Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Read Free Book Online Page A

consequences.
    Unsurprisingly, they worked unwillingly for the new state farms. Yet the state demanded grain not only to feed the cities but also to export for hard currency in order to buy foreign machinery for projects like the KhTZ. Soviet engineers were sent to the United States and Germany to buy steam hammers, sheet steel rolling machines and presses with trunkloads of Soviet gold, all earned from selling grain at Depression prices. The KhTZ's American steam hammer, which Bibikov was later accused of sabotaging, cost 40,000 rubles in gold, the equivalent of nearly a thousand tons of wheat, enough to feed a million people for three days.
    In October 1931 the Soviet government requisitioned 7.7 million tons of a meagre total harvest of 18 million tons. Most went to feed the cities, strongholds of Soviet power, though two million tons was exported to the West. The result was one of the greatest famines of the century.
    During the expropriations of 1929 and 1930 individual villages had starved if they resisted the commissars, who punitively confiscated all the food they could find. Now, as the winter of 1931 set in, hunger gripped the whole of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Millions of peasants became refugees, flocking to the cities, dying on the pavements of Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov and Odessa. Armed guards were posted on trains travelling through famine areas so they wouldn't be stormed. One of the most haunting images of the Russian century is a photograph of hollow-faced peasants caught selling dismembered children for meat on a market stall in the Ukraine.
    The new vast fields of collective farms had watchtowers on the perimeter, like those of the Gulags, to watch for corn thieves. A law was introduced mandating a minimum of ten years of hard labour for stealing corn - one court in Kharkov sentenced 1,500 corn gatherers to death in a month. The towers were manned by young Pioneers, the Communist Children's League (for children aged ten to fifteen). Fourteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov became a national hero in 1930 when he denounced his own father to the authorities for not handing over kulak property to the local collective farm. The tale-telling Pavlik was subsequently, perhaps not unreasonably, murdered by his grandfather. The story of this young revolutionary martyr became front-page news in Pravda and prompted books and songs about his heroism.
    'There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,' wrote Boris Pasternak after a trip to the Ukraine. The young Hungarian Communist Arthur Koestler found the 'enormous land wrapped in silence'. The British socialist Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev, where he found the population starving. 'I mean starving in its absolute sense, not undernourished,' he wrote. Worse, Muggeridge found that the grain supplies that did exist were being given to army units brought in to keep starving peasants from revolting. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet Union, convinced he had witnessed 'one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.'
    Even hardened revolutionaries like Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin were horrified. 'During the Revolution I saw things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot be compared to what happened between 1930 and 1932,' Bukharin wrote shortly before he was shot in 1938 in the Purges. 'In 1919 we were fighting for our lives . . . but in the later period we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men together with their wives and children.'
    The famine was not just a disaster - it was a weapon deliberately used against the peasants. 'It took a famine to show them who is master here,' a senior Party official told Victor Kravchenko, a Party planning apparatchik who defected to the US in 1949. 'It has cost