A Patriot's History of the Modern World (27 page)

In late 1927, with the collapse of Soviet agriculture, Stalin overturned Lenin's “New Economic Policy” and instituted a dramatic and deadly collectivization process that brought all agriculture under state control.
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When—as would be expected—production fell, Stalin blamed it on the
kulaks
(“grasping hands”), or small private farmers who owned more than eight acres per male family member and constituted less than 5 percent of the population of the USSR (which at the time included all of modern-day Siberia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, though not yet the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and some of the World War II territories the Soviets would seize). Stalin virtually declared war on the kulaks, and ordered farmers rounded up, shot, deported, and stripped of their land. The kulaks retaliated by refusing to sell their crops or give up their lands, slaughtering their animals rather than taking them to market. By 1930, Stalin, convinced the Ukrainian peasants were hoarding grain, refused to release reserves that might have alleviated the forced famine. Sometimes called the Ukrainian genocide, the imposed famine in the region killed between 10 and 20 million. One study determined that yearly deportations of kulaks and middle-income peasants from 1930 to 1941 reached a peak of 1.8 million in 1931 and fell to 930,000 by 1940. Approximately three million of the deportees died in the gulag, while the remainder of the peasants died of starvation.
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Later termed the “Harvest of Sorrow,” the Communist-induced famine constituted one of the most widespread, systematic mass murders of all time.
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This reaper's bill came on top of the nine million who died in the Russian Civil War.
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Western leftists gushed about Stalin, particularly the
New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty, who personally witnessed the bodies strewn along the way on his travels in the USSR and mysteriously forgot those scenes in his reporting. Perhaps the most effusive Western supporter
of Stalin was George Bernard Shaw: “Jesus Christ has come down to earth,” he announced. Stalin had “delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago.”
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To a Leningrad audience, he rhapsodized, “If the future is…as Lenin saw it, then we may all smile and look forward to the future without fear.” Of course, that did not apply to the millions of kulaks and “wreckers” who were terrorized on a daily basis. When the Bolsheviks abolished private property in the countryside, it produced the greatest famine in human history, all man-made. Peasants rebelled at the confiscation of their livestock and crops, burning wheat and slaughtering animals by the millions—upwards of two thirds of the sheep and goats, and close to half of all cattle. The seizure of grain left millions starving as they ate “cats, dogs, field mice, birds, tree bark and even horse manure…. There were even cases of cannibalism.”
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As starvation and murder winnowed out the peasants, the numbers (completely ignored in the West) grew to mind-boggling proportions. In 1987, Robert Conquest, then slurred as a right-wing ideologue, produced his landmark book,
Harvest of Sorrow
, estimating the “terror-famine,” as he called it, to have accounted for 14.5 million deaths.
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Subsequent work in the post–Cold War former Soviet archives suggests Conquest's figures were too low. Normal population increases would have put Russia's 1937 population at 186 million, when the census counted only 156 million. Where did the 30 million go? Depending on what years are included, the Lenin-Stalin tag-team murder combo accounted for between 20 and 40 million Russians, Ukrainians, and subjugated people dead
before Hitler's war machine ever invaded
.
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Russia's descent into a Bolshevik Hades would have worldwide repercussions for decades, rearranging the map of Europe, reordering entire populations, but most important, offering an undeniable example of the total failure of Communist theology. And a theology it had become: communism, often called “godless,” had elevated the state itself to the position of a deity. A short string of venomous dictators took turns as high priests, proving in the process how interchangeable they were. Until the curtains to the holy of holies could be pulled back, and the murderous essence of Marxism incarnate exposed, European elites and Progressives would praise the perceived accomplishments of the USSR. Hypnotized by statistics and dizzied by a surface egalitarianism that was already quickly devolving into the most medieval of aristocratic class systems, Europeans of all classes rapidly gravitated to socialism and statism, leaving an isolated America and wounded Britain nearly alone.

Time Line

F
or a conflict started by staggering misperception and bungling, fought in squalor, and responsible for the loss of a colossal number of lives, the end of World War I constituted a great beginning for so many who believed that the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended the conflict, represented a fresh idealism, awash in good intentions and even better plans. For the first time, politicians—the professional planners—were in charge of organizing the new nation-states and setting their agendas. Surely they could govern better than the aristocrats or the monarchs who had led them into the carnage.

