Stalin

As the Nazis reveled in Hitler’s chancellorship, Stalin’s regime staged the First all-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers (February 15–19, 1933), attended by more than 1,500 delegates, nearly 900 of whom held no bureaucratic office and half of whom were not party or Communist Youth League members. They were recognized for labor performance.⁴⁰⁸ Kaganovich addressed them in a folksy manner, reciting peasant proverbs, while praising the vicious injunction against theft of socialist property as a “great law.” He boasted of the creation of 200,000 collective farms and 5,000 state farms, asserting that only collectivization had made possible industrialization and the preemption of foreign military intervention.⁴⁰⁹ One collective farm brigadier, who had been asked by Kaganovich whether the collectivized system was better, answered, “Things are, of course, better now. Still, before I was master of my fate, and now I am not the master.”⁴¹⁰

On the final day, Stalin, putting on a folksy air, too, warned biblically that he who did not work would not eat, but promised that each collective farmer would have a cow (“prolonged applause”).⁴¹¹ He scolded those who underestimated women (“Women on the collective farms are a great force”). He acknowledged that “quite a number of people, including collective farmers,” had been skeptical of party policy, but dismissed the idea of a third way, individual farming without capitalists and landowners, because it would inevitably give rise to a “kulak-capitalist regime.” Silent on the famine, he asserted that “the multi-million-mass poor peasants, previously living half starving, have now become middle peasants in the collective farms, they have become well-off. This is an achievement that the world has not seen before.”⁴¹²

On February 27, a fire consumed the German Reichstag, and a young, unemployed bricklayer, recently arrived from the Netherlands, was found inside and arrested. He was a member of the Dutch Communist party. The Nazi party was still a minority in the parliament, but now Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending the governments of Germany’s federal states and most civil liberties “as a defensive measure against the Communists.”⁴¹³ Dissolution of parliament and snap elections, which were scheduled for March 5, afforded Hitler a campaign of intense hysteria about Communist subversion. The Nazis still won only 43.9 percent (288 of 647 seats), but with their partners, the German National People’s Party, who won 8 percent, they had a governing majority.⁴¹⁴ Hitler had been handed power, but now he seized it, proposing an Enabling Act to promulgate laws on his authority as chancellor without the Reichstag for a period of four years. It required a two-thirds vote. Only the Social Democrats, twelve of whose deputies had been imprisoned, voted against the measure, which passed 441 to 94.⁴¹⁵ Soon the Nazis were the sole legal party in Germany.

Hitler—who had become a German citizen only in 1932—was dictator of the country, upending the traditional conservatives.⁴¹⁶ “With few exceptions, the men who are running this government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” the American consul general wrote in a message to the state department. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”⁴¹⁷

Elements in the Nazi movement—assisted by colluding police—exuded fanatical delight in physically annihilating leftist property, institutions, and people. Hitler fulminated against “Judeo-Bolshevism” as a worldwide conspiracy.⁴¹⁸ At the same time, he received the Soviet envoy, Lev Khinchuk, on April 28, 1933, and shortly thereafter allowed Germany to ratify the long-delayed extension of the 1926 Berlin treaty, ostensibly reaffirming good bilateral relations.⁴¹⁹ “The cornerstone of Soviet foreign policy is the maintenance of peace,” Izvestiya editorialized (May 6). “In this spirit, the Soviet Union does not wish to alter anything in its attitude to Germany.” But Radek penned an essay in Pravda (May 10) noting that the fascist regimes led the way in “revision of the robber baron peace of Versailles,” and warning that this would entail “the creation of a worse Brest-Litovsk peace.” He hinted at a Soviet effort to cozy up to Poland.⁴²⁰

Communist parties outside the USSR numbered 910,000 members, and the German party had accounted for 330,000 of them, the second largest after China (350,000).⁴²¹ But Hitler crushed them. This left the French and Czechoslovak parties, with just 34,000 and 60,000 members, respectively, as the next largest. Communists in France and Czechoslovakia pressured Moscow to abandon the “social fascism” policy. But in spring 1933, when seven Social Democratic parties issued a joint public appeal for a nonaggression pact with Communists, Stalin approved instructions “to step up the campaign against the Second International,” arguing that “it is necessary to emphasize the flight of Social Democracy to the fascist camp.” This stance was shared by many of the foreign Communists he had gathered at Comintern HQ.⁴²² The long-standing civil war on the left persisted.⁴²³

