutsiia (revolution) had become, in effect, the officially sanctioned term for what would later in English become some version of “The Great October Revolution.” But for Martov and the Mensheviks, the October/November events were never a revolution, but rather a perevorot—an overturn. In modern usage, the term perevorot can in fact, be translated as “coup” or “putsch,” words with much sharper, more negative connotations.13 But Haimson’s stress on translating it as “overturn” does accurately coincide with Martov’s political analysis of the October events, an analysis developed in detail through many publications in the years that followed. Martov’s use of the term began in the very heat of the long, chaotic 1917 night when the Second Congress of the Soviets was in session. As the Bolshevik-directed military operation unfolded, Martov read out a joint declaration from his Menshevik-Internationalists and the Jewish Socialist Labour Party (Paole-Tsion), which read: “The overturn which gave power in Petrograd into the hands of the Military Revolutionary Committee the day before the opening of the Congress, was perpetrated by the Bolshevik Party alone by means of a purely military conspiracy.”14 “Overturn” (perevorot) was used by Martov again in his 1919 book World Bolshevism, a book to which we will return on many occasions throughout this text.15

Where did the October Revolution (or overturn) come from? Just before the outbreak of war in 1914, Russia had a population of more than 170 million.16 It was a multinational and overwhelmingly peasant-based empire, with the minority of wage-earning workers and the educated middle class largely concentrated in a small number of cities—most notably, Petrograd (known before 1914 as St. Petersburg) and Moscow. The rural population was caught in a hellish netherworld, formally freed from feudalism and serfdom in the 1860s, but in fact trapped in extreme poverty, “producing food crops primarily for its own consumption and for the satisfaction of its immediate obligations to some superior authority.”17 Chained by debt to local usurers and village strong men, peasants were condemned to exist within the illiterate, patriarchal, and oppressive structure of the so-called commune, or mir. In that small world, petty power was in the hands of the male heads of households, whose ruling weapon of choice was the cudgel, wielded equally against “their” women and “their” children.18 In 1922, Maxim Gorky wrote that “women are nowhere beaten as mercilessly and terribly as in the Russian village” and that “children, too, are assiduously beaten.” These beatings were justified through folklore. “Probably in no other country do proverbs offer such advice. ‘Hit your wife with the butt of the axe, get down and see whether she is breathing. If she is and shamming, she wants more.’” According to Gorky, “hundreds of such aphorisms, embodying the people’s wisdom accumulated over centuries, circulate in the countryside.”19 Figes tells the story set in 1908 of Grigorii Maliutin, a male peasant who had for years been the chief elder of his village. He “was a heavy-built and heavy drinking septuagenarian…. Vain and jealous of his power, he was a strict disciplinarian, a village despot of the old school, who still beat his elderly wife and, as the elder of the village, flogged any peasant found guilty of a crime. Most of the villagers lived in fear of him.”20

In 1914, this patriarchal violence of the village was joined by the mass violence of the trenches. With the outbreak of World War I, a huge number of peasant boys were removed from the fields and placed into uniform. Of the sixteen million mobilized in total, at least twelve million were peasant males.21 Roger Pethybridge estimates that “by 1916, 36 per cent of the male population of working age was under arms.”22 For peasant males, that percentage was certainly higher: fully 66 percent of the roughly eighteen million peasant males between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine were called up.23 An extraordinary proportion of the able-bodied young peasant men (and many of the not so able-bodied older men) were pulled into the trenches and subjected to unimaginable suffering. By 1917, writes Boris Souvarine, “the dead already numbered two million and a half; there were three million wounded and prisoners. Hospitals and ambulance stations were overflowing with the sick.”24

The repercussions from this mass mobilization and mass slaughter were enormous. The creation of a mass army of peasant male soldiers created a critical labour shortage in the countryside, “which the employment of prisoners of war and refugees from the combat zone only partly alleviated.”25 As a result, the number of acres of land sown with wheat fell steadily, from 270 million acres in 1913, the year before the war, to just 138 million in 1916, two years into the conflict.26 In the country, says Richard Pipes, “landlords, for lack of farm labor, were unable to fulfill their traditional role as suppliers of food to the cities.”27 Furthermore, the sixteen million young men pulled into the army were not merely lost as labourers but were added to the rolls of consumers dependent on surplus grain from the countryside. The main thread connecting the countryside to the urban areas had always been the trade in grain, on which the cities relied to feed their growing populations. That thread was now broken. By 1917, the cities were haunted by hunger. It was no accident that the Women’s Day demonstration in Petrograd, which sparked the revolution, was a plea by women for bread. As Marcel Liebman describes it: “Procession after procession passed through the street to cries of ‘Bread,’ ‘Our children are starving,’ ‘We have nothing to eat!’”28

