The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation (6 page)

of those in Germany, although the

Soviet Union had some of the richest

land in the world.

From a cultural and social

perspective, things were even worse.

Or

so

I

heard

from Vasily

Germangenovich

Shpinkov,

universally

known

as

Germangenovich, from the village of

Kazashchina.

Kazashchina

is

a

couple of kilometres to the west of

Berezina. On my way to see him, I

walked past a stork’s nest, a dense

umbrella of sticks. Storks are

supposed to bring good luck, but

this one did not seem to have helped

the village. Almost every house was

boarded up or rotting.

Germangenovich was born in

1926, making him four years Father

Dmitry’s junior. If he was busy

when I arrived, he showed no sign

of it, since he sat me down, squeezed

on to the seat next to me and began

to talk as if he had been waiting for

me his whole life.

He had a strange twisted nose,

scarred in the way I imagine a

serious explosion would scar it. His

grey hair was thick but chaotic. His

eyes were bright. I had plenty of

time to examine him since he

believed in the bigger picture. His

life story started with Peter the

Great’s victory over the Swedes at

Poltava. That was in 1709.

He was a Cossack and proud of

it, and he pointed out to me his

reproduction above the door of a

painting in which Cossacks are

shown writing a rude letter to the

Turkish sultan. He wanted me to

know that the tsars had been good

people, and told me so at length. I

had to write it all down, since he

waited for me to do so after every

sentence.

As a result, my notebook is full

of pages of information on tsaristera

serfs, when peasants were tied to

their village and forced to give their

labour to their lord for three days a

week.

‘In 1931, Stalin brought in a

second serfdom. He took the land,

he took the livestock and he left the

people with just a quarter of a

hectare. And people did not have to

work only three days a week for

their masters like under the old

system, but all the time, plus the

churches

and

priests

were

destroyed.’

He was talking directly into my

face, so I had a close view of his

nose. His eyes were alive either side

of it.

‘I remember how they forced

people into the collective farm. The

chairman of the village council sat at

a table with a pistol which he said

was for the enemies of the people,

who were those who did not want to

join the collective farm. I was six

years old and was up on the stove.’

He gestured to the huge flat-

topped stove that dominated the

room. Traditional peasant houses

such as this one are built around the

stove. It projects into every room

and keeps them warm in the

wintertime. In very cold weather, the

family sleeps on top.

When the chairman had finished

his speech and everyone shouted

‘Praise

Stalin,

praise

the

revolution!’,

Germangenovich’s

grandmother told them they were all

fools, that nothing good would come

of it; that it was not for life, it was

for death. Her curses made no

difference. The government took

over all the barns, and all the

livestock. It even took people’s

wedding rings, the state’s desire for

currency was so strong.

‘We had to give our cow to the

state, and my mother got two and a

half metres of cloth, which she used

to make shirts for my father. That

was the payment for our cow: a

couple of shirts. When my father

took the horse to the collective farm,

we cried, we children. He knew that

the horse would die, because it

would have no master, no one would

look after it. Our horse went to the

common barn, and they took our

land, and this is where the starvation

came from.’

There were seven people in his

family: his parents, him, his three

siblings and his grandmother. They

ate herbs and weeds to stave off

hunger. His father did not have the

money to buy an exercise book, so

they went semi-naked and barefoot

to their lessons without anything to

write in.

‘The children were weak, many

could not go to school. They were

naked and hungry, and refused to

leave the house. How can you walk

when your legs won’t move? At

school, they gave out bread. They

had a list, and they divided children

up. The poorest got bread, but me

and my brother were so-called

middle peasants so we got nothing.’

Middle peasants were the group

of people between kulaks – the

supposedly rich oppressors, who

were often ordinary farmers whose

hard work had allowed them to own

slightly more than their neighbours,

and who were sent off to die in

Siberia and the north – and the

Bolsheviks’ favoured poor peasants.

The classifications were based on

a report that Lenin wrote in the late

nineteenth century. He was a

committed Marxist, and saw the laws

of class struggle all around him. That

led him to the erroneous conclusion

that peasants were dividing into

classes – kulak, middle and poor –

thanks to the government’s abolition

of serfdom and various other limited

agricultural reforms.

In fact, peasants distributed their

land afresh every year, with families

receiving a share proportional to the

number of people in their household.

That imposed equality and the

differences Lenin observed were

transient

developments

brought

about by temporary increases in

some families’ sizes that would be

erased when young men left home

or old men died.