EDUCATION OF A TRUE BELIEVER

Upward of 50 million Soviet inhabitants, perhaps as many as 70 million, were caught in regions with little or no food.⁴²⁴ More than a million cases of typhus would be registered in 1932–33, and half a million of typhoid fever.⁴²⁵ The OGPU claimed in a report to Stalin (March 1933) that it had interdicted 219,460 runaways in search of food, sending 186,588 back to their points of origin and arresting the others.⁴²⁶ Human and animal corpses littered county roads, railroad tracks, the open steppe, the frontiers. Peasants ate dogs and cats, exhumed horse carcasses, boiled gophers. The Dnepropetrovsk OGPU reported to Kharkov (March 5, 1933) “on the rising cases of tumefaction and death on the basis of famine, verified and confirmed in documents by physician observation.” The regional OGPU boss sent tables with the numbers of starving families by county, and named conscientious laborers who were starving, adding that a traveling commission had delivered grain from the reserves to the suffering areas.⁴²⁷ It was, of course, too little too late.

Death and disease wracked the entire Soviet wheat belt—Ukraine (including the Moldavian autonomous republic), the North Caucasus (including the Kuban, Stavropol, and Don provinces), the Middle and Lower Volga valley (from Nizhny Novgorod to Astrakhan, including the Volga German autonomous republic), and the Central Black Earth region—but also Vologda and Arkhangelsk in the north, the Urals, and the Kazakh autonomous republic.⁴²⁸ Party officials begged for emergency aid to “save the lives of many people from starvation death,” as the ethnic Kazakh official Turar Ryskulov wrote to Stalin (March 9, 1933).⁴²⁹ An OGPU operative assembled a summary of starvation in the cities in the Urals, Volga valley, and North Caucasus, underscoring the negative effects on workers’ political mood.⁴³⁰ Reports of cannibalism in Ukraine were averaging ten per day. Parents were killing one child and feeding it to the others; some prepared soup stock and salted the remaining flesh in barrels to preserve it.⁴³¹ The secret police reported on cannibal bands that targeted orphans: “This group cut up and consumed as food three children, including an eleven-year-old son and an orphan whose parents perished from starvation.”⁴³²

Reports and letters to Stalin’s office were graphic.⁴³³ The documents show that he became livid not when he learned that people were driven to eating human flesh but when he learned that an American correspondent was given permission to travel to famine-stricken regions (“We already have enough spies in the USSR”).⁴³⁴ When even the unsqueamish Kaganovich confirmed the catastrophe, it evidently got through to the dictator.⁴³⁵ On March 20, 1933, the politburo, with Stalin signing the protocol, resolved to supply more tractors (though fewer than requested), send more food aid to Ukraine, allow free trade in foodstuffs in Kharkov and Kiev, and mobilize all internal resources for the sowing campaign.⁴³⁶ (That same day, the politburo directed the OGPU to remove guns from the population.) ⁴³⁷

Voroshilov, on holiday again, had written to Stalin complaining of insomnia and stomach problems. Stalin answered, “I still feel poorly, sleep little, and am not getting better, but this is not manifested in work.” Orjonikidze wrote to Voroshilov (April 9) that he was sick and exhausted and complained about how his first deputy, Pyatakov, worked hard but did not believe in the party’s strategy, and how Orjonikidze needed a trusted deputy who could relieve him as commissar, because “I am rather ill and cannot make it much longer.”⁴³⁸

How did the regime not come apart altogether? How did higher-ups writing and receiving the reports not concede that the situation called for repudiation of regime policies? How did local officials persist in implementing orders?

Lev Kopelev (b. 1912) was a Communist Youth League militant, the editor in chief of an agitation paper, and a 25,000er requisitioning grain in his native Ukraine from late 1932 into spring 1933. He had been arrested, for ten days in 1929, for putting out leaflets defending the “Bolshevik-Leninists” (as Trotskyites called themselves).⁴³⁹ Young and naïve, he had admitted his error. His life rippled with meaning. “The grain front!” he recalled of the procurement campaigns. “Stalin said the struggle for grain was the struggle for socialism. I was convinced we were warriors on an invisible front, fighting kulak sabotage for the grain which was needed by the country, by the Five-Year Plan.” Kopelev noted how a local OGPU operative was the son of a miner and had worked in a mine himself (“We believed him without reservation”), while meetings with villagers took place under religious icons. “Every time I began to speak, I wanted to prove to these people that they were making a serious mistake by hiding the grain”—after all, workers in the cities were putting in two and three shifts yet did not have enough food; Japanese militarists and now German fascists surrounded the country. Villagers were eating grass and gnawing on twigs, denying that they had grain to give, before being hauled off—“and I persuaded myself, explained to myself: I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity,” Kopelev said. He convinced himself that “the famine was caused by the opposition of suicidally unconscientious peasants, enemy intriguers, and the inexperience and weakness of the lower ranks of [party and soviet] workers.”⁴⁴⁰