The uprising in the cities, sparked by hunger and fatigue with the war, was like an electric shock in the already seething trenches. Soldiers were restive even before the revolution: in January 1917, the inspector general of artillery estimated that “one million or more soldiers had shed their uniforms and returned home.”29 The new provisional government, which assumed power in the vacuum created by the abdication of the tsar on 2 March (15 March) 1917, promised an elected Constituent Assembly where the agrarian question would be discussed and settled. For the peasant soldiers at the front, settling the agrarian question meant one thing—seizing and redistributing land that was outside the control of the commune. In part, this meant land controlled by the rich landowners, but it also meant the land of family farmers, a class newly created through a package of radical policy changes introduced in late 1906, often called the “Stolypin reform” after their chief architect, Petr Stolypin, the minister of the Interior, appointed prime minister by the tsar in July 1906. Stolypin’s reforms aimed to increase agricultural productivity by enabling peasants to choose to leave the mir and set up on their own piece of land as independent family farmers. By 1915, as a consequence of these reforms, approximately 2.5 million households had opted out of the traditional commune and established family-run farms.30 The land of this new class of family farmers was coveted by those peasants still engaged in communal farming.

The provisional government—an unstable coalition of liberal democrats and non-Bolshevik socialists in which the latter soon became dominant—could not navigate these waters. Over the roughly eight months of its existence, it tried to bridge the demands of the workers and peasants for bread, peace, and land and the demands of the business class and the general staff of the army, whose shared agenda was military victory and a free rein for a liberal, capitalist society along West European lines and who feared and distrusted the peasants and workers. It was a bridge too far.

We can add Isaac Steinberg to the list outlined in the preface of writers who produced truth from behind bars. Imprisoned in 1919 as part of the suppression of all left-wing challenges to the Bolsheviks, he wrote what is perhaps the best survey of the immense forces that led from the February Revolution, through the stalemated months of the provisional government, to the October Revolution—a survey where one key chapter was written “on tiny scraps of paper, which were smuggled out to his wife from the Butyrka prison in Moscow,”31 and on which the narrative that follows relies heavily.

The provisional government, while opposed to the old tsarist regime, nonetheless refused to pull Russia out of the tsar’s murderous war. On 18 June (1 July) 1917, Alexander Kerensky, associated with the peasant-based Social-Revolutionary Party then serving as the provisional government’s minister of war (and soon to become its official leader), pushed the peasant-soldier mass into one last futile offensive—an offensive that ended in defeat, death, destruction, and a chaotic retreat. The very launch of the offensive was the tipping point, resulting in what Steinberg describes as “deep moral and psychological disturbances within the Army. Soldiers considered themselves betrayed by their democratic and socialist leaders.”32 This sense of betrayal led directly to what has come to be known as the “July days.”

In the first week of July, Steinberg writes, “tens of thousands of workers, Petrograd soldiers and Kronstadt sailors poured into the streets to demand a radical change. The Bolshevik Party, still weak at that time … attached itself to this mass movement and furnished it with a slogan: ‘All Power to the Soviets!’”33 These demonstrations, associated with considerable violence, had only just ended when “military catastrophe at the front broke. The mass retreat of the Russian Army began…. Nothing was left of the offensive.”34 Kerensky and the other government socialists lost their legitimacy and, unable to rely on popular support, increasingly turned to the general staff of the army as their only ally. This alliance with reactionary militarism saw them sanction what had once been unthinkable—“the death penalty was reintroduced at the front for soldiers who refused to enter battle…. In restoring the death penalty, the revolution tumbled from its moral height and delivered to the military clique a weapon that would later be used against the revolution itself.”35

For a few weeks, military reaction carried the day. The government socialists and the army general staff were able, for a while, to pin the blame on the far Left for the defeat on the battlefield, accusing them of having “sabotaged” the armed forces. These charges were, in particular, levelled against the Bolsheviks and the Left Social-Revolutionaries—the radical wing of the peasant-based Social-Revolutionaries (SRs) that, as the revolution unfolded, emerged as an independent party. “Together with the Bolsheviks Trotsky and Lunacharsky, the Left Social-Revolutionaries Proshyan and Ustinov were arrested,” Steinberg notes, and their organizations were pushed underground.36

Again, it was developments at the front that transformed the situation. On 21 August (3 September), the German armies broke through and began moving toward Petrograd. This time, the situation could not be blamed on the now underground far Left. As Steinberg tells it, people began to ask whether this military debacle resulted from “some evil plan on the part of the military reactionaries.” These sentiments crystallized on 26 August (8 September), when “General Kornilov and his headquarters began an open rebellion against the Government.” But his attempted coup quickly disintegrated: “The counter-revolution had miscalculated.”:

