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

millions of lives . . . but we have won the war.'
     
    Bibikov must have seen the hunger too - the pinched faces, the bloated bellies and the empty eyes. He travelled often on Party and factory business in his black Packard, or in firstclass train carriages with guards in the corridors. He must have known that special trucks, on secret orders from the municipal authorities, patrolled the cities of the Ukraine at night to collect the corpses of peasants who had crawled there from the villages. Many must have made it to the barbed-wire perimeter of the KhTZ, on the outskirts of the city. By morning there was no trace, for those who chose not to see, of the horror which was unfolding all around. George Bernard Shaw declared, after a carefully stage-managed tour of the Ukraine in 1932, that he 'did not see a single undernourished person in Russia'. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent, dismissed reports of famine as anti-Soviet propaganda. To the Party, starving peasants were simply the waste-matter of revolution, to be ignored until they obligingly died - and then forgotten. The Party's leaders wanted the world to see only the shining achievements, not the price which was being paid for them.
     
    Bibikov made sure his family knew nothing. Lenina's memory of those years in Kharkov is of bazaars filled with fruits and vegetables, and her father coming home laden with sausages from the factory's canteen and boxes of sweets for the children. She doesn't remember wanting for anything. What did Bibikov think, as he tucked those paper-wrapped sausages into his briefcase as dusk fell, bringing the night and its crop of starved and desperate wanderers? He thought, I am quite sure, thank God it's them, instead of us.
    The convulsions of collectivization two years previously could be explained away as a war against the Revolution's class enemies, the kulaks. But now those enemies had been liquidated and the collective farms of the future established. Yet even those blinded by ideology could scarcely fail to see that the Workers' and Peasants' State was, painfully obviously, failing to feed its own people. Moreover, for all the glorious achievements of industrialization, it was equally clear that the whole dream of Socialism was being held together increasingly by coercion. Already in October 1930 a law forbade the free movement of labour, tying peasants to their land and workers to their factories, as in the days of serfdom. In December 1932 internal passports were introduced in an effort to stem the exodus of the starving into the cities.
     
    Does Bibikov's decision to continue believing, in the face of mounting evidence that the dream was becoming a nightmare, make him a cynical man? It's hard to know, since first and foremost he had little choice but to follow the Party line. The alternative was to join the starving, or worse. Yet he was clearly intelligent enough to understand that terrible cracks were appearing in the paradise he had spent his adult life fighting for.
    Perhaps, like many of his generation, he convinced himself of that greatest of twentieth-century heresies: that bourgeois sentimentality had no place in the heart of a servant of a higher humanity. Maybe he believed that the Party would ultimately create a brave new world from all this chaos. Or perhaps, less self-righteously, he convinced himself that his duty was to do what he could to conquer the backwardness of Russia, with its famines and grinding poverty, by helping to forge it into a modern, industrial nation. Most likely, though, is a more human explanation: it was much easier to live by one's myths, and to continue to believe in the ultimate wisdom of the Party, than to speak out and risk disaster.
    Yet the famine-ravaged country Bibikov saw during the winter of 1931-32 seems to have profoundly altered him. The Party was always right, yes - but the Party's tactics might at least be altered. Like many Party leaders in the