(7 of 10)
The Purger. The measure of Khrushchev's failure came in World War II when millions of Ukrainians went over to the Germans without a fight. Stupidly rejecting this free offering, the Nazis launched a mass slaughter which so aroused the survivors as to provide the Red army with a vast guerrilla underground that slashed at the Wehrmacht's rear. Khrushchev, a lieutenant general, commanded a Ukrainian guerrilla army, and won a medal for the defense of Stalingrad. Political commissar for all Russian armies on the southern front, he ruthlessly purged collaborators in city after city recaptured from the Germans. By 1947 Khrushchev was able to report: "Half the Ukraine's leading party workers have been done away with—65% of the presidents of regional soviet, two-thirds of the directors of tractor stations."
Recalled to Moscow in 1949, Khrushchev warned his bosses that "Ukrainian enemies of Communism have entered the service of Anglo-American imperialists." It was his way of saying that trouble was brewing in the land.
No Place for Peasants. Khrushchev's work had brought him face to face with one immutable fact that plagues Communism the world over: that Marxism is and was the creed of a city dweller, with little place in it for the land-loving peasantry. In their writings, Communist thinkers (e.g., Engels) sneer at the muzhiks as "a class of barbarians" with an "anti-collective skull," condemned by history to inexorable extinction. Communist bosses (e.g., Stalin) have consistently endeavored to make the prophecy come true, and the result is a never-ending war between the muzhik and the commissar.
Lenin declared the war in 1920: "The peasant lives in a separate homestead, and he has bread; by that fact alone he can enslave the workers." Five million peasants starved to death when Lenin's grain collectors took the bread force.
In the '30s Stalin's men took the land as well as the bread. The peasants rebelled; millions of them were killed. The muzhiks still resisted in the only way they could, slaughtering or abandoning half of Russia's cattle (30 out of 70 million), half its hogs (12 out of 26 million), one-third of its sheep. In the famine that followed (1931-33), millions more peasants died of hunger; and millions of those who remained were driven into kolkhozes (collective farms), subjected to the law of Aug. 7, 1932: "Death by shooting for any theft from the sacred and inviolable property of the kolkhoz."*