The entire country—from the capital to the last forgotten village—rose as one…. As on a signal, workers, soldiers, railway men, postal officials armed themselves, occupied all danger points, cut off the military headquarters from the rest of the country and forced them to complete capitulation. Tremendous strength was thus uncovered in the soviets when Kerensky, in despair, turned to them for help. But the masses who defeated the rebellions, clearly conscious of the political issues involved, were not out to save Kerensky’s Government, but their own independence which, they now realized, dwelled in the power of the Soviets. The road to the October Revolution, from that moment, lay open.37

Travelling on that road to revolution were millions of deserting soldiers. Roger Pethybridge notes that, on 25 October 1917, more than 9.3 million men in total were stationed at the front and the rear, but, by spring 1918, “most of them had literally melted away.”38 Throughout 1917 and into 1918, millions of young peasant men and boys, arms in hand, turned toward home. “Fearing a division of land in their absence,” Souvarine reports, they “returned en masse to the villages without permission” and “began to pillage the great estates, and to seize cattle.”39 But their pillage was not restricted to the great estates. According to Richard Pipes, “the communal peasants, at first cautiously and then with increasing boldness, raided landed property, first and foremost that belonging to fellow peasants who had withdrawn from the commune and taken title to private land.”40 This was, indeed, a revolution, but with ominous contours. For peasants to take land from the great estates was both just and progressive, but for the patriarchal commune to assert ownership over small family farms was neither. In economic terms, it was a serious retreat, since the two areas that had traditionally been able to produce a grain surplus—the large estates and the family farms—were now swallowed up by the unproductive commune, whose members were always just on the edge of subsistence production, unable to develop the productivity of labour necessary for bringing large surpluses to market. Finding a solution to the agrarian question had begun, but it was by no means finished.

These mass movements of peasant-soldiers, urban women, and factory workers—movements that took the form of mutiny and desertion in the army, the forcible appropriation of land by peasants in the countryside, and bread riots, strikes, and the formation of soviets in the cities—were the background to the November 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party. It was a seizure of power done in the name of the soviets under the slogans “Bread, peace, and land!” and “All power to the Soviets!” and with the promise of convening an all-Russian Constituent Assembly.

The End of an Era

How did the hopes of 1917 metamorphose into the horrors of Stalinism? Leon Trotsky and Boris Souvarine—whose pathbreaking studies of Stalinism will anchor chapters 8 and 9 of this book—differ in their interpretations of what has come to be known as the October Revolution. Neither would have entertained Martov’s much more nuanced approach in seeing the October events as an “overturn”—the imposition of a new governmental authority (vlast) through the armed actions of a minority, within a still-intact, but damaged, revolutionary process. For Trotsky, it was a proletarian uprising, calling into existence the first workers’ state since the Paris Commune of 1871, a workers’ state representing, in the minds of many in his generation, a higher form of democracy than a parliamentary state. For Souvarine, October 1917 was a coup d’état by the Bolshevik Party in alliance with radicalized soldiers and sailors, a largely military undertaking with the urban workers per se playing a very small role. The resulting state was only nominally proletarian, the real power resting in the hands of the Bolshevik Party machine—that machine resting not on the self-active urban workers organized in workers’ councils, but rather on the mobilized masses of pro-Bolshevik peasant-soldiers and sailors. Trotsky saw the January 1918 dispersal of the Constituent Assembly to be inevitable and just, since a higher form of democracy now existed through the soviets. Souvarine regarded soviet democracy as being more formal than real and saw the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly as a tragedy, making inevitable a civil war between the Bolsheviks in the cities and the peasant masses in the countryside.41