Kopelev was “speaking Bolshevik,” or making the revolution personal, internalizing its inescapable vocabulary, worldview, and presentations of self. The regime compelled people to write and recite autobiographies using prescribed categories and ways of thinking. Kopelev was a true believer, but it was not necessary to believe. It was, however, necessary to appear to believe and even the reluctant came to employ the language and thought processes of the regime to view the world through party directives and official reportage—class and enemies, factory output, and imperialist threats, false versus genuine consciousness. This is what gave Stalin’s regime its extraordinary power.⁴⁴¹

Even in the hospital with diarrhea, Kopelev devoured the reportage of Five-Year Plan triumphs and Stalin’s catechismal speeches. If doubts crept in, he took inspiration from role models—like the orphaned son of a hired farm laborer who had worked for “kulaks” but become chairman of a village soviet. Stalin purged the Ukrainian party apparatus and replaced the Kharkov party boss with Pavel Postyshev, a Bolshevik originally from industrial Ivanovo-Voznesensk, who now became the number two in Ukraine. Postyshev, Kopelev wrote, “stood in line at grocery stores, cafeterias, bathhouses, and he sat with petitioners in the waiting rooms of various government establishments.” Postyshev opened cafés in factory shops, had flowers planted, and viciously condemned Ukrainian intellectuals as bourgeois nationalists and agents of fascism. “For me, Postyshev became a hero, a leader, a paragon of the true Bolshevik—and not for me alone.”⁴⁴² In newspaper photographs of turbines and tractors, in live glimpses of freight cars loaded with steel, Kopelev saw the new world coming into being. When a peasant tried to burn down a collectivized barn, Kopelev was confirmed in his conviction that sabotage existed. Capitalist encirclement was a fact. In 1933, he was awarded a coveted place at Kharkov University.⁴⁴³ “I believed,” Kopelev wrote, “because I wanted to believe.”⁴⁴⁴

CONSEQUENCES

Hay carts were going round to gather the corpses, as during the medieval plagues.⁴⁴⁵ “I saw things that are impossible to forget until one’s death,” the Cossack novelist Mikhail Sholokhov wrote to Stalin (April 4, 1933) of his native Don River valley. Stalin responded (May 6) that he had directed that the area be provided food aid and that the information in Sholokhov’s letter should be investigated, but he stood his ground. “Your letters create a somewhat one-sided impression,” Stalin wrote. “The esteemed grain growers of your region (and not only your region) carried out a ‘sit-down strike’ (sabotage!) and would not have minded leaving the workers and the Red Army without grain.” He deemed their actions “a ‘quiet’ war with Soviet power. A war of attrition, dear comrade Sholokhov.”⁴⁴⁶

Stalin was indeed at war—with the peasantry, and with his own Communist party for supposedly going soft at this perilous hour. On May 4, he had received a report from Yagoda on how newly arrived emaciated conscripts were eager for the promised bread toasts and a lump of sugar, while relatives trailed them, looking for handouts. One was overheard to say, “When there were no collective farms, peasants lived a lot better. Now, with collective farms, everyone is starving. If war breaks out, no one will defend Soviet power; everyone will go against it.”⁴⁴⁷

