America is beginning to confront its long term, structural financial troubles. And they are big ones. Yet one thing is for sure, they will not be solved solely by taxing the “rich.”
We are running a $1.6 trillion deficit. If we taxed all annual household income over $200,000 at 100%, the US Treasury would net just over $2 trillion a year. This is according Investor’s Business Daily, using 2008 IRS data for its analysis.
So just exactly who are these rich? It’s nice to think of corporate senior executives, investment bankers and money managers, all with their fat salaries and bonuses. It’s nice too to think of trial lawyers and medical specialists with their exorbitant fees. The truth is, most of the “rich” Americans are American peasants – small business men.
Using small business as defined by the US Small Business Administration, these are for profit entities that employ fewer than 500. They employ nearly half of those employed in the private sector and historically have accounted for between 60% and 75% of all new jobs created in the private economy. The owners and operators of these businesses on the average earn between $240,000 and $260,000 a year, depending upon whose figures you use.
I am somewhat troubled when I see American public policy proposals following and tripping behind history – particularly when the outcome was hideously ugly. In the 1920s Soviet Communists had a word for wealthy peasant. Kulak, roughly translated it means “the tight fisted ones.” In 1927, it meant any peasant farmer who had the means to employ others. By the end of 1931, it meant any peasant farmer who hadn’t resettled onto a collective. Here is, as best as I can tell, how that story played out. (This is from individual I know, and from the history I’ve read. In a short 2000 words, this is what it looked liked.)
Everything about Stalin’s Soviet Union has a strange, surreal and most certainly nightmarish tenor to it.
The first five year plan was no exception.
In what can only be called an understatement, Stalin biographer Adam Ulam wrote: “But like so many things about Soviet society at the time, almost everything about the plan had an air of unreality. Officially begun in 1928, it was not voted on by the Sixteenth Party Conference until April 1929.”
If nothing else the first five year plan was a watershed event of the Twentieth Century. And as Ulam points out, to this day it remains historically controversial.
Often called the great leap forward, it set out to establish a communist economy and propel the Soviet Union into the industrial age. In what transpired some see one of the greatest crimes of modern history. To other’s it was a breathtaking feat of social engineering, which while ruthless and cruel, laid the foundation for a richer and more rational economy and enabled Russia to withstand the German invasion.
If Stalin’s methods were somewhat less than benevolent, his ultimate vision was kinder than that recorded by history.
Ulam sums it up this way: “He knew the effort to collectivize through compulsion would mean civil war; he said so in 1924 and 1925 when urged to adopt a more modest policy of collectivization and of “squeezing the kulak,” But it would be a civil war he could he could win. The enemy’s forces would be divided and dispersed, his united and resolute. There would be instead (and there were) tens of thousands of little civil wars: in every soviet village. The poor peasants would help the Party and GPU and, if need be, though this was to be avoided, the Red Army could also be used in the struggle. Once the kulak was done with and the peasant’s were on the collective farms what could they do? They might be unhappy, might rebel here and there or sabotage deliveries, but one could take care of this increasing the GPU forces in the countryside (a was done). And then the tractor would come to make the work easier, and more and more village lads would find industrial employment in the cities The peasant would acquire socialist consciousness and would be grateful to the Party and Comrade Stalin for saving him from what Marx had called “the idiocy of rural life” and enabling him, after a painful but short interval, to enjoy the benefits of a cultured existence in a modern industrial society.”
What followed was any but “a painful but short interval.” Instead it was a decade of brutal repression during which, according to official Soviet sources, about 40 million people were arrested, executed or otherwise repressed under Stalin. For perspective, the population of the entire Soviet Union was 162 million in 1937.
The official numbers regarding Stalin’s repression did not come to light until 1989. They appeared in the official Soviet press to fill in what were called “blank spots” in Soviet history. Those official numbers include the 5 to 7 million who perished in famine of the early 1930s, and the 5 to 7 million arrested in the “Great Terror” in 1937 and 38. Of those, 1 million were executed and the rest sent to labor camps where most died. Not counted were the 9 to 11 million peasants who were deported to Siberia from 1930 to 1932. Western historians believe about 5 million of those died after being forced off their land.
The motivation driving this horror was three fold.
First, the peasantry represented a kingdom of darkness that must be conquered. What threatened communism, threatened Russia. Stalin purposely waged a war against the nation’s peasantry.
Secondly, the serious intent of the plan was money. Since defaulting on international loans the Soviet Union had lousy credit rating. Her only source for capital to industrialize was grain. Before the revolution the peasant economy provided up to 12 million tons of grain for export. In 1928 Russia imported 250,000 tons.
And finally, the industrial economy he intended to create needed an abundant supply of cheap labor.
Under the economic plan, the Soviet Union increased its grain exports from 1,000,000 tons in 1929, to 5,400,000 tons in 1930. The issue went beyond grain and foreign capital. An industrial nation needs labor. 80% of Russian labor was locked in agriculture. The peasantry was not inclined to embracing Communist ideals. For comparison, in 1930, US agricultural employment stood at 21.5% of the labor force, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
For someone living through the first five year plan, things started getting bad in 1929. There came the taxes. Mass arrests started toward the end of 1929. Stalin, having secured his position, returned to a policies Lenin was forced to abandon in 1921. Collectivization was under way.