Differences aside, Trotsky and Souvarine agree on many of the key contours of the counter-revolution that followed. Both understood the underpinnings of the counter-revolution to be the harsh conditions in which the original revolution unfolded—world war, civil wars, foreign intervention, famine, social dislocation, mass unemployment, and population dispersal. The pressures from these conditions came to a head in early 1921, with strike waves sweeping the major cities and peasant rebellions sweeping the countryside in reaction to the period of what has come to be known as “war communism,” from 1918 to 1921, during which Lenin’s Bolshevik government dispatched urban squads to seize grain from the peasants while simultaneously outlawing free trade in grain. The unrest culminated in the Kronstadt rebellion, an uprising against Bolshevik rule carried out by the sailors who had, just a few years before, been the military bulwark of the regime. In 1921, the Bolsheviks, at the cost of thousands of lives, crushed the Kronstadt rebellion, and in the immediate aftermath, the revenge of the security forces was fierce. Isaac Steinberg describes the terrible consequences of Kronstadt: “Every night groups of imprisoned sailors were taken from the Petrograd jails and shot. Great numbers were sent to the prisons and concentration camps of Archangel and Turkestan.”42 The former, Archangel, was the extreme northerly district in which, in the summer of 1923, the notorious Solovki camp was established, the first post-revolutionary hard labour concentration camp. Socialist prisoners interred there encountered those survivors of Kronstadt, who had been promised an amnesty in 1922. Tragically, however “a good half” of these Kronstadt sailors “(and their number was in the four figures) did not live long enough to enjoy the amnesty.”43 Steinberg concludes that “Kronstadt marked the end of an era. After Kronstadt the Russian people no longer had the strength to stand up in such a manner for their rights and honor.”44

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did, however, accede to the Kronstadt sailors’ principal economic demand—the end of war communism and a return to distribution of grain through the market. As a result, the regime was able to achieve some degree of stabilization. But many of the most politically active workers, on whom all hopes rested for a workers’ revolution, had been killed in the civil wars, dispersed to the countryside, or pulled into the burgeoning state and party apparatus that controlled both political and economic life in what became in 1922 the Soviet Union. Although an important and politicized workforce still existed in the cities, it operated under conditions of surveillance, repression, and fear. Souvarine calls the resulting years of political backsliding a “counter-revolution.” Trotsky stops short of this, preferring the term “Thermidorian reaction.”

Thermidor was the month in the French revolutionary calendar of 1794 when Maximilien Robespierre was overthrown and executed by others in the French revolutionary elite. Trotsky used the term consciously, suggesting an internal fight within an “intact” revolutionary process, but he stretched the definition beyond politics. In the Russian case, he writes, “the substance of the Thermidor was, is and could not fail to be social in character. It stood for the crystallization of a new privileged stratum, the creation of a new substratum for the economically dominant class.”45 He thus pushes the notion of a Thermidorian reaction very close to the broader notion of a “counter-revolution.” This is not surprising. Trotsky, as we will see in chapter 8, was immersed in a milieu that found it difficult to stick with the restrictive category of Thermidor and then apply the adjective “progressive” to a regime associated with artificially induced famines, forced labour camps, purges, and mass executions—actions that destroyed the lives of millions.

Catastrophe in the Countryside

Whether labelled “Thermidorian reaction” or “counter-revolution,” the consolidation of Stalin’s rule brought catastrophe to the countryside. In 1928, the Stalinist regime declared its intention to “liquidate the kulaks as a class.”46 This was, in fact, a declaration of war against the entire peasantry. According to Lynne Viola, “During the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, almost anyone could be labeled a kulak.” Although, in theory, the term was applied to “rich” peasants—rural capitalists, symbolic of the emergence of class stratification in village settings—Viola observes that “as the state entered into what would be a protracted war with the peasantry, the kulak came to serve as a political metaphor and pejorative for the entire peasantry.”47 As Donald Treadgold suggests, in deciding whether to label someone a kulak, the Soviets probably most often used a criterion “openly voiced by Tito in 1949, namely, that the test of being a kulak was not the size of a man’s holding, but whether he was for ‘socialism’ or against it”—a criterion by which, Treadgold comments, “the number of kulaks in Russia must be reckoned as very large indeed.”48

The essence of the war on the kulaks was the forced move of millions of peasants onto “collective farms” (kolkhozy), which might better be described as agricultural forced labour camps. Peasant resistance was intense, and even before the forced collectivization drive was over, millions died. The worst moment was the winter of 1932–33, when millions starved to death in what Souvarine rightly calls an “artificially organized” famine.49 Souvarine cites a correspondent for the Socialist Courier who reported in May 1934 that the 1932–33 famine had claimed five million lives—an astonishing figure that was actually less than that reported by an American socialist, Harry Lang. According to Souvarine, Lang had returned “utterly dismayed” from a stay in the Soviet Union, where he had learned from a senior government official that “at least six million starving people perished in the Ukraine at that period”—information that Lang subsequently published in the New York paper the Forward. Lang further reported that “40 per cent of the population disappeared in certain districts of the Ukraine and White Russia.”50

