What the State can do for you…..wait…..I Mean To You!

Ah the Bolsheviks (audible, junior-high girlish sigh). Why do I continue to think about them, talk about them, write about them. Why do I find them so dreamy in a non-sexual kind of way? Why do I continue to go back to their poisoned well again and again? I suppose it’s because they provide such a target rich environment for my literary missile….so to speak. Anyway, while I certainly need a post about the Nazis or the Chinese communists, I figured I could squeeze out one more about the Russian version of totalitarianism because they were just such the epitome of Statist evil run amok. This is what the State, when it is totally unfettered and led by individuals who feel they know the way to a brighter, utopian future, can in fact do to you as a citizen. So while it may be somewhat easy to write about the Bolsheviks, it’s still a labor of love and something that you need to read, digest, and repeat. And for this post I’ll dispense with my self-imposed, though rarely enforced, one thousand word limit. There’s just too much juicy Communist goodness to try to contain in some arbitrary corral of words. So this post may be my Brothers Karamazov, my magnum opus, or dopus, depending on how you feel about my work.

The two episodes I want to discuss today are the killing of people deemed to be getting in the way of the Bolshevik’s aims by that beardo Lenin, and the terror famine orchestrated by Stalin and his boys against the Russian people in general and the Ukrainians in particular. When the Bolsheviks took over, agriculture in Russia was not much different from what it had been during medieval serfdom. The Marxists looked at the Russian peasant with disdain and viewed them as an impediment to progress due to backwardness and individualism. “Can’t they just see that allowing us to shoot a bunch of them is for the greater good of Mother Russia?”

But one group of peasants above all was held by the Party to be the true hub of evil and those were the kulaks. Kulak technically means “money-lender” and all they were were peasants that acquired more wealth than their fellow peasants and were in turn able to lend money and hire others. Unfortunately for them, that whole “lending and hiring” thing just didn’t sit well with the Marxists. The kulaks just weren’t picking up what the Party was laying down and because of that the Party felt it needed to embark on a program that they called without a trace of irony “de-kulakization.” They were honest in their descriptions if nothing else. The Party viewed the kulaks as the ultimate enemy of collectivism and attempted to foster a hatred towards them by the lower peasants that never really took hold. Estimates vary widely but millions died during de-kulakization.

So the Party security apparatus went about harassing, relocating, and outright killing anyone deemed a kulak. And keep in mind that over time the term kulak lost its literal meaning and became very fluid thus allowing anyone considered an enemy of the state to be labeled a kulak. Uh oh. Party apparatchiks would sometimes forward a list with the number of kulaks in a village, somehow magically known to them, and the local thugs would then go out and find just that amount of kulaks and round them up.

Ironically, or perhaps since we’re dealing with communism, “ronically” it was the kulaks who were usually the hardest working, smartest peasants in the countryside and thus were able to amass some wealth. So by taking them away the planners were attempting to force collectivize the countryside with the weakest workers among the peasantry. So not only would their plan not work because of its homegrown shittiness but they were making it even more impossible by trying to run it with the second and third team. Here’s a snippet from The Education of a True Believer by Lev Kopelev:

Some of them (the kulaks) were even heroes of the Red Army, the same guys who took Perekop and near took Warsaw. They settled down on the land and took root like oats. Got rich! Only the guy who didn’t strain stayed a poor peasant. The kind of guy who couldn’t grow anything but weeds in black soil, couldn’t get milk from a prize cow. He’s the one who made a big stink about the class enemy choking him, getting fat off his impoverished blood and sweat.

And this from the 1934 novel The Second Day by Ilya Ehrenburg sums up the plight of the kulak quite well.

Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.

We now turn to the second part of this snappy post and we plunge into what has come to be known by the Ukrainians as the Holodomor which translates into “killing by hunger.” This is where Stalin got off the chain and really came into his own as one of the biggest dickheads in the world’s long history of dickheads. When it came to killin’ there was just no stallin’ that Stalin. What the Holodomor was was (stuttering!) a manmade famine that took the lives of oh, I don’t know, around 8 million Russians in particular including around 4 million Ukrainians give or take a few million. A huge swath of Ukraine and Russia proper became one giant concentration camp. Here’s how it worked. In an effort to rapidly industrialize and radically transform rural society Stalin and the boys would come out with one crazy plan after another, they would set grain quotas for the  peasants that they were naturally unable to reach, the peasants would be hammered even harder by Party officials, grain would be forcibly confiscated and they would be starved in order to make them work harder, they and their draft animals would begin to literally fall over in the fields, grain quotas would again not be met, the peasants would again be pushed harder………I think you get it.

The Russian peasant was pushed to the brink of starvation and then pushed a little more. Some bolted for the cities where they were hunted down and arrested, many would lie starving in the streets as passers-by averted their eyes and did the two-step around them in their dying moments. Most however stayed home and just plain starved to death right there in their houses. I mean if you’re going to starve to death what better place to do so? Whole villages were wiped out and whole families lay dead in their homes as Party officials continued to scour the villages for the “hidden” grain that they knew the sneaky peasants surely had. I mean, “how could they not have an over abundance of grain with this wonderful plan that Comrade Stalin has created?” A long metal rod used for prodding the earth and any place where hidden grain could be stored became the symbol of the Party officials who did their best swarm-of-locust imitations when they rolled into the villages. Oh, and keep in mind, there are countless stories of grain lying rotting in the fields or sitting beside railroad tracks waiting to be shipped but eventually becoming unusable simply because of the planning done by the Communists that often just could not deliver the goods.

