After this initial massacre the Bolsheviks let a pause ensue and for several years no great killings took place, just the routine score or so of executions per month. But when the Five-Year Plan was inaugurated, the decision was made to exterminate the kulaks. A kulak was the term applied originally to a peasant who had risen sufficiently above his neighbors to employ labor. That made him an exploiter, a person who lived from the surplus value produced by his hired hands. The Bolsheviks, however, chose to amplify this category to include all peasants who, even if they did not employ labor, had become in the least degree more prosperous than their neighbors. This prosperity, based for the most part upon the individual industry and sagacity of the kulak, might consist in the possession of two cows to the neighbor’s one. In any case the reasoning of the Bolsheviks was that they could not afford to tolerate the existence of any peasant who, forced to join a collective farm, would at the beginning have to live worse than he had lived as an individual farmer.
Such peasants, the Bolsheviks reasoned, would be just as incorrigible enemies to collectivism as the aristocrats and industrialists. They had to die. They did die. This was the greatest Soviet mass slaughter, because there were a great many more such peasants than there were aristocrats, or industrialists, or intelligentsia. It took about two years to do away with the kulaks. Tens of thousands of G.P.U. troops and agents sought out every family of better-than-average peasants throughout the entire Soviet Union, and forced them into boxcars and herded them off to places of exile, down to Kazakstan or up to Narimsky Krai, to places where it was too hot or too cold to live. It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 of these more enterprising farm workers and their families died at once, or within a few years.
This process destroyed what there was left of the originally non-Communist party talent in Russia. You would have thought that this ought to satisfy the Bolsheviks. It did, but it did not satisfy Stalin. There was no more opposition to the Bolshevik program. There was not a human being left in Russia who had any connection with the old regime. Not in modern history has there been such a clean wiping of the slate. The Bolsheviks were left not only as absolute masters, but containing a country in which every living person was their hopeful or cowed collaborator. Then came the fatal quarrel between Stalin and Trotzky. Out of this quarrel came the great purges by Stalin which destroyed for the second time within a generation the principal talent of Russia.
This may be regarded as the most fateful slaughter of all. Bolsheviks could argue that the extermination of every vestige of Czarist Russia could be justified on account of the inefficiency, inhumanity, unproductivity of the old regime, and the fact that, according to Bolshevik reasoning, members of the old regime would never cooperate with the new. But now Stalin was destroying not the old, but the new regime, all its talents, its best intellects, its best characters if you like.
Beginning with the politicians, he killed off in the course of four years of uninterrupted purges, the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists. There is, of course, enough youth among 200,000,000 for the nation to recover even after such a purge. The youth whom Stalin spared have proved in battle how boundless are the forces of Russia, the first country Hitler ever tackled with lives to waste!
Q. You have not made it clear, if the Soviet system is so brutal a tyranny, how it is that the Red Army has been able to stand up so well to the Germans.
A. The answer is that the Red Army has fought as Russians have always fought under any regime, bravely, enduringly, stubbornly, gallantly. Russians have always had to fight despite their government; as they did in the last war, as they are doing in this war. The general distaste of the outside world for the Bolshevik system led many to forget that the Russian soldier retains in the Red Army all the martial virtues he possessed in the past. And have we forgotten that the Imperial Army in the last war held the Germans for three years? If the Red Army does as well we will be eternally thankful. True, the Germans in the last war had to divide their forces into two fronts, while today the Red Army has to bear the shock of nearly the full force of the whole German land forces. The task of the Red Army is accordingly heavier.
But our appraisal of the Red Army’s resistance has been strongly influenced by an element which has colored and distorted our judgment of the quality of any army which faces the Germans. That element is our recollection of the collapse of the French Army, which was due to a score of causes besides the excellence of the German Army. It was so overwhelming, bewildering, and impressive that it gave rise to the involuntary, subconscious feeling that the Germans were invincible. Now when any troops stand up to the Germans we are inclined to judge it a miracle of valor and military effectiveness. This is not to take away one whit of the immense credit due the Russians for holding up Hitler’s juggernaut but it is fair to point out that if we had not seen France fall, if for example Germany had attacked Russia before attacking France, everybody would have expected the Russians to put up just about the resistance they have put up. After all, Russia is a nation of double the population of Germany, with incomparably greater natural resources, and with twenty-three years of unflagging preparation for precisely this war. If there had been the exceptional virtue in the Soviet collectivist system which is ascribed to it by its disciples in America, it should not merely have stopped but should have defeated, routed, and conquered the Germans.
Q. Aside from the fact that everybody was influenced by the French example, most military experts seem to have been deceived about the fighting ability of the Red Army. Why was that?
A. It seemed almost as though Stalin wanted the outside world to think his army less strong than it was. None but the most acute of professional observers, among them Colonel Faymonville, for years American military attaché to Moscow, and now a member of the Allied military mission there, had a correct view of the Red Army. Hitler for the first time in his life admitted he had “had no idea” how strong the Red Army was. No outsider was ever allowed to see more than fragments of it. No newspaper correspondent, for example, ever put foot over the threshold of a Red Army barracks. Maneuvers were nearly always carried out in secret without the presence of military attachés. One almost had the feeling that Stalin had deliberately arranged the initial debacle of his attack on Finland in the first Soviet-Finnish war in order to deceive the world into thinking his army inferior to its real strength. Of course that makes no sense, and the fact was that Stalin had been led to think he could walk over Finland with ease and hence had not properly prepared his attack. Nevertheless the net effect of the first Finnish war combined with the secrecy thrown about the Red Army was to make even military attachés in observation posts around Russia believe the Red Army extremely weak. There was always the greatest difficulty in obtaining the most elementary facts about the Red Army. The Soviet government published less about its military establishment than any other great power. It kept concealed the very existence of important armaments factories; it never published production figures in the arms industry; it furnished the League of Nations less information about its vast army than any other members of the League. The G.P.U. Terror made it possible to envelop the Red Army in an impenetrable blanket which even the Germans were not able to pierce.