455. The pair wrote disapprovingly that collective farm chairmen and county and district plenipotentiaries were being arrested “according to the rule: ‘first arrest, then figure it out.’” Their directive also set an upper limit of inmates for the Union, excluding labor camps and colonies, of 400,000—half the number then imprisoned. (Another 500,000 were in camps.) Afanas’ev et al., Istoria stalinskogo Gulaga, I: 609. Krylenko reported (July 19, 1933) the prison population to Stalin and Molotov as 397,284, so on paper the objective was met, in very short order. Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 87 (citing GARF, f. R-5446, op. 15a, d. 1073, l. 35).
456. Goliakov, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii ugolovnogo zakonodatel’stva SSSR, 335–6 (May 8, 1933); Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, III: 746–50 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 981, l. 229–38); Khlevniuk et al., Stalinskoe politbiuro, 63; Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 185–8; Krasil’nikov, Serp i molokh, 94–107; Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, 54–82. In the military, too, arrests were being made by anyone. Suvenirov, Tragediia RKKA, 62. Stalin wrote in notes to himself (May 13, 1933): “(1) Who can arrest? (2) What to do about the former White military people in our economic organs? (3) decrease the prison population in a lawful way (by accelerating cassation) (what to do about quarantine) (accelerate the work of courts). (4) What to do about different groups of arrested people? (5) allow expulsion, deportation?” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 27, l. 69. See also Béládi and Krausz, Stalin, 169–70.
457. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 46, 140. “It is a small thing to win power, it is no small thing to drive out the capitalists,” Kaganovich told Moscow party activists on May 22, 1933, contrasting 1917 with the Stalin revolution. “What is necessary is to destroy the root from which capitalism grows.” Rees, Iron Lazar, 115 (citing Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 1933, no. 11: 10).
458. Dolot, Execution by Hunger, 155.
459. A similar fate sometimes met adult interlopers: one man had his ear cut off, then his fingers put in a door and smashed; he was still alive when the farmers threw him down a well, into which they dumped dirt. Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, III: 774 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 11, d. 1047, l. 212–8: July 15, 1933).
460. The politburo discontinued grain exports in April 1933, after Mikoyan, among others, lobbied Stalin to reduce them. Pavlov, Anastas Mikoian, 68 (citing RGASPI, f. 84, op. 2, d. 8, l. 5). Forestry exports (logs, lumber, plywood, cellulite, paper) in 1933 brought in nearly four times as much (119 million gold rubles), oil and petroleum products almost twice as much (60.4 million), and furs nearly as much (30.2 million) as grain. Total export revenues in 1933 were 388.7 million, versus 812.7 million in 1930. Even the 1933 level represented a high-water mark compared with what would follow (239.7 million in 1940). Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR, 1918–1966, 18–22.
461. Davies, “Soviet Military Expenditures,” 586–9, 593, 598.
462. Pravda, April 29, 1933; KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh (9th ed.), VI: 46–7; Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 221–2; Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 201–4; Thorniley, Rise and Fall, 141. Stalin had Kaganovich chair the all-Union purge commission. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 910, l. 2. Initially, the purge targeted the provinces of Moscow, Leningrad, Urals, Donetsk, Odessa, Kiev, and Vinnitsa, as well as Belorussia and Eastern Siberia and Far Eastern regions. From May 15, 1934, it would be extended to the provinces of Gorky, Western Siberia, Azov-Black Sea, the North Caucasus, Crimea, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Chernigov, and Uzbekistan. Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 1934, no. 14: 2. The seventeen remaining provinces or republics would undergo a purge during a Union-wide party card verification campaign in 1935. Iaroslavskii, “K chistke partii,” 18; and Iaroslavskii, “o chistke partii”; Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 52; Gill, Origins, 201–218; Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, 22, 38–48. Two previous “general” party purges had taken place (1921 and 1929).
463. Thorniley, Rise and Fall, 145–7; Armstrong, Politics of Totalitarianism, 9–10. As of Jan. 1934, the party would number 1.826 million members and 874,000 candidates, or 2.7 million total. Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 52.
