Slaughter in the Gulags

The Soviet Union suffered an estimated 20 million military and civilian deaths during World War II. But only a decade earlier its population had undergone another enormous and brutal reduction, not as a result of foreign invasion but as a calculated act of policy. No one knows for sure how many people died between 1929 and 1933 as Soviet agriculture was collectivized and as those who resisted or were even suspected of opposition were crushed. The British historian Robert Conquest, whose book “The Harvest of Sorrow” is the most thorough study of this cataclysm, has calculated from census figures and other data that 14.5 million Soviets perished. Another British historian, Hugh Seton-Watson, has described what occurred as “a war of the Communist Party and its armed forces against the Russian and non-Russian peasantry.”

The official Soviet version of the human costs of collectivization insists that only “rich” farmers--the so-called kulaks --were punished for trying to hold on to their land. But as the 1926 census showed the kulaks, a category defined by the value of the property they owned and the extent of the labor they hired, were in fact only a tiny fraction of the peasant population. Josef Stalin’s call for the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” could be explained on ideological grounds; those who profited from the labor of others were exploiters who deserved to be repressed, as Stalin read Marx and Lenin. But the extermination of entire villages and even regions of peasants, including an estimated 5 million in the Ukraine alone, could not be ideologically justified. This extermination is precisely what occurred, by shootings, by mass deportations to what became death camps, most horribly by deliberately created famine.

This tragic story has been known in the West for nearly as long as it has been suppressed in the Soviet Union. Now there are modest signs that the suppression is being eased. Vladimir Tikhonov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, writes in the weekly Argument and Fact how Stalin’s “perverted” notion of socialism “repressed” more than 10 million farmers in the 1930s and produced “an atmosphere of terror” in the countryside. Tikhonov stops well short of candor about the immense death toll produced by forced collectivization. But he goes considerably beyond the version of events supplied by Soviet propagandists. Slowly, tentatively, incompletely, Soviets are being acquainted with some of the ugliest truths of their recent past. The information they are now being allowed seems certain to whet their appetite for more.