From The End of the Soviet Empire, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, 1993
. . . For years history — both recent and distant — had been concealed. Noting that Russia had lost its peasant roots — as well as its roots, period — the ruralists were not only going to reclaim Russian history but return it to society. Worse than the destruction of the villages was a history that was primarily a veritable genocide of Russian peasantry. If genocide means the systematic destruction of an ethnic group,* then the term fully applies to what was suffered by the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, which was liquidated precisely because it was peasant and because Russia’s foundation was its peasant civilization:Nearly all the capital of intellectual energy accumulated in Russia during the nineteenth century and used for the revolution was frittered away on the peasant masses. The intellectual who produces spiritual sustenance and the worker who creates the mechanisms of the urban culture are increasingly being devoured by the peasantry who voraciously feed on what others have produced through incredible effort. It can be said with certainty that the peasantry revived itself by killing the intelligentsia and the working class. . . . The Russian people of the cities and villages, half-savage beasts, stupid, almost frightening, will die to make room for a new human race.3The hateful, racist words of Maxim Gorky, a friend of Lenin, concerning the peasantry were published in 1922 and presaged the policy to come. The fight waged by the ruralist writers led them eventually to publish remarkable books describing this genocide,* exposing those who were responsible (Soloukhin put Lenin on trial on this charge), and evoking the current abandonment of the countryside. They also are credited with revealing the publication of the most abhorrent writings, such as those of Gorky, hitherto concealed from criticism but now inescapably linked to the genocide* of the peasant.
The ruralists succeeded in showing that the country’s unbridled industrialization cost the deaths of tens of millions, the pillaging and degradation of peasants into slavery, and ultimately the destruction of the roots of the Russian civilization.4
3. Maxim Gorki, “On the Russian Peasantry,” In SSSR vnutrennie protivorechiia (Tchalidze Publications, 19087), p. 218.
I. Belov, Kanuny (French edition: Veilles) (Paris, 1985), p. 420.New York : BasicBooks (HarperCollins), 1993, page 173 notes page 281.
* The term 'genocide' does not seem to apply — because the target of the marxist/leninist criminals was a 'class', rather than an ethnic group. The 'class' in question was termed 'kulak', which was primarily to denote those peasants of wealth enough to use it for the exploitation of less-well-to-do peasants. It ultimately had meant any peasant who had anything of value at all, such as could be 'expropriated' (usually extorted, or simply stolen) from him.One notes that the formulations by Mr. Gorky would lend credence to accusations of 'genocide'. This seems merely inexact (on the part of any writer).
(Note : on having read the following I am now wise to such a definition of 'kulak' : any peasant who would show insufficient enthusiasim for the Bolshevik order of things.) — (WPT).
From “Molotov Remembers”, Introduction (by Albert Resis)
The greatest barrier to understanding Russia has been the obsessive secrecy imposed by the Soviet regime. . . . (page ix)In the civil war, 1918-1921, Molotov held a number of posts in Petrograd and in the provinces where in 1919 he came to the favorable attention of Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife. * * *
1921 proved an important year for Molotov. He was elected a full member of the party’s Central Committee, was named secretary of the CC, and was elected a candidate member of the Politburo (composed of full members Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, and candidate members Kalinin, Bukharin, and Molotov). As secretary he served as Lenin’s chief of staff until 1922, when the newly created office of genera l secretary went to Stalin. Molotov then acquired the title of second secretary of the Central Committee, deputizing for Stalin. In 1921, no longer living out of a suitcase, Molotov settled down to marry Polina Semenovna Zhemchuzhina, a Bolshevik who had worked in the Ukrainian underground during the Revolution and civil war.
The death of Lenin in January 1924 sharpened the struggle for power within the Communist party. Despite earlier differences with Stalin and <1-- pxv --> the fact that Stalin had superseded Molotov as chief administrator of the party in 1922, Molotov became Stalin’s most loyal servitor. Indeed, he figured as one of Stalin’s point men, so to speak, in the struggle against the three major opposition groups within the party in the 1920s: Trotskyist, Zinoviev-Kamenev, and Bukharinist. In 1926 Molotov was elected a full member of the Politburo, a position he retained until 1952 when he figured among the next round of Stalin’s purge victims. In 1930, at the age of forty, Molotov became chairman of Sovnarkom, succeeding the defeated rightist Alexander Rykov. In Soviet political power Molotov was now second only to Stalin and acted as his chief spokesman.
Molotov accordingly played a crucial and bloody role in the main domestic events of the 1930s which accompanied the crash program of industrialization under the Five-Year Plans launched in 1929: total collectivization of agriculture with its attendant horrors of famine and mass “dekulakization” (the kulaks were better-off peasants) and the Great Terror.
In 1928-1930 Molotov helped Stalin defeat the Bukharin-Rykov-led opposition to the Stalin-Molotov resumption of compulsory grain requisitioning and the drive for total collectivization. Stalin had launched the effort at the end of 1929 with the pronouncement that the time had come for “liquidating the kulaks as a class.” This was a logical consequence of Molotov’s charge in September that emboldened kulaks had moved from obstructionism to mounting an offensive against collectivization of the peasantry. Since “kulak” was a social category never clearly defined, any peasant, however poor, who showed insufficient enthusiasm for the collective farm could be accused of having kulak “proclivities.”
In January 1930 Molotov was appointed head of the Politburo commission on collectivization which mapped out the chief antikulak measures. Molotov boasted that he personally designated the areas from which tens of thousands of so-called kulak families were selected for expropriation and deportation. Precise figures are still lacking, but the victims may have numbered an estimated ten million people sent into internal exile in Siberia, the far north, and other inhospitable locales. Perhaps one-third of them perished under the harsh conditions of transportation and exile. Molotov also shares with Stalin direct responsibility for the man-made famine of 1932-1933 caused by total collectivization and forced grain procurement. Molotov told Chuev that on his inspection tours he saw no evidence of famine in the Ukraine, conceding that there might have been “hunger” in certain other areas. The famine of 1932-1933 took an estimated five million lives in the Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million in Kazakhstan and elsewhere.
( pages xv – xvii )
Carrère d'Encausse, Hélène. Title(s) Gloire des nations. English The end of the Soviet empire : the triumph of the nations / Hélène Carrère d'Encausse ; translated by Franklin Philip. Publisher New York : BasicBooks, c1993. Paging xii, 292 p. ; 25 cm. Notes "A New Republic book." Includes bibliographical references (p. [287]-289) and index. ?blockquote>