The peasants he labelled as rich

were rarely rich enough to employ

labour, and in any case distrusted the

habits required to get ahead in

business.

Besides,

as

Olga

Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia noted,

any surplus wealth tended to go on

vodka, which had the habit of

returning the relatively rich to the

ranks of the poor once more.

Even if stratification into classes

did occur, it was wiped out by the

revolution

and

subsequent

disturbances. Peasants stole their rich

landlords’ belongings, then the

Bolsheviks stole what was left. There

were no kulaks, no middle peasants

and no poor peasants. There were

just peasants, and all of them were in

dire condition.

For the Bolsheviks, however,

what Lenin wrote was true, and the

communist government set targets

for how many kulaks needed to be

‘dekulakized’ so as to establish

fairness in the countryside. In June

1931 alone, 101,184 families were

resettled from their homes to remote

areas. The population of the Narym

territory in Siberia increased from

120,000 to 300,000 in less than

three months as the kulaks poured

in, with no allowances made to feed

the new arrivals in the long Siberian

winter.

The kulaks were often the

peasants with the best handicraft

skills. With their departure, the

villages lost their most skilled and

accomplished residents, as well as

much of their livestock, since many

peasants preferred to slaughter their

animals rather than hand them over

to the state. Lacking animals to work

the land or supply manure for

fertilizer, the peasants’ grain crops

collapsed,

while

grain

seizures

continued. That caused a new

famine.

Germangenovich cut a piece off

the loaf of bread on the sideboard –

9 centimetres square, a bit bigger

than a packet of cigarettes, though

not as deep. That was the ration that

he did not get. The bread was on a

tray in school, and only the poor

peasant children got any.

‘My brother asked for some and

they refused him. So he just grabbed

two bits of bread off the tray and

ran. While they chased him, he ate

one bit and the second he hid under

his shirt and gave to me. That was a

true brother.’

The government moved many of

the

villagers

a

few

hundred

kilometres into Ukraine, where there

would apparently be work and food.

They walked into the houses

assigned to them, he said, to find the

tables laid and the beds made. The

Ukrainians had all died of hunger,

and their fields were unworked.

In the winter of 1932–3, the

death rate in some parts of Ukraine

was thirteen times higher than

normal. Russia was better off, but

only just. In its worst-affected parts

the death rate was nine times higher

than normal.

In 1932–3, somewhere between

5 and 6 million people died, making

it the worst single famine of the

century until China surpassed it in

1958. Grain production that year

was around 60 million tonnes, but

the five-year plan demanded 106

million tonnes and the plan could not

be changed, so grain seizures by

officials

continued

despite

the

evidence of starvation. Desperate

peasants fled the villages for the

towns, where rations were better.

The

government,

which

had

abolished internal passports with the

revolution, sent the peasants back to

their homes and reintroduced travel

permits. Now only town-dwellers

would have the right to live in

towns, and peasants would be tied to

the

land

by

their

lack

of

documentation.

For

Germangenovich, it was serfdom

come again.

Stalin’s lack of sympathy for the

starving peasants, whom he referred

to as ‘peasants’ in inverted commas

as if to accuse them of being

impostors, was shown when, in a

private telegram, he said they were

Polish agents seeking to blacken the

Soviet Union’s name. Ukrainian

officials followed his lead and said

the peasants were starving because

they were lazy. Some 21,000 top

officials, meanwhile, had access to

special shops in the cities where

delicacies were still available. Closed

Shop No. 1 served the Moscow elite.

While officials ate caviar, the boy

Germangenovich was killing vermin

to try to stop them eating the grain

that was left.

‘We were ordered to kill mice,

and we got given a book if we

brought in a hundred mouse tails. It

was a plague of mice,’ he said. ‘That

is how we lived. Up to the war.’

On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany

attacked the Soviet Union, finding

the

Russian

troops

totally

unprepared. The invaders’ advance

was quick and devastating. By 17

August, they had seized Berezina.

The same disregard for logic that

had led the Bolsheviks to starve

millions of peasants had also

persuaded them to purge the highest

ranks of the army, leaving the

officers untrained and scared to take

the initiative.

The Germans took whole armies

of Soviet troops prisoner, of whom

2.8 million would be dead by early

1942. It was one of the most

spectacular military disasters in

history, and it exposed Father

Dmitry and Germangenovich to the

German army and an entirely