What was said, and what was written down

“Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition.”

The same letter tells the Politburo that the Shuya trial should end with the shooting of the largest possible number of the most influential Black Hundred clergy, in Shuya and if possible in Moscow and other church centers. “The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better.” He asked Molotov to circulate the letter to Politburo members that evening and to have each one note whether he agreed.

The Volga famine of 1921–22 killed about five million people. The letter uses the eating of human flesh as the practical indicator that resistance could be crushed while the countryside was at its weakest.

Reporting telegrams from the provinces, he read out that the death rate in the Maltsov and Bryansk factories was very high, especially among the children, and that Klin had been two weeks without bread. “In our country there are places where the most terrible of Tsars reigns — ‘Tsar Famine.’ ”

He said the shortage was not an absence of grain. “The main enemies of the town and of the rural poor are the kulaks, who are hiding away in their bins and their barns hundreds and thousands of poods of grain while in towns and villages the workers and peasants are starving and dying of hunger-typhus, and their children are dying too.” Then: “Woe to all kulaks, woe to all speculators who withhold grain surpluses while the workers’ children are dying of hunger-typhus!”

“If the latter will not give it up voluntarily, then all stocks of grain must be taken by force.” This is the food policy of the summer of 1918, spoken by the war commissar, two months before the formal Red Terror decree and in the same weeks as Lenin’s Penza hanging order.

During the Volga famine, court and relief records collected by later historians list thousands of cases in the worst districts. Orlando Figes, working from those records in A People’s Tragedy, describes parents killing infants, usually daughters, to eat them or to feed other children, and corpses stored for meat. A man convicted of eating several children told a court that everyone in his village ate human flesh and hid it.

In Ukraine in early 1933 the same fact is in police paperwork. Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine cites district lists — one policeman recorded 69 cases of cannibalism between 9 January and 12 March and wrote that the real number was higher — and witness statements taken by the police, including a father who told a neighbor, “I have eaten my children.” The Ukrainian GPU chief warned subordinates against putting the famine into writing, so that notes would not circulate and start rumors.

Lenin’s March 1922 letter already treats “people are being eaten” as a known fact of the earlier famine, and as the condition for a political attack. The 1933 reports show the same fact under the grain seizures, the blackboards, and the closed border.

19 February 1919, at the Mansion House in London: he spoke of aid to Russian armies “now engaged in fighting against the foul baboonery of Bolshevism.” The aid he named was arms, munitions, equipment, and technical services.

11 April 1919, Aldwych Club, London: “Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.”

4 November 1920, in the House of Commons: “I submit as a most unchallengeable conviction that those disasters in Russia are solely due to the Bolshevists, and are solely due to a very few men.” He called the result “unspeakable misery” and “a deadly and paralysing sect.”

On 27 December 1929 Stalin told a conference of Marxist agrarians that the party had moved “from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.” Dekulakization, the special settlements, and the famines of 1932–33 followed that line.

On 7 November 1937, at a Kremlin dinner, he toasted the destruction of enemies “even if he was an old Bolshevik,” and of “all his kin, his family.” Georgi Dimitrov wrote the toast in his diary that night. Execution lists in those years included wives and children.