Japan’s Kwantung Army attempted to seize Jehol, in Inner Mongolia, a springboard for attacking both Peking (Beijing) and Outer Mongolia, the Soviet satellite.⁴⁴⁸ Chiang Kai-shek’s earlier appeal to the League of Nations had merely resulted in Japan quitting that body, which Tokyo had come to see as a racist Anglo-American conspiracy to emasculate it.⁴⁴⁹ On the last day of May 1933, Kwantung generals signed a truce with “local” officials in the port of Tientsin (Tianjin), in northern China, that extended Manchukuo’s borders to the Great Wall, gave Japan control of the strategic mountain pass, and created a demilitarized zone extending sixty miles south of the wall and just north of the Peking-Tientsin district.⁴⁵⁰ Stalin suspected that Chiang, whose signature was not on the truce, was secretly negotiating an end to the war, which would free up Japan to attack him. Presumed Japanese saboteurs were crossing into Soviet territory.⁴⁵¹ The dictator received intercepted communications between the British ambassador in Tokyo and the foreign office in London, asserting that Japan’s military buildup went beyond its aims in China and that Japanese army observers viewed war with the Soviet Union as inevitable.⁴⁵² Stalin had Soviet newspapers publish intelligence excerpts, in disguised form, to expose Tokyo’s aggressive desires.⁴⁵³

The party journal Bolshevik tried to rebut a sense of “the capitulation of the Soviet Union in the face of world imperialism in general and Japanese imperialism in particular.”⁴⁵⁴ But whether the USSR could even fight a war had become doubtful. On May 7, 1933, the politburo had prohibited the OGPU from imposing the death penalty—the Soviet Far East was granted an exception—and the next day Stalin and Molotov had issued a secret directive to party organizations and OGPU branches suspending mass peasant deportations and ordering release of Gulag inmates guilty of lesser infractions, in light of “the three-year struggle that has destroyed our class enemies in the village.”⁴⁵⁵ “The moment has arrived when we no longer need mass repressions,” the decree explained, conceding that further “severe forms of repression” could “bring the influence of our party in the village to zero.”⁴⁵⁶ But then, when Kosior and others in Ukraine had reported on severe repression being undertaken against peasants there, Stalin responded (May 31), “Finally you are beginning to apply yourself in Bolshevik fashion.”⁴⁵⁷

Early June brought a small measure of relief: berries, green onions, young potatoes, carrots, and beets became ready for consumption, for those who maintained household gardens (and guarded them round the clock).⁴⁵⁸ Hungry children who were discovered rooting around in the plots were sometimes killed, then and there, by farmers protecting their families’ food.⁴⁵⁹ The regime was purchasing livestock from western China and again reducing grain exports. For 1933, it would end up at 1.68 million tons, when the original plan had been for 6.2 million. Exports in 1933 would bring in a mere 31.2 million gold rubles, a fivefold revenue plunge since 1930.⁴⁶⁰ The general crisis forced a halt to the generous increases in military expenditures, which would decrease in 1933 to 2 billion rubles (from 2.2 billion).⁴⁶¹

On June 1, 1933, the announced party purge commenced. The procedures specified ferreting out self-seekers, the politically passive, and the morally depraved, but also—in a conspicuous indication of Stalin’s hand—“open and hidden violators of party discipline, who do not fulfill party and state decisions, subjecting to doubt and discrediting the plans by the party with nonsense about their ‘unreality’ and ‘unattainability.’” The party journal explained that the enemy, unable to proceed openly and frontally (like the class-alien targets of the previous general purges), deceitfully penetrated the party and hid behind a party card to sabotage socialism from within (“double-dealers”).⁴⁶²

During the Five-Year Plan, membership had ballooned by more than 2 million, to 3.55 million (2.2 million full members, 1.35 million candidates). Each party organization established its own purge commission, and every Communist—this now included Central Committee members—had to place their party cards on the table, recite their autobiographies, and submit to interrogation. The commissions usually had records of previous autobiographies and any denunciations; the proceedings were open to non-party workmates to chime in. The previous purge, in 1929–30, had expelled around one in ten. Now, nearly one in five would be expelled, and nearly as many would quit rather than submit to the procedure, bringing the total number who did not keep party cards to more than 800,000.⁴⁶³ Expulsion was not cause for arrest, which required accusations of a crime, but Stalin’s commentary implied guilt until proven innocent.⁴⁶⁴

