Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Read Free Book Online

to the canteen and wash before the classes began. A lucky 500 workers were even sent to Stalingrad and Leningrad to learn how to work new specialist machine tools installed in factories there. One of the many excuses Bibikov gave his long-suffering wife for his constant lateness was that he personally conducted classes in Marxist Leninism for an advanced group of foremen and managers, and mass meetings and lectures on political economy for the rank and file. One imagines lines of eager, and not-so-eager, listeners, looking up at the bald, animated figure at the lectern in his striped sailor's shirt, soaking up information as indiscriminately as sponges, Marx and Lenin slowly displacing the no less jealous old God of the Russias with whom they had grown up.
    On 31 May 1931, the Politburo's industrial supremo Sergo Orzhonikidze was reverently shown around the nearly complete factory buildings. Orzhonikidze ordered the construction to be completed by 15 July, and the installation of the production lines to begin immediately afterwards. Unsurprisingly, given the unspoken penalties for failure, the job was done on time.
    By 25 August 1931 the first trial tractors were coming off the assembly line. On 25 September the factory director sent a telegram to the Central Committee reporting that the KhTZ would be ready to start full production on 1 October as planned, just fifteen months after the ground had been broken.
    Twenty thousand people assembled in the giant machine hall for the official opening. Demyan Bedny, the 'proletarian poet' whose pseudonym meant Demyan the Poor, was there to record the event in verse, as was a delegation of dignitaries from Moscow. A biplane flew over the site, scattering leaflets with a poem entitled 'Hail to the Giant of the Five Year Plan'. The foreign journalist with the yellow rubber boots was there too, 'just as sloppy, but less confident'. Varvara, the peasant girl whom he had scoffed at, had been to the factory school and was now a qualified steel-presser.
    Grigori Ivanovich Petrovsky, head of the All-Ukraine Central Committee of the People's Economy, cut the ceremonial ribbon, walked inside the hall and rode out on a bright red tractor covered in carnations and driven by champion woman worker, Marusya Bugayeva, as the factory band played the 'Internationale'. It was followed by dozens of other tractors. One collective farm worker shouted, records the Temp special issue on the opening, 'Comrades - But it's a miracle!'
    The Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil published the factory management's telegram verbatim: 'October First opening of Kharkov Tractor Factory invite editorial representative attend celebrations opening factory - Factory Director Svistun. Party Secretary Potapenko. Factory Committee Director Bibikov.' The magazine composed a special poem in honour of the event, 'To the Builders of the Kharkov Tractor Factory.'
     
To all, to all, the builder-heroes,
Participants of one of our great victories,
Who have worked on the building of the Kharkov Tractor
A Crocodile's flaming greeting!
The Crocodile, overwhehned with joy at the news,
Bows its jaws to you:
You fulfilled your task with Bolshevik honour,
Kharkov did not betray the pace . . .
A record! One year and three months!
     
    But behind the universal jubilation, further catastrophe was unfolding in the countryside. The KhTZ's tractors came too late to make an impact on the 1931 harvest, which, after the ravages of collectivization, was disastrous. The projected 'grain factories' were producing little more than half of what the same countryside had yielded five years before. The peasants' only way to protest against the loss of their land and homes was to slaughter their animals and eat as much of their food supplies as they could before the commissars came. Eyewitnesses from the Red Cross reported seeing peasants 'drunk on food', their eyes stupefied by their mad, self-destructive gluttony, and the knowledge of its