In Europe

before long the whole country was suffering under ‘five-year hysteria’. It was decreed that the production of iron was first to increase threefold, then fivefold, and finally sevenfold. The farms were to be merged into huge, modern collectives – Stalin spoke of ‘grain factories’ of tens of thousands of hectares – villages were to be converted into ‘socialist agro-cities’, the wooden houses replaced with prim flats, the stuffy churches with airy schools and model libraries, the heavy manual labour would be taken over by hundreds of thousands of farming machines.
    Joseph Roth, who toured Russia in August 1926, wrote that the young Soviet cities reminded him of the little towns of America's Wild West, ‘the same atmosphere of noise and constant childbearing, the quest for happiness and the lack of roots, the courage and self-sacrifice, the suspicion and fear, the most primitive forestry beside the most complicated technology, the romantic horsemen and down-to-earth engineers’.
    Between the utopia and the reality lay an obstacle: the farmers did not want it. The situation in Koltsovo was typical of that which pertained throughout the Soviet Union. In summer 1929, only three per cent of the farmers were actively taking part in collective and/or state farms. The big estates, most of the revenues from which had previously gone to the cities, had been disbanded. The small farmers produced largely to meet their own needs, and stockpiled the rest of their grain; they could earnnothing on it anyway. Grain stocks were commandeered and fixed quotas imposed, but it didn't help much. The farmers skirted the rules, hid their supplies or sold them on the black market.
    For the first time since the civil war, winter 1929–30 saw lines at the greengrocers and bakeries in the cities. ‘It is normal for a worker's wife to spend the whole day standing in line, her husband then comes home from work, dinner is not ready, and everyone curses the Soviet authority,’ said a (secret) summary of readers’ letters to
Pravda
. On 27 December, 1929, therefore, Stalin decided to collectivise at one fell swoop all agriculture in the nation's grain-producing areas. In addition, he singled out a general culprit for all the earlier failures, a new and well defined class enemy: ‘We must destroy the kulaks, eliminate them as a class!’
    The Politburo's resolution of 30 January, 1930 – ‘On measures to eliminate kulak households in areas of mandatory collectivisation’ – is not as well known as the protocol drawn up twelve years later beside the Wannsee, but for millions of farmers the results were much the same: mass deportation, followed by death. Stalin needed no gas chambers: the starvation and cold in the distant reaches of his empire turned his camps into natural death factories.
    Sixty years later, Schmemann sat beside an old woman on the bench in front of her wooden hut in Koltsovo; together, they ran down a list of the nearby houses: ‘The Ionovs, they were kulaks, were thrown out of that first one, over there; Uncle Borya, a simple farmhand was arrested in that red one, his only crime was cursing at the wrong moment; the next one, there, where the Lagutins live, belonged to the Chochlovs …’ Eight of the fifteen households on her street were evicted in the early 1930s, and the families disappeared without a trace.‘The Zabotnys,’ another woman said, ‘there, where the telephone booth is now. They took away everything they had and sent them into exile. They'd had some stupid conflict with the leaders of the collective.’ A third villager said; ‘They took our neighbour too. He had flour and bread. He had a horse.’
    According to the latest and most accurate estimates, Stalin's breakneck collectivisation cost the lives of seven million people: five million in the Ukraine, two million in the rest of the Soviet Union. The famine grew worse, because the enormous cost of the five-year plan was being deductedlargely from the nation's food supply. Foreign material and equipment and specialised manpower were paid for mostly with the revenues from grain exports. In 1932, the Soviet Union exported two million tons of grain. In the catastrophic year 1933 that was 1.7 million tons, while the country's population starved. In 1935, domestic grain consumption in the Soviet Union was less than that of Russia in 1890.
    After a tour of the Soviet Union in 1932, a gullible George Bernard Shaw wrote in
The Times
: ‘I did