While readers today may not be familiar with either the Socialist Courier or the Forward, in the 1930s they were essential reading for any concerned with developments in the Soviet Union. The Forward was a Yiddish-language daily newspaper, founded in 1897, that by the early 1930s had a daily circulation in excess of 275,000.51 The Socialist Courier (Sotsialisticheskii vestnik) was a Russian-language periodical launched in 1921 by the Menshevik Delegation Abroad, at the time consisting of just three members—Raphael Abramovitch, Iulii Martov, and Eva Broido.52 Produced by the Mensheviks in exile, it was smuggled into Russia and eagerly read by thousands. The editorial offices of the Socialist Courier followed the Mensheviks as they went from place of exile to place of exile—in Abramovitch’s case, from the Soviet Union to Berlin in the 1920s, to Paris in 1933 after Hitler came to power, and finally to New York in 1940 after the Nazi invasion of France. More than seven hundred issues of the journal appeared, until, with the passing of the last of the veterans of 1917, it ceased publication in the early 1960s. Sidney Hook was not alone in his opinion that the Socialist Courier was “the most knowledgeable journal on Soviet affairs published anywhere.”53

These eye-witness accounts notwithstanding, the existence of the famine—particularly as it concerned the Holodomor (murder by hunger) centred in Ukraine—was disputed by many on the Left then, as it often is to this day. Late in March 1933, at the height of the famine, the New York Evening Post reported that “official quarters” in the Soviet Union “declared flatly that actual famine did not exist” and “vigorously denied … reports published abroad that the nation is suffering from famine. A statement that thousands were dying of starvation was branded as ‘nonsensical.’”54 This version of events was repeated by supporters of the Soviet Union in the West, including the editors of Weekly People, one of North America’s most established left-wing papers, whose editors wrote in early April: “Every now and again scare stories originate to the effect that the Russian mass is seething in counter-revolt or is starving by the millions.”55 Writings such as these echoed the words and relied on the research of award-winning journalist Walter Duranty, accurately labelled a “bourgeois admirer” of Stalin by Jay Lovestone.56 At the end of March, Duranty spoke derisively of “a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union with ‘thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation.’”57 The evidence of catastrophe was so strong, however, that even Duranty had to make some concessions. “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation,” he wrote, just “a serious food shortage throughout the country” and “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”58

Those dying from lack of food would have been uninterested in the subtle distinction between “mortality from diseases due to malnutrition” and “starvation.” Duranty’s sophistry was an attempt to challenge the path-breaking journalism of Gareth Jones, “Foreign Affairs secretary to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain,” who was “the first foreigner to visit the Russian countryside since the Moscow authorities forbade foreign correspondents to leave the city.”59 As Jones recounted to an American journalist,:

I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.” This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farm land in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.60

During his walking tour in 1933, Jones had managed to evade government officials and enter the hunger-stricken areas, where he interviewed hundreds of peasants.

I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month’s supply left…. “We are waiting for death” was my welcome, but “See, we still have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,” they cried.61

Malcolm Muggeridge, another eyewitness, described his visit to the North Caucasus and the Ukraine:

I saw something of the battle that is going on between the Government and the peasants. The battlefield was as desolate as in any war, and stretches wider; stretches over a large part of Russia. On the one side, millions of peasants, starving, often their bodies swollen with lack of food; on the other, soldiers…. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.62

Famine Denial

So overwhelming was the suffering experienced in 1932 and 1933 that today the fact of a mass famine cannot be denied. However, the goal posts have been moved. The denial of famine has been replaced by emotional denials of this famine having resulted from a genocidal plan directed by Stalin against the people of Ukraine. A Canadian author, Douglas Tottle, played a role in perpetuating this denial with his Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, which one critic dismissed as “an unabashed, book-length argumentum ad hominem.”63 More scholarly is the work of Mark Tauger, who argues that the “low harvest” in 1932 was “the result of a failure of economic policy, of the ‘revolution from above,’ rather than of a ‘successful’ nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.”64

But is the central task really to discern Stalin’s genocidal intentions? First, in the absence of evidence, how will we ever know? Second, it deflects attention from what we do know. The famine was clearly rooted in the catastrophic policy of forced collectivization. “We peasants are all hungry,” a Russian peasant told journalist Gareth Jones, after eating Jones’s discarded orange peel. “The Communists took away our grain. They robbed us of our land. They came to our village and left only a few potatoes for us to live through the winter. There’s bread in the big cities, but there is no bread in the villages in the homes of the people who grow the wheat.”65 Third, is it legitimate to blame the peasants’ starvation on nature? When Jones asked the peasants “Why is there famine?” they replied:

“It is not the fault of nature. It is the fault of the Communists.

“They took away our land. Why should we work if we have not our own land?

“They took away our cows….

“They took away our wheat….

