11. Portrait of Stalin by Isaak Brodskii, 1928

Why, though, did organizational rivalries generate the grotesque excesses of the 1930s terror? The Communist leaders were profoundly marked by the experiences that had brought them to power. They had endured privation together in the Tsarist underground, sustained by their shared belief in their own mission. They had suffered arrest and exile, and fought a desperate civil war, which it often seemed they would lose. Their consciousness was formed by their awareness that they were surrounded by enemies and by popular indifference or hostility even while, as they saw it, they were trying to bring harmony and happiness to humanity. Through these abrupt changes of fortune, they forged intense interdependence and mutual trust, without which they could scarcely have persisted in their endeavour. Absolute trust in the party became a hallmark of Communists.

A warrior mentality coloured the Communists’ responses to all social problems, including those of economic development. In their eyes, everyone but workers and the poorest peasants were potential enemies. In 1928, the state planning institution, Gosplan, launched the first of a series of Five Year Plans, intended to industrialize the country, replacing foreign capital with state allocation of resources. The plans were successful in increasing industrial output, but they required a net transfer of resources from the countryside to the towns. Offered lower prices for their crops, peasants responded by cutting their grain deliveries. The Communist leaders interpreted this market malfunction as deliberate sabotage by ‘kulaks’ – wealthier peasants who were ‘class enemies’. They responded with two aggressive campaigns, implemented with military speed and thoroughness: ‘dekulakization’, and the creation of collective farms (kolkhozy ), run by appointed officials, from which deliveries of produce could be enforced.

Plenipotentiaries were sent into the villages, with instructions to find out who the ‘kulaks’ were and to banish them from the communities. The most ‘malicious elements’ were deported to remote underpopulated regions of the north and Siberia, where they were dumped, often without suitable shelter, nutrition, or clothing. The peasants were then pressured into surrendering their land and livestock to kolkhozy, which were intended to bring industrial organization and discipline to agriculture. Some poorer villagers welcomed this, but the whole notion repelled most peasants, who were strongly attached to their household plots of land.

These measures brought about the destruction of the whole traditional rural way of life. Some peasants dubbed the results a ‘second serfdom’. As more archive materials become available, historians have uncovered more and more cases of peasant resistance, often violent. Since the village church was usually closed as well and the priest arrested, some peasants actually believed that the reign of Antichrist had come, and that anyone who entered a kolkhoz would be ‘branded with the stamp of the beast’.

In truth, both sides had apocalyptic expectations. Taken together with the industrial Five Year Plans, collectivization was the great and decisive struggle to create socialism. Lev Kopelev, a young activist at the time, confessed many years later:

Stalin had said ‘The struggle for grain is the struggle for socialism’. I was convinced we were warriors on an invisible front, waging war on kulak sabotage for the sake of grain needed for the Five Year Plan. . . [and] also for the souls of peasants whose attitudes were bogged down in ignorance and low political consciousness.

The destruction of the traditional village caused a major famine and poisoned the whole of social and economic life. The effects were especially devastating in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Ukraine was a major grain‑ growing region: the campaign was conducted ruthlessly there, and became enmeshed with the suspicion that Ukrainians might favour treacherously leaving the USSR and joining Poland. Hence the ‘holodomor ’, the hunger‑ famine which many Ukrainians today judge a form of genocide. In Kazakhstan, collectivization entailed ‘sedentarization’, compelling nomads to adopt a settled way of life, which resulted in a catastrophic loss of cattle, and the death or emigration of a third of the population.

By the mid‑ 1930s, many ‘kulaks’ managed to escape from their ‘special settlements’ and find jobs in the towns. Their appearance prompted a second spasm of terrorist activism by the state. In July 1937, Order No 00447 listed categories of ‘socially harmful elements’ to be arrested and, after a summary trial, either shot or sent to the Gulag. They included kulaks, priests, religious believers, old regime officials, and former members of non‑ Communist movements. The numbers to be arrested in each region were stipulated in advance; in practice, they were often exceeded as local NKVD agents ‘worked towards’ Stalin. In 1937–8, more than 760, 000 people were arrested and 387, 000 shot. Those who were not killed spent years, sometimes decades, in labour camps where exhausting work, poor nutrition, and inadequate medical care imposed their own death rates.

The manic distrust devastated party cadres too. Given his experience and mentality, Stalin could only interpret difficulties as a sign that enemies had infiltrated the highest levels of the party–state apparatus. The very intensity of the struggle had bred its own enmities, even – or perhaps especially – within such a tightly knit band of leaders. The struggle of black versus white left no room for shades of grey. After Lenin’s death in 1924, each party faction struck a pose of absolute doctrinal rectitude and total moral authority. That meant that disputes over the best strategy tended to polarize opinion, transforming intense trust into intense distrust. Opponents and even waverers had to be treated as deadly enemies, to be attacked and destroyed. When the Central Committee worked out a particular strategy, it had to be adopted unanimously. Those who had reservations about it were accused of being ‘deviationists’, then of being ‘oppositionists’, which implied open hostility. Under such suspicion, Trotsky, Stalin’s principal rival, was expelled from the USSR in 1929. In the 1930s, as the fear of war with Germany grew and social turmoil intensified, the rhetoric escalated further: ‘oppositionists’ became people with ‘terrorist intentions’, then full‑ scale ‘terrorists’ or ‘enemies of the people’, to be eliminated.

The nomenklatura system intensified these suspicions. Leading Communist officials in all regions defended their own trusted appointees from the prying eyes of the NKVD. Stalin became convinced that, as a result, ‘terrorists’ had ensconced themselves throughout the apparatus. He unleashed the NKVD on them. Between the 17th party congress in 1934 and the 18th in 1939, 110 out of 139 members of the Central Committee were arrested; of 1, 966 delegates at the 17th, 1, 108 had disappeared by the time of the 18th. In the most sensational cases, former party leaders, comrades of Lenin, were accused, at much‑ trumpeted show trials, of participating in a great conspiracy, directed from abroad by Trotsky, aimed at murdering the Communist leaders and colluding with foreign powers to restore capitalism in the USSR. Most of them confessed, under pressure from exhausting interrogations, threats to themselves and their families, and perhaps also the feeling that they could save themselves by rendering one last service to the party. They had given their lives to the conviction that history could be made only through the party, and they had no alternative beliefs on which they might make a stand or form an opposition.