STALIN’S FAMINE

Before 1917, to import machinery, Russia had been exporting more than would have seemed permissible, given domestic consumption needs. (“We will not eat our fill, but we will export,” Alexander III’s finance minister had remarked.)⁴⁶⁵ A famine had broken out in 1891–92. In the four years prior, Russia had exported about 10 million tons of grain, but then a dry autumn, which delayed fall planting, severely cold winter temperatures without the usual snowfalls, a windy spring that blew away topsoil, and a long and dry summer damaged the harvest. The tsarist state had contributed to the vulnerability by reducing the rural workforce (conscripting young males), enforcing peasant redemption payments for former gentry land in connection with the serf emancipation, and having tax collectors seize vital livestock if payments fell short. Even after crop failure and hunger were evident, grain exports continued for a time. And the finance minister had opposed even this belated stoppage. The tsarist government refused to use the word “famine” (golod), admitting to only a “failed harvest” (neurozhai); censors prevented newspapers from reporting about it. Around 500,000 people died, primarily from cholera epidemics triggered by starvation.⁴⁶⁶

Stalin’s famine, involving extirpation of capitalism and denomadization, was incomparably worse. In 1931–33, famine and related epidemics probably killed between 5 and 7 million people. Perhaps 10 million more starved nearly to death.⁴⁶⁷ “I don’t know how they stood it!” Molotov would say later in his long life. In the Kazakh autonomous republic, starvation and disease probably claimed between 1.2 and 1.4 million people, the vast majority of them ethnic Kazakhs, from a population of roughly 6.5 million (of whom perhaps 4.12 million were ethnic Kazakhs). This was the highest death ratio in the Soviet Union.⁴⁶⁸ In Ukraine, the death toll was around 3.5 million, out of a population of 33 million. Statistics on livestock were not published in the Soviet press in 1932 or 1933, but the country likely lost half of its cattle and pigs and two thirds of its sheep. The horse population declined from 32.6 million to around 16 million; by 1933, tractors supplied only 3.6 million to 5.4 million horsepower equivalents. Kazakh livestock losses were beyond staggering: camels from 1.06 million to 73,000, sheep from 21.9 million to 1.7 million, cattle herds from 7.5 million to 1.6 million.⁴⁶⁹ By 1933, a Kazakh family owned, on average, just 3.7 cattle, compared with 22.6 in 1929. And Kazakhs ended up only nominally collectivized: the regime reinstituted private control of animals, and the majority of Kazakhs worked household plots and failed to work the requisite number of days for the collectives. But the damage to the USSR’s meat supply was done, and enduring.⁴⁷⁰

Many contemporaries, such as the Italian ambassador, who traveled through Ukraine in summer 1933, deemed the famine deliberate.⁴⁷¹ Monstrously, Stalin himself made the same accusation—accusing peasants of not wanting to work.⁴⁷² Regime propaganda castigated the starving refugees besieging towns for “passing themselves off as ruined collective farmers.”⁴⁷³ Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional.⁴⁷⁴ It resulted from Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization-dekulakization, as well as the pitiless and incompetent management of the sowing and procurement campaigns, all of which put the country on a knife-edge, highly susceptible to drought and sudden torrential rains.⁴⁷⁵ Stalin appears to have genuinely imagined that increasing the scale of farms, mechanization, and collective efficiency would boost agricultural output. He dismissed the loss of better-off peasants from villages, only belatedly recognized the crucial role of incentives, and wildly overestimated the influx of machines. He twice deluded himself—partly from false reporting by frightened statisticians, partly from his own magical thinking—that the country was on the verge of a recovery harvest.

Always grudgingly, Stalin approved, and in some cases initiated, reductions in grain exports, beginning already in September 1931; in 1932 and 1933 he signed reduced grain collection quotas for Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga valley, Crimea, the Urals, the Central Black Earth region, the Kazakh autonomous republic, and Eastern Siberia on nine occasions.⁴⁷⁶ The 1933 grain procurement target fell from 24.3 to 19.6 million tons; the actual amount collected would be around 18.5 million tons.^{477, 478} Altogether, the regime returned about 5.7 million tons of grain back to agriculture, including 2 million tons from reserves and 3.5 million from procurements. Stalin also approved clandestine purchase of grain and livestock abroad using scarce hard currency.⁴⁷⁹ Just between February and July 1933, he signed or countenanced nearly three dozen small allocations of food aid to the countryside, primarily to the North Caucasus and Ukraine, as well as the Kazakh lands (which necessitated sharp reductions in the bread rations for city dwellers, many of whom were put on the brink of starvation). All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians.⁴⁸⁰ In the Kazakh autonomous republic, probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation—as compared with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there—perished from starvation or disease, not because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy there consisted of forced denomadization. Similarly, there was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.⁴⁸¹

