peasants saw this as a licence to leave the collective farms, and they voted with their feet. Between March and June 1930 the proportion of Soviet peasant households enrolled in the collectives fell from 58 to 24 per cent (in the central Black Earth region it fell from 83 to just 18 per cent). But leaving the collective farm turned out to be no easy matter. It was almost impossible for the peasants to retrieve their private property, their tools and livestock. For six months there was an uneasy truce. Then, in September 1930, Stalin launched a second wave of collectivization, the stated aim of which was to collectivize at least 80 per cent of the peasant households – up from 50 per cent the first time around – and eliminate all ‘kulaks’ by the end of 1931. The Politburo instructed OGPU to prepare a thousand ‘special settlements’, each to receive up to 300 ‘kulak’ families, in remote regions of the North, Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan. Two million people were exiled to these places in 1930–31.31
In September 1930, right at the start of this second wave, the kolkhoz in Obukhovo was established. ‘New Life’ (
The peasants lost their plots of land, which were reorganized into large collective fields. The kolkhoz took away the work-horses and locked up all the cows in dairy sheds; but the promised new machinery did not arrive, so the cows were returned to their owners for milking, and a milk tax was imposed on every house. Kolia Kuzmin, the leader of the Komsomol, became the chairman of the kolkhoz. He took a bride from a nearby village and moved into the biggest house, which had been confiscated from the exiled ‘kulak’ Vasily Golovin. Kuzmin was responsible for the daily management of the kolkhoz, even though he was perhaps the least experienced farmer in the whole village. He was often drunk and violent. The first winter was a disaster. The kolkhoz delivered a large state quota of grain and milk, but half the horses died, and each kolkhoz worker was paid just 50 grams of bread a day.
Some of the villagers continued to resist. There were angry scenes when Kolia Kuzmin came to take away their property with an armed brigade. Many peasants ran away rather than be forced to join the kolkhoz. The Golovins were scattered as a clan. Of the 120 Golovins living in Obukhovo in 1929, only 71 remained by mid- 1931 (20 had fled to various towns; 13 were exiled as ‘kulaks’; and 16 were moved out to isolated homesteads, having been excluded from the collective farm).
As for Nikolai’s immediate family, it was broken up entirely. Two of his brothers were exiled. His mother fled to the nearest town. His oldest son was arrested and sent to work as a Gulag labourer on the White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal). Two other children, Maria and Ivan, ran away to escape arrest. His wife Yevdokiia and their three youngest children tried to join the collective farm, but they were barred as ‘kulak elements’, and isolated from their fellow villagers. Only the Puzhinin family, their oldest friends, would talk to them. ‘The atmosphere was terrible,’ remembers Antonina. ‘Mama often cried. We stopped playing outside; neighbours did not visit us any more. We grew up overnight.’ Yevdokiia and her children were allowed to stay in their family house and keep a cow and a tiny plot of land, from which they managed to survive for a few months, partly because they were helped in secret by their relatives. But life became unbearable when Kuzmin took away their cow (milk was their main source of food). In January 1931, Kuzmin declared a policy of ‘squeezing out the last of the kulak Golovins’, and the village Soviet imposed a huge tax (1,000 kilograms of grain) on Yevdokiia. ‘Kuzmin and his gang would not give up,’ recalls Antonina: ‘they kept on coming back, taking all we had and demanding more. When all the grain had gone, they confiscated the last household property, farming tools and wagons, furniture and pots and pans, leaving us just one iron bed, some old linen and some clothes.’