“The Communists have turned us into slaves and we shall not be happy until we have our own land, our own cows and our own wheat again.”66

Jones had no doubt that the crisis was man-made. “The famine now killing hundreds in the Soviet Union cannot be attributed to the weather,” he wrote, “for in the last few years climatic conditions have—with the exception of drought in some areas in 1931—blessed the Soviet Government.” He went on to blame the disaster on the “Soviet policy of abolishing the private farm and replacing it by large collective farms, where the land and cattle were owned in common…. When the Government attempted force to make them [the peasants] yield their cows they retaliated by massacring their cattle and eating them.”67

Contemporary research firmly backs up these 1933-era accounts. According to R. J. Rummel, “The weight of evidence suggests that the attempt to collectivize the peasant, even the nomad, and liquidate the kulak as a class, massively disrupted the agricultural system and brought about the famine.”68 N. M. Dronin and E. G. Bellinger blame the government’s “race to achieve the unrealistic plan figures for grain delivery” for the famine in 1931. They go on to explain why the crisis deepened, despite the weather being conducive to farming:

In the next years, 1932 and 1933, which were years of good weather, the excessive procurement of grain from devastated collective farms was the single cause of mass famine in the Ukraine and other productive regions. The authorities seemed to do everything possible to aggravate the situation. They prevented starving peasants from leaving the affected regions, even though such migration had saved millions of lives in previous bad years.

Dronin and Bellinger point out that despite an extremely severe drought in 1936, “the recurrence of mass famine was avoided due to a few elementary measures such as the radical reduction of the grain procurement plan (by 60 percent) and the halting of grain exports.”69

This contemporary research is compelling. But in fact, impeccable research demonstrating these truths has been sitting on our bookshelves for decades. One of the classics of 1970s scholarly writing on the Russian Revolution is Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, Stephen Cohen’s study of Nikolai Bukharin, a leading figure in the Russian movement. Cohen’s scholarship provides overwhelming evidence regarding not only the reality of the devastating famine of 1932–33 but also the roots of this famine in the forced collectivization policies of the Stalin regime.

In 1928, after a few years of relatively “normal” economic urban–rural relations, the Soviet regime was faced with a fall in grain deliveries from the countryside to the cities. Under Stalin’s initiative, the regime reverted to the methods of war communism, sending thousands of party activists, backed by the armed force of the state, to seize grain “surpluses” from the peasants, seizures that shifted the burden of hunger from the cities to the countryside. The policy proved catastrophic. Cohen, quoting Bukharin, notes that “as a result of Stalin’s ‘extraordinary measures,’ … peasant agriculture was ‘regressing’ because ‘the basic peasant masses have lost any stimulus to produce.’”70 A “new wave of peasant unrest” swept the country in the summer and autumn of 1929 as “state agents—their methods increasingly coercive—swarmed the countryside procuring grain.”71 This was the prelude to the catastrophic “great assault that was to come in December,” an assault whose aim was to shift twenty-five million peasant families off their individual plots and into collective farms.72 It was, in effect, the launch of a one-sided civil war—the armed forces of the state against the pitchforks and bodies of the peasants.

We can pick up the story from another classic author, Alec Nove, whose books have also been available for decades. The forced collectivization of peasants began in the dead of winter, in late December 1929. Nove indicates that “it was announced by 20 February 1930 … that 50 per cent of the peasants had joined collective farms.” The usually detached Nove resorts to the use of an exclamation mark, to emphasize that this represented “half of the peasant population in seven weeks!”73 Tens of millions had been ripped from their small plots and deposited in their new collective farms. The resulting chaos was intensified at the beginning of March 1930, when Stalin called a temporary halt to the process in his “dizzy with success” article.74 “Within weeks,” Nove writes, “the proportion of the peasantry collectivized fell from 55 per cent (1 March) to 23 per cent (1 June).”75 In other words, there was, once again, a mass movement of tens of millions, this time reversing the flow, with peasants leaving the collective farms and returning to their old small plots—all in the middle of winter. It is impossible to convey “the fantastic ups-and-downs in the lives of the large majority of the population of the Soviet Union within a few short months.”76

Those ups and downs were about to intensify. Among the immediate consequences of this war of the Soviet state against most of its population—the vast masses of the rural peasantry—was the destruction of much of the productive capacity of the countryside. Cohen provides some stark statistics: “Figures published in 1934 revealed that more than half of the country’s 33 million horses, 70 million cattle, 26 million pigs, and two-thirds of its 146 million sheep and goats had perished,” most during the catastrophic months of January and February, 1930. “Twenty-five years later, livestock herds were still smaller than in 1928.”77

From within the Soviet Union, this appalling destruction of livestock was blamed on the kulaks. From 10 February until 22 March 1934, the Bolsheviks, since 1918 officially called the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) or RCP(B), gathered at their 17th Party Congress. Central Committee member Ianis Rudzutak, delivering a CC report to that congress, said: “Of course a lot of damage has been done to agriculture by the kulaks who campaigned to wipe out the herd.”78 This explanation has no credibility. The very scale of slaughter would have entailed a level of organization and coordination far beyond the resources of any in the countryside.