In the spring of 1933, officials gave the famine a self-justifying pedagogical gloss. Ukrainian party leader Kosior wrote that “the unsatisfactory preparation for sowing in the worst affected regions shows that the hunger has not yet taught many collective farmers good sense.”⁴⁸² In the same vein, an official report to Stalin and Molotov from Dnepropetrovsk claimed that collective farmer attitudes had improved as a result of “the understanding that . . . bad work in the collective farm leads to hunger.”⁴⁸³ Such reports followed Stalin’s lead. He admitted privately to Colonel Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross (May 13, 1933)—who had met with Lenin during the acknowledged Soviet famine of 1921–23—that “a certain part of the peasantry is starving now.” Stalin claimed that hardworking peasants were incensed at the indolent ones who caused the famine. “The collective farmers roundly curse us. It is not right to help the lazy—let them perish. Such are the morals.” It was ventriloquism.⁴⁸⁴

Once Stalin had caused the horror, even complete termination of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. The regime had no strategic grain reserves left, having released them.⁴⁸⁵ Only more aggressive purchases of food abroad and open appeals for international assistance could have averted many (and perhaps most) of the deaths. The world had plenty of food in 1933—indeed, the glut was depressing global prices for grain—but Stalin refused to reveal vulnerability, which, in his mind, would incite enemies. Admission also would have been a global propaganda debacle, undermining the boasts about the Five-Year Plan and the collective farms.

• • •

STALIN HAD CAUSED A DOMESTIC CALAMITY and rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable in the face of Japan’s expansionism, while contributing significantly to the ascent in Germany of Hitler, who threatened expansionism, and provoking blistering internal critiques.⁴⁸⁶ But his faction felt compelled to rally around him. “Loyalty to Stalin,” wrote a military official who later defected, “was based principally on the conviction that there was no one to take his place, that any change in the leadership would be extremely dangerous, and that the country must continue in its present course, since to stop now or attempt a retreat would mean the loss of everything.”⁴⁸⁷ A correspondent wrote to Trotsky on Prinkipo, in early spring 1933, that “they all speak about Stalin’s isolation and the general hatred of him, but they often add: ‘If it were not for that (we omit the strong epithet), everything would have fallen to pieces by now. It is he who keeps everything together.’”⁴⁸⁸

Resolute in extremis, Stalin ordered the forced return of peasant escapees, the blacklisting of entire counties (they would suffer the highest mortality), and the banning of fishing in state waters or even private charity—anything that would have made it possible to avoid the collectives.⁴⁸⁹ The OGPU arrested 505,000 people in 1933, as compared with 410,000 the year before.⁴⁹⁰ Some farmers were still refusing to sow crops, since the regime would only take the harvested grain away.⁴⁹¹ But most weeded the fields, sowed, and brought in the harvest. “All the collective farm workers now say: ‘We understand our mistakes and we are ready to work,’” one local report noted. “‘We will do everything expected of us.’”⁴⁹² Officials concluded that they had broken the peasants’ will, indirectly suggesting the regime had partnered with famine to achieve subjugation.⁴⁹³ Indeed, it was the famished peasants who would lift the regime and the country out of starvation, producing between 70 and 77 million tons of grain in 1933, a bumper crop comparable to the miracle of 1930.⁴⁹⁴ The peasants, in their land hunger and separate revolution, had made possible the advent of a Bolshevik regime in 1917–18; now enslaved, the peasants saved Stalin’s rule.⁴⁹⁵

Through it all, he had revealed escalating rage and pathological suspicion, to the point that not only bourgeois specialists or former tsarist officers were considered as enemies, but many workers and party loyalists. At once self-righteous and self-pitying, the aggressor who somehow was always the victim, full of rage, Stalin could display affection as well. He wrote (June 25, 1933) to Avel Yenukidze, the overseer of Kremlin affairs, who had gone to Germany for treatment of a heart condition, recommending he avoid fats. “Try to observe a diet, move about more, and get fully healthy,” Stalin wrote. “We extended the length of your holiday by a month, and now it’s up to you.” The dictator exhibited his own good spirits. “We have ramped up agriculture and coal,” he added. “Now we’re going to ramp up rail transport. Harvest gathering in the south has already begun. In Ukraine and the North Caucasus, the harvest is taken care of. This is the main thing. In other regions, the outlook so far is good. I’m healthy. Greetings! Your Stalin.”⁴⁹⁶