If Stalin made his move to crush the Ukrainian peasantry, the wealthy peasantry, the Kulak class, was his first target. The first mass arrests began in late 1929. Stalin announced on December 27, 1929 that his intention was a liquidation of the Kulaks. An official Party ruling, 'On measures for the Elimination of Kulak Households in Districts of Comprehensive Collectivization,' was approved by the Politburo on January 30, 1930.
Initially, a wealthy farmer might have been some one with as much as 100 acres. The definition of wealth in time changed to include some one working 30 or 40 acres. Finally it included almost anyone deemed undesirable.
According to historian Robert Conquest, when Stalin made his move to crush the peasantry in 1929-30 he also resumed the attack on the Ukraine and its national culture. This attack had been abandoned in the early 1920s, during a time when Soviet government was barely hanging on. In fact for a few years in the mid-1920s was functioning as independent county and there was a small but growing independence movement.
In 1926, the tax on peasants in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus which normally provided the Soviet Union half of its total marketable grain was 3.3 million tons. By 1930 it was been raised to 7.7 million tons. The 1930 harvest was good.
In 1931, that same 7.7 million tons was demanded from a poor harvest of only 18.3 million. This left only 250 pounds of grain per person in the Ukrainian rural population.
Conquest described the plight of a “former landless peasant who served in the army (who) had by 1929 thirty-five acres, two horses, a cow, a hog, five sheep and forty chickens, and a family of six. In 1928 the tax on him was 2500 roubles and 7,500 bushels of grain. He failed to meet this, and his house (worth 1,800 to 2,000 roubles) was forfeited and ‘bought’ for 250 roubles by an activist.”
The first five year plan which was to have run through 1933, was pronounced to have been concluded by the end of 1932. It main industrial targets would not be fulfilled until many years later. Those targets didn’t seem to be the principal point. Goals for farm collectivization, on the other hand, were met many times over by the end of 1930.
In January, 1930, the Soviet Central Committee tripled the rate of collectivization in some regions seeking to complete the process in all grain-producing regions by the fall of 1931. In fact this was largely accomplished by the end of 1930.
By 1932 two million, mostly peasant farmers, were in detention camps. From there they were deported to Siberia. As many as twenty-percent died in transit. In the spring of 1932 there was again famine in the Ukraine. By the middle of the year three million people were on the move seeking some measure of prosperity. By March of '33, people were dying of starvation on a mass scale, an estimated 5 million perished in the Ukraine.
The famine was entirely a matter of policy. It wasn’t that there wasn’t food available, but simply denied. Conquest writes:
“This was particularly true when the grain was piled up in the open and left to rot. Large heaps of grain lay at Reshetylivka Station, Ooltaya Province, starting to rot but still guarded. From the train, an American correspondent saw ‘a huge pyramid of grain, piled high and smoking from internal combustion.’”
According to Biographer Ulam, Stalin’s wrath against the peasant was motivated by what would happen in the cities of the worker did not have enough food. By 1931 or 32 even that concern was cast aside. In 1929 city dweller ate 47.5 kilograms of meat, poultry and fat. In 1930 it was 33 kilograms; in 1931, 27.3; “and in the terrible year of 1932 less than 17. He was saved from near and actual starvation by a somewhat increased consumption of bread and potatoes.”
During that time the industrial work force almost doubled.
Finally to complete picture of this surreal nightmare were the laws regarding state property. Ulam paints this picture:
“…So in the summer of 1932 a decree was flung out at the peasant: stealing of socialist and kolkhoz property was to be punishable by death or, if there were mitigating circumstances, by no less than ten years of forced labor or jail. The law, a Soviet author acknowledges, was used not only against thieves but also against those “who maliciously refused to turn over grain for stat procurements,’ i.e., in practice against many who simply kept bread for their families’ needs. Under this law the father of Paul Morozov was shot for concealing grain, having been renounced to the authorities by his fourteen-year-old son. (The young monster, having been garroted by a group of peasants led by his uncle, was the extolled by propaganda as a patriotic saint of the Young Pioneers – the Party’s youth auxiliary.)”
Robert Conquest in his history of collectivization, The Harvest of Sorrow, reports of 11 million dead between 1930 and 1937 from famine, and 3.5 million dying in labor camps. Those exiled were either crowded into camps or simply left in the forest, with only a few axes and shovels to create a new settlement. One such group managed to establish a prosperous community only be discovered in 1950 and then charged with sabotage.
The official figures on the deportations paint broader picture that extends beyond the Ukraine. Here are the ‘blank spots’ that were filled in in 1989.
In 1932 and 33, 1.5 to 2 million peasants were arrested for violating “extremely cruel” laws regarding state property.
In 1935, 1 million former officials, merchants and noblemen from Moscow and other cities were branded “class strangers” and sent away.
During 1937 and 38, between five and seven million were arrested during the “Great Terror.” Of those 1 million were executed outright and the rest sent to labor camps where most of them died.
During World War II, up to two million ethnic Germans were rounded up and deported. Another 3 million Moslems were forced to move. One million of those died.
And finally, and this is precious, after 1940, two to three million people were arrested for reporting late to work, a crime punishable by up to five years in a labor camp.
I’ve posted this because, for what ever reason, here in Wisconsin we’ve become the center stage in what is swelling into a huge national debate, and it’s become ugly. Next time no matter, I’ll serve up a magnificent recipe for BBQ brisket to go with them artisan beans and Bavarian cabbage. To be sure, it is a peasant’s feast.