The livestock and the farmers died for the same reason—the seizure of their grain by the Soviet state. The whole point of forcing peasants off their land and onto collective farms was to make systematic the seizure of their grain. In the first year of collectivization, the scale of the pending catastrophe was not yet apparent. As Nove puts it: “The heavens chose to smile. The weather was excellent, somehow most of the sowing did get done, and the 1930 harvest was better than that of 1929,” increasing by about 15 percent.79 But if the heavens chose to smile, the authorities did not. An increase in grain production simply meant intensified state pressure to procure even more grain. And just to be clear, procurement meant the violent seizure of grain from the peasants by armed agents of the state. In 1931, Nove writes, these seizures “left many peasants and their animals with too little to eat. Ukraine and North Caucasus suffered particularly severely.”80 By 1932, “all forces were directed to procurements,” which included the use of the death penalty for any who “refused to deliver grain for procurements.”81

As was inevitable in these circumstances, millions of animals and humans died. All relied on grain—feed grain for the livestock, grain to make the bread for the peasantry. When party policy led to extremes such as in the North Caucasus, where, according to Stalin’s close ally Lazar Kaganovich, “all grain without exception was removed, including seed and fodder,”82 the animals had to be slaughtered immediately: not only could they not be fed but their meat provided an emergency (but temporary) food source for the starving peasants. The seizure of grain “surpluses,” especially when grain production was declining, forced the peasants to abandon bread and turn to meat, slaughtering their animals to stave off hunger. But that solution could happen only once. By the winter of 1932–33, grain was still being forcibly seized, but the animals were gone. The result was a famine of catastrophic proportions. Nove has no doubt that these policies were the direct cause of the famine, which he describes as “part and consequence of the struggles described above.”83

The events of these disastrous years, sometimes called a “revolution from above,” but in reality, more resembling a counter-revolution, did lead to industrialization. The cities received both bread and the labouring bodies of ex-peasants, who were starving, homeless, and desperate for work. But the price for this industrialization was paid with the lives of millions of small farmers and by “those inseparable partners of peasant destiny, their livestock.”84

The latter quotation is taken from Stanisław Swianiewicz in his pathbreaking exploration of the economics of forced labour in the Soviet Union. Swianiewicz draws a direct parallel between the experience in the Soviet Union and that of Great Britain some centuries before, where “the policy of enclosures provided a cheap labour force for industry by squeezing the peasant out of the countryside.”85 In both cases, the rural population suffered displacement and impoverishment. But the compression of the time frame meant that this suffering was felt far more acutely in the Soviet Union. “For three centuries,” Swianiewicz writes, the enclosures “provided English industry with a cheap labour force by compelling the peasants to move to the towns. The Communist Government carried out the same task in a few years.”86 Forced collectivization—like Great Britain’s enclosure movements—could be accomplished only by depriving peasants of the means of subsistence. Both policies in effect expropriated land formerly worked in common and created a mass proletariat available for exploitation. Both measured their success in broken bodies and broken communities.

The story of forced collectivization is an appalling one. Horrendous suffering swept whole areas of the Soviet Union, suffering that resulted directly from the war on the peasantry launched by Stalin in the context of what was grotesquely labelled a five-year plan. Yet, there had been generations of goal posts being moved—first, denying that the famine existed, and then, when the reality of that famine was too obvious to deny, arguing, without reflection, that the issue in dispute was whether policy was motivated by anti-Ukrainian chauvinism, all the while leaving hanging the main issue: the destruction of agricultural productivity caused by the imposition of so-called collectivization. In reality, it was a return to policies of the era of war communism, doing the work of the British enclosure movement, but in a matter of years, not a matter of generations.