Over time the Communists simply viewed the peasants as “class enemies” of the system they were striving to maintain and thus used starvation as a weapon against them, especially the Ukrainians who viewed themselves as being culturally different from the Russians which simply would not work in the new Soviet Union. Naturally the intelligentsia needed to be rounded up and killed. (As a side note, when I’m down at the neighborhood tavern spouting off to the locals, as much as I’d like to, I’m careful to never deem myself one of the intelligentsia for this very reason. They’re always the first ones put against the wall.) Another great example of the Party hostility to Ukrainian culture is the story of the blind Kobzars. There is a long tradition of the blind in society, being generally unable to perform many of the tasks done by those with sight, taking up singing and storytelling as a profession. In the Ukraine these musicians and singers were known as Kobzars and they played the traditional Ukrainian instrument known as the bandura as they traveled the country singing about Ukraine’s history and retelling epic stories about the Ukrainian past. Naturally the Communists saw this as a threat to cohesion and summarily had the Kobzars persecuted. In fact, many were arrested and either relocated or murdered as the Kobzar tradition was basically extinguished in 1930’s Russia. How nice.

Now word of these type of overreactions and of the starvation in the rural areas naturally leaked out and Stalin had an answer for this. Often they would just plainly deny there was any starvation at all. A number of Western intellectuals and journalists were either duped, or willingly lied about Stalin’s crimes and went on to win Pulitzer Prizes (see Duranty, Walter), for further reading see (shameless, jackass). When however something was so ridiculously obvious that there was no lying out of it, the Party press apparatus would denounce the “overreactions” by operatives out in the field. Clearly these overzealous party members had strayed away from the Party’s teachings and used renegade tactics. They would be punished and then new operatives, often from the cities (you call them urban hipsters, we call them citidiots, see Free Cheese Glossary), would be sent out to take their place, these new officials just as unsure of how far to go as the last. If they looked kindly on the peasants they were hammered by the Party, if they went overboard in their mistreatment and word got out they were summarily called onto the carpet that was no doubt red but not as a sign of greeting a dignitary. Like much of twentieth century Russia this was a time of paranoia, cruelty, and fear.

We’re not generally in the business of tugging at heartstrings here at Free Cheese. In fact, Free Cheese generates zero income so we’re not really in any business. There’s enough misery and sorrow in this sick, sad world that I don’t like to pile on but it would be derelict of me not to mention the fate of children during dekulakization and the Holodomor. Naturally when millions of people are starving and practicing defensive eating, those who are the weakest are going to be totally at the mercy of those who have any power over them and that is where the children of Russia fell. Children starved to death in mass numbers. Children were also left orphans if they did survive while others simply wandered about, their family either arrested or dead, and made do in whatever way their young minds conceived to be best. If you have children or know any imagine taking away all adults who might give them any aid and pushing them out into the street to fend for themselves. You can imagine the sorts of things that could happen to them. Millions of children died during this era. Millions. The majority starved to death, others died for a myriad of reasons. Still more died in unmeasurable ways even though they continued to physically survive but forever bearing the scars of Communist Russia for the rest of their haunted lives.

I realize this has been a long post but I’m going to try to tie it all together and land this thing in the Hudson.

Here’s a smattering of quotes that should cause you to clench your teeth a bit.

First the big man himself, let’s bring out Joe Stalin! People say Hitler laid it all out in Mein Kampf and that’s true but who wants to read all that crap when you can have your megalomaniac sum it up in one tidy sentence. Here’s Uncle Joe in 1929:

We have gone over from limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulak to a policy of liquidating the kulak as a class.

Next up is Stalin’s favorite economist Stanislav Strumulin.

Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws. There are no fortresses which Bolsheviks cannot storm.

Finally Nikolai Bukharin who was initially a supporter of Stalin though later came into opposition of many of Stalin’s edicts. He is considered to be on the Right when it comes to Bolsheviks which is still so far left for the average person that he’s almost behind you if you look to your left side. He talked about the whole experience of the 1920’s and 30’s and noted that the suffering of the peasants was horrible and also said this about those who took part in the administration of de-kulakization and the famine, and it sums things up nicely though it could be applied to all central planning /mass killing nightmares of the twentieth century. He noted,

…deep changes in the psychological outlook of those Communists who participated in this campaign and, instead of going mad, became professional bureaucrats for whom terror was henceforth a normal method of administration and obedience to any order from above a high virtue.

If you’re part of a Statist apparatus and you’re not a psychopath, though have given serious thoughts to maybe becoming one or at least on a goof trying it out, the system brutalizes you and you can become one.

Now we’re a peace-loving bunch here at Free Cheese which fits in nicely with one of the main pillars of libertarianism. But a great parlor game, whatever that is, would be to think of the one historical person that you’d most like to punch in the face. I’m sure you’ll have your Hitlers and Mao’s, perhaps Reagan or FDR depending on your politics. Maybe even Jesus or Mohammed if you’re an atheist and have a serious axe to grind. And Jerry Lewis, though as of this moment he’s still alive. But for me it’s Stalin. That little spud is the dude I’d love to coldcock above all others. Knowing him though, he’d take the punch, stagger a bit, and then break into a grin while straightening his jacket and saying, “Is that the best you’ve got you bourgeois pig?” Dammit! I thought for sure Stalin would have a glass jaw. That however is the problem with studying these horrific events. There’s no undoing them, no going back and making it all better, and that in a nutshell is why we have to watch the State with an ever-vigilant stink eye just waiting for it to make that first move. For often when the wrong people grab the reins they will use the power of the State, pat you on the back, encourage you, “help you along”, while holding a knife to your throat with the other hand and drawing it across your neck from ear to ear.

Ta, ta,

H.R. Gross