AN ACTIVIST

Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 232-233
An activist recalls [Stalin’s forced famine in the Ukraine]:

    “I heard the children…coughing, coughing with screams [from government-planned famine]. And I saw the looks of the men: frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad, daring ferocity.

    ‘Take it. Take everything away. There’s still a pot of borscht on the stove. It’s plain, got no meat. But still it’s got beets, taters ‘n’ cabbage. And it’s salted. Better take it, comrade citizens! Here, hang on. I’ll take off my shoes. They’re patched and repatched, but maybe they’ll have some use for the proletariat, for our dear Soviet power!"

    It was excruciating to see and hear all this. And even worse was to take part in it…and I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five Year Plan.”

    He adds, “With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism,’ the attribute of people who ‘could not see the forest for the trees.’

    That was how I reasoned, and everyone like me, even when…I saw what ‘total collectivization’ meant—how they ‘kulakized’ and ‘de-kulakized,’ how they mercilessly stripped the peasants in the winter of 1932-1933. I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it; that their distress and suffering were the result of their own ignorance or the machinations of the class enemy; that those who sent me—and I myself—knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they should plough.

    In the spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger [eventually about 14.5 million human beings were made to starve to death]. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Volgoda, under the bridges of Kharkov…I saw this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me out to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton-thin or sickly swollen people to go into the fields in order to “fulfill the bolshevik sowing plan in shock-worker style.”

    Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.”