At the center of this optimism stood President Woodrow Wilson, whose record as a wartime administrator had been mixed at best and whose trail of Progressive programs would later prove disastrous. The pivotal role he was to play evolved out of European expectations that he would be a miracle worker, the willingness of the Allies to pragmatically horse-trade specific material gains for lip service to Wilson's nebulous slogans, and Wilson's own grand design. Unfortunately, the American president had no lack of idealism, and even though his actions in Europe in 1919 indeed remade the world, no one could foresee the ruinous consequences that lay down the line.

Peace in the Progressive Era

Much has been made of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which he first presented to Congress in January 1918, ten months before the war ended, and which he insisted should become the basis for ending the war. The policy as a whole was a culmination of recommendations from “The Inquiry,” a 1917 study group run by Colonel Edward House and Sidney Mezes, an American philosopher and delegate to Versailles. When Wilson first presented the Fourteen Points, they included “Open covenants of peace,” freedom of the seas, equality of trade, reductions in national armaments, and several specific elements related to evacuation of territories taken by Germany in the war. Wilson also insisted upon an independent Polish state and stated the need for what would become the League of Nations—a “general association of nations” to ensure political independence and territorial
integrity. Generally, the Fourteen Points rested on a presumption of democratic government, openness, and benevolent empires that would pave the way for self-government in their colonies. Possibly the most controversial stipulation in the document was that claims on territories, specifically the Balkan states, were to be adjusted based on the interests of the populations. Some historians have criticized this requirement as promoting “national self-determination” (a phrase never used in the document itself), and credit the document with calling for the creation of independent countries such as Czechoslovakia thanks to the stipulation of providing “territorial integrity” to states and their borders.

These ideas were nothing new. In 1914, Lenin had called for “the right of self-determination,” and the Soviet constitution (in theory) permitted the secession of its republics. This precedent caused Wilson to expand the concept even further at Versailles by stating that “every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.”
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The establishment of a new Polish state was already in the works; when Russia had left the war with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the failure to specifically mention Poland in its terms had sparked nationalist riots and ended all Polish support for the Central Powers. Farther south, the Ottoman Empire sat, ready to be carved up, its constituent parts believing the independence of Arab tribes in the Middle East to be promised as part of British strategy that pitted them against the Turks during the war. The sultan, Mehmed V, had presided over the beginning of the partition, then his successor Mehmed VI hung on only until 1922. As a dynasty, the Ottoman Empire—the “Sick Man of Europe”—had outlasted many of the great European monarchies, including the Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs—all dispatched in 1918—leaving only a handful of petty kings and emperors orbiting a pair of exhausted democracies. Belgium, the moral winner of the war due to its perceived victim status, had been pillaged and leveled; Italy, humiliated.

At least four of the items in the Fourteen Points referred to “independence of various national groups” or other national boundary “readjustments,” all of which found their way into the Treaty of Versailles in more than a dozen article subpoints related to territorial shifts. Meanwhile, the creation of Poland out of Prussia and Russia to serve as a buffer between Germany and Russia was supported by everyone—except, of course, Germany and Russia. It put an independent nation (albeit one with initially little strength and indefensible borders) in a position to threaten both if it suddenly became powerful. This was the “big Poland” concept, and it constituted
simply another example of good intentions gone astray. Westerners such as Wilson, Britain's foreign minister A. J. Balfour and her prime minister David Lloyd George, and Prime Minister of France Georges Clemenceau all assumed that a “big Poland” would in fact find favor with the Russians, and hoped they would see it as a further diminution of German power. Quite the contrary: Russia feared a revived Poland—her traditional enemy—every bit as much as a “big Germany.” Thus, Poland created a built-in target of expansion for the new Soviet Union, while Poland's small wars against other nearby states of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia ensured minimal support from those countries later when Poland's own borders were violated.

Yet the whole notion of sovereignty based on “nationality” was troubling every bit as much for the victors as for the vanquished. Britain, after all, ran the largest, most heterogeneous amalgam in the world, though each ethnic group was, for the most part, confined to a specific geographic territory. This contrasted with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its Serbs, Romanians, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Germans, and, of course, Jews and Gypsies, all mixed together despite sharp differences in languages, beliefs, and customs. Now Wilson would split all these apart? Would the peacemakers ignore the fact that Alsace-Lorraine, now “restored” to the French, was predominantly German? It soon became clear that the Allies, anxious to unload custodianship of former Central Power territories, could be influenced by promises of friendship and the wheels that squeaked would be greased quickly and copiously. Thus, Italy received part of Tyrol and Dalmatia; Romania was handed Bukovina; Japan got Shantung. In the Middle East, Britain and France awarded land to different claimants so fast that England actually promised the same small strip of land, what would become Israel, to both the Arabs and the Jews!