Then the order for their deportation came. On 4 May, a cold spring day, Yevdokiia and her children were expelled from their house and sent into exile in Siberia. They were given just an hour to pack their things for the long journey. The Puzhinins took the iron bed for safekeeping. The bed was the last possession of the Golovins, the place where all their children had been born and the last trace of their roots in Obukhovo, where the family had lived for several hundred years. Antonina recalls their leaving:
Mama remained calm. She dressed us in our warmest clothes. There were four of us: Mama; Aleksei, who was then fifteen; Tolia was ten; and I was eight… Mama wrapped me in a woollen shawl, but Kolia Kuzmin, who had come to supervise our expulsion, ordered the shawl removed, saying that it had been confiscated too. He would not listen to Mama’s pleading about the cold weather and the long journey that awaited us. Tolia gave me one of his old caps with ear-flaps, which he had thrown away becaused it was torn, and I wore this on my head instead. I felt ashamed to be wearing a boy’s cap instead of the shawl [traditionally worn by peasant girls]. Mama bowed and crossed herself before the family icons, and led us out the door… I remember the grey wall of silent people who watched us walk towards the cart. No one moved or said anything… No one hugged us, or said a parting word; they were afraid of the soldiers, who walked with us to the cart. It was forbidden to show sympathy towards the kulaks, so they just stood there and stared in silence… Mama said farewell to the crowd. ‘Forgive me, women, if I have offended you,’ she said, bowing and making the sign of the cross. Then she turned and bowed and crossed herself again. She turned and bowed four times to say goodbye to everyone. Then, when she was seated in the cart, we set off. I recall the faces of the people standing there. They were our friends and neighbours – the people I had grown up with. No one approached us. No one said farewell. They stood there silently, like soldiers in a line. They were afraid.32
2
Returning to his native Belorussian village in June 1931, the writer Maurice Hindus, who had emigrated to the USA almost a quarter of a century before, remarked on what he saw as a ‘fresh slovenliness that had come over the people’ as a result of collectivization. ‘Houses, yards, fences, were in sad need of repair.’ Holy Trinity was approaching,
yet nowhere was there a sign of paint on windows or shutters or a roof with a fresh coating of thatch. Was this neglect a mere accident? That I could not believe. The uncertainties that the kolkhoz had spread abroad were no doubt holding people back from improving their households.33
Hindus might have made his observation in virtually any village that had been collectivized. Dispossessed of their land and livestock, the peasants lost the sense of attachment to their family farms that had been the source of their pride and independence; once reduced to labourers in the kolkhoz, they no longer had the means or even the incentive to keep up their homes.
The peasants worked in kolkhoz brigades, receiving payment in the form of a small food ration (which they were expected to supplement by growing vegetables and keeping pigs and chickens on their private garden plots) and a once-or twice-a-year cash sum (enough on average to buy a pair of shoes). The lion’s share of kolkhoz production was purchased by the state through a system of compulsory ‘contracts’ which kept prices very low, so that kolkhoz managers were forced to squeeze the peasants to retain any funds for running costs. The peasants said that collectivization was a ‘second serfdom’. They were tied down to the land and exploited by the state, just as their ancestors had been enserfed and exploited by the landowners.
Economically, the collective farms were a dismal failure. Few had tractors to replace the horses slaughtered by the peasantry (human draught was used to plough a good deal of their land in the early years). The collective farms were badly run. The managers were people, like Kuzmin, who had been chosen for their loyalty to the Party rather than their agricultural expertise. There was nothing to replace the initiative and energy of the so- called ‘kulaks’, the hardest-working peasants before collectivization. The newly created kolkhoz labourers had no real interest in their work. They focused their attention on their garden plots and pilfered kolkhoz property. Many kolkhoz peasants found it very hard to reconcile themselves to the loss of their private household property. They knew which horse or cow had once belonged to them, and tried to use their former horse to till the land, or to milk their former cow.34
Olga Zapregaeva was born in 1918, the fourth of six children in a peasant family in Krivosheino, a small village in the Tomsk region of Siberia. When Krivosheino was collectivized, in 1931, the kolkhoz took her family’s household property (three cows and three horses, farm tools, carts and two barns full of hay), leaving them with just their chickens and their goats. ‘We were not paid anything in the kolkhoz,’ recalls Olga, who left school to work in the fields at the age of just thirteen. ‘We had to live from what we grew in our garden, from our chickens and our goats.’ There were no tractors on the kolkhoz, so the peasants ploughed the fields with their own horses, which