In 2003, without conceding that what happened was genocide, the Russian Federation added its signature to a UN resolution that said, in part: “The Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor), which took 7 to 10 millions of innocent lives, became a national tragedy for the Ukrainian people…. We also commemorate the memory of millions of Russians, Kazaks and representatives of other nationalities who died of starvation … as a result of civil war and forced collectivization.”87 This retroactively confirms the research of Cohen in the 1970s, of Nove in the 1960s, and of Souvarine in the 1930s, as well as the eyewitness accounts of Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, both of whom managed to evade government authorities and actually visit the devastated areas in 1933.88

Catastrophe in the Cities

Whether labelled a “Thermidorian reaction” or “counter-revolution,” the consolidation of Stalin’s rule brought devastation to the countryside. It also brought catastrophe to the urban areas. Solomon Schwarz has meticulously documented the steady decline in workers’ living standards during the first five-year plan (1928–33). “Nominal wages … greatly exceeded Plan estimates,” he notes, “but a much greater inflationary rise in living costs considerably depressed the level of real wages.”89 There was some improvement up to the summer of 1938, but then “the trend reversed itself, with nominal earnings lagging far behind the price level. By 1941, real wages had taken a new plunge, and on the eve of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war they cannot have been much higher, by and large, than at the end of the First Five-Year Plan period.”90

Decline in real wages was only one aspect of the misery for urban workers. Sergei Kirov, one of the regime’s most popular figures, and a formidable potential rival to Stalin, was assassinated in confusing circumstances in December 1934. After his death, purges swept through the cities. Roy Medvedev writes that “every oblast [province], Leningrad especially, was swept by the first wave of mass arrests, which was later called the ‘Kirov flood’ in the camps.”91 Ante Ciliga says the Kirov flood sent 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants of Leningrad into exile in Siberia.92 Boris Souvarine writes that “some 100,000 innocent inhabitants of Leningrad” were deported.93 And Solzhenitsyn states that “one-quarter of Leningrad was purged—cleaned out—in 1934–1935. Let this estimate be disproved by those who have the exact statistics and are willing to publish them.”94

This was just a taste of what was to come. In 1937 and 1938, the counter-revolution reached a chilling climax in what would come to be called the Great Terror. These years are well-known as the years of the “trials” of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and other leading figures of the party. With painstaking devotion to detail, Medvedev’s classic account of these horrendous years tells the story and lists the names of seven hundred individual victims, “the best-known officials, military commanders, writers, artists and scholars.”95 These individuals were among thousands falsely accused and arrested from every key sector of politics and civil society, including:

• the central organs of the ruling Communist Party
• the party committees in the regions
• the trade unions
• the upper echelons of the Red Army
• the very security apparatus that was conducting the purges
• leading members of non-Russian communist parties living in exile in the Soviet Union
• the “technical intelligentsia” working in science and technology
• writers and cultural workers, including “every kind of creative person and organization … painters, actors, musicians, architects and film people.”96

While we have Medvedev’s seven hundred names, most who suffered in the Great Terror were anonymous. “Numerically” he says, “the chief victims were hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file Party members.”97 There were also thousands of non-party victims and those whom Suzanne Rosenberg calls “small fry.” These latter, according to Rosenberg, “by the thousands and hundreds of thousands were also being caught in the net…. When you arrived at your job you never knew who would be missing next.”98 Souvarine writes that “mass arrests and wholesale executions made the population live again through the darkest hours of the Civil War. Groups of several dozen ‘citizens’ were shot each week, then each day, without formality, without the least guarantee of justice, or after secret trials, tantamount to pseudo-legal assassination.”99 Medvedev says that “there were days when up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone.”100 Nadezhda Joffe amplifies this, saying that in 1937–38, “about 28,000 people a month were annihilated.”101

Medvedev’s estimate for the total number of victims summarily shot, based on information available in the 1970s, was “at least four to five hundred thousand.”102 Contemporary research on those two terrible years, 1937 and 1938, puts the figure at 681,692.103 In addition, the victims of famine, forced exile, and imprisonment in the Gulag numbered in the millions. Souvarine cites evidence from the suppressed census of 1937, which Stalin anticipated would show a population of 171 million, up from 147 million in 1926. The actual total, according to Souvarine, was just 145 million, meaning that more than 20 million people were “missing.”104 Nove makes the same point, but with different arithmetic, saying: “well over 10 million people had ‘demographically’ disappeared” between the two censuses.105 Contemporary figures put the 1937 census figure at 162 million against an expectation of 170 million, a gap of “only” 8 million.106 Whether we rely on Souvarine’s 1930s figures, Nove’s 1960s figures, or figures from contemporary research, it is clear that from the late 1920s to the mid- to late 1930s, something horrifying took place in the Soviet Union—hence, the suppression of the census and the demand by Stalin for a revised one in 1939. Whatever the actual figures, this really is the arithmetic of horror.

Whether focusing on the countryside or the city, the move from hope to horror must be the starting point for any assessment of the Russian Revolution. To focus only on the horror and blur the experience of hope in the revolution’s early months is to deny the efficacy of mass action by the oppressed. To focus only on the hope and blur the experience of horror is to become an apologist for what was to become a grotesque totalitarian regime.