Their personal goods, pots and pans, clothes and boots, were looted by “activists .

Some 100,000 were shot The remainder (except for the very old who were left to their own devices) were evicted from their homes, and marched to the nearest railway. Huge lines of peasants converged on the trains which took two to three thousand people in cattle trucks, on journeys lasting a week or longer, to the Arctic. In the un-heated trucks, deaths, particularly of infants, were common. On detraining, they might spend some time starving and crammed into the confiscated churches of Archangel or Vologda, or go straight to their destinations-typically being marched for several days to a clearing in the forest and told to make their own homes. About three million died in the early stages, predominantly young children. The survivors either had to create farms in the frozen wilderness, or were sent to work on such projects as the Bal¬tic-White Sea Canal, on which about 300,000 died (and which was never of any use).
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The kulaks and subkulaks of course included all the natural leaders of the peasantry, especially those recalcitrant to the new collectivization. After their removal, the bulk of the remaining peasants, under very heavy pressures, were forced into the collective farms.

There was much resistance. Sporadic armed risings involving whole districts took place, especially in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus. But scythes and shotguns could not prevail against the armed forces of the O.G.P.U. They were ruthlessly sup¬pressed. But so was more peaceful resistance. Isaac Deutscher met on a train a high O.G.P.U, officer who, after a few drinks, said to him with tears in his eyes, “I am an old Bolshevik. I worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the Civil War. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh no, no, no!”

The only peasant tactic which had a measure of success was the astonishing “women’s rebellions”: peasant women would prevent confiscation of their cows, and the authorities were often at a loss as to how to cope. The peasants’ main reaction however was to slaughter the cattle. In a few months, even on official figures, over 40% of the country’s cattle and 65% of the sheep had gone. Stalin’s policy lay in ruins. Like Lenin, in March 1930 he made a tactical retreat. Peasants were now al¬lowed to leave the collective farms. Sixteen million families had been collectivized. In a few weeks, 9 million left.

But they were not allowed their land back. They were given rough ground at the edge of the ploughland. Then heavy taxes were imposed on them. A huge new wave of dekulakization removed the more recalcitrant. And over the next two years, the bulk of the land was again collectivized. The system was inefficient from the start and the countryside soon presented, as Boris Pasternak describes it, “such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.”

The central problem for the Communists was that under the N.E.P, system of markets they had not directly controlled the grain. Under collectivization, the grain was at no point in peasant possession, but at the disposal of the authorities. Decrees