A Time to Live, a Time to Die

By Ernest McIvor

A Time to Live, a Time to Die is the fascinating true story of the life of an extraordinary woman. Born to impoverished parents in Ukraine, and growing up in war-torn Europe, one of Lida’s early memories was making a miraculous escape, with her mother, from a mass execution by the German Nazi invaders during World War II. She spent the rest of the war in slave labour camps and wandering the streets of towns and cities shattered by aerial bombardment, surrounded by the dead and the dying, scavenging whatever she could find to stay alive.

At the end of the war, Lida and her parents were given a sea passage to New Zealand, and the opportunity to begin a new life on the other side of the world. But many new challenges faced them, through having to adapt to a very different language and culture and, most of all, battling to overcome the psychological scars and a deep sense of insecurity that resulted from their traumatic war-time experiences.

Lida’s remarkable life is the story of a journey from suffering and despair to happiness and the fulfillment of dreams through hard work, determination, and the creative use of her many talents. It is a story that will inspire any reader to strive for greater meaning and success in their life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National Pacific Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310343568

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A Time to Live, a Time to Die

E.G. McIvor

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 E.G. McIvor

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resoldor given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

First published in

New Zealand in 2012 by

National Pacific Press

PO Box 57-202

Mana 5247

Porirua, New Zealand

Ph 64 4 233 8204

E-mail: [e-mail]

This is a work of non-fiction. Descriptions of, and references to, people, places and events are believed to be entirely true and accurate, and any inaccuracies in this regard are beyond the knowledge and intent of the author and publisher.

Text artwork and page design by ia Orana – Margaret Hosking.

Cover design by National Pacific Press and ia Orana.

The Monument to the Motherland, shown on the front cover, is a giant titanium statue 62 metres high, located in Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine. It commemorates all those who died during the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. The Museum of the Great Patriotic War lies at its base and honours the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who died while defending the motherland during World War II.

Lida walking in a German slave labour camp in her Ukrainian national costume.

Contents

1. Olga

2. A new home

3. Solitary life

4. Wasyl

5. German captives

6. Moscow and Leningrad

7. Stalingrad

8. Kursk

9. Bombing Germany

10. The Russians advance

11. Reunion

12. Migration

13. New Zealand

14. Auckland

15. Problems

16. Marriage

17. Transformed life

18. Family life

19. Growing up

20. More problems

21. Retirement

22. Economic downturn

23. Reminiscences

24. Final years

25. A changing world

26. Personality

Chapter 1

Olga

‘I do not love him because he is good, but because he is my child.’

– Rabindbranath Tage, The Crescent Moon

In 1905 Albert Einstein suddenly presented the Theory of Relativity to the world and scientists in Europe and America began to grapple with its intricacies. Before long, the concept of time was being questioned, and soon afterwards Alexander Friedmann was able to demonstrate that the universe was not infinite in space and that space had no boundaries – the reason being that gravity was so strong that space was bent round on itself! While this was going on, Einstein made a number of attempts from 1905 to 1915 to fuse Isaac Newton’s concept of gravity into the general Theory of Relativity, but he was unsuccessful. His research, however, suggested that one had to abandon the idea that there was an absolute time unique in itself, and accept instead that time was a personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it. In other words, clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. All these ideas allowed scientists to suggest that, if a man travelled in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, he would eventually come back to where he started from. Time was like a line with two ends or boundaries that had a beginning and an end. Einstein was the child of his time.

Man is indeed a peculiar creature. He seeks to control the universe when he cannot even control himself, and he struggles with the mysteries of creation while he tears himself apart in merciless wars on his own miserable little planet. One momentous outcome of all this scientific research was the hydrogen bomb, which became the mother of all bombs. Its little brothers and sisters were the modern weapons of mass destruction, and the rockets which became their means of delivery.

Birth, life and death are the only things that are common to all mankind, and each child must experience his or her own unique path in life that is bound only by his or her own sojourn on earth. Time alone can determine when and where children can be born, and only nature can decide when and where the event should take place, for the travails of labour do not take into consideration the worldly turmoil that occurs at any particular moment. Olga was such a child and she was born at a time that could not promise any hope for the future. Nevertheless, every normal mother who gives birth to a child looks upon her newborn offspring with love and devotion, and she prays that the fruit of her love will enjoy a life of health and happiness that exceeds her own.

If we wish to live in a world of make believe, we could confine ourselves to writing fairy tales, but real life cannot be divorced from reality and our lives are frequently moulded by events that are not of our own choosing. Wordsworth wrote in Intimations of Immortality:

‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And commeth from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home.’

It would indeed be pleasant if that was true, but Olga did not choose the time to be born. She had to obey nature’s call, and she entered the world on a hot midsummer’s day on 6 June 1916 in the midst of all the horrors of war. She was a seed that was planted and made to flourish, to give rise to a new being. But this new life was to be the child of a new era, born to suffer the consequences of political upheavals that would transform Russia from tzarism into a communist state.

Just as farmers annually go out to plant their seeds and watch them flourish with delight as they grow to maturity, so in life people are born into various phases of history in the hope that they will mature into an equal state of happiness.

The sun was shining brilliantly over the steppes of northern Ukraine on that particular day, and the ripening heads of grain rocked to and fro in a gentle breeze that played about the countryside in the early morning hours. However, it was not a happy occasion for Olga’s mother, as this was her fourth child and God only knew how difficult her own life had been up till then. She did not want the added burden of nurturing another daughter in those dismal days of 1916. Olga’s father had been conscripted into the army and he was one of the first to lose his life in the most recent battle. How was she going to manage her responsibilities and bring up four very young children when she had no husband, no permanent job, and no real hope?

Olga’s mother was a hardy peasant woman who was now quite used to bearing children, and the birth itself was uneventful. She had laid herself down on the earthen floor of a room that was bare and untidy, and only a midwife was present to help her during her moments of travail. The first cry of her newborn child was a signal for her to rise up from the floor and prepare to return to work in the fields.

A woman’s life was hard in those days and after-care medication was non- existent. She was not an educated woman and all that she knew was that the seasons came and went with predictable regularity, and that there was no God-given reason why anyone should help her. Her life was similar to the lives of millions of others who had come before her, and no doubt to millions more who would come after her.

Countless men, women and children had died during those early months of the war. No one knew exactly how many lives had been lost, as life was cheap and no one bothered to count the dead. The soldiers were transformed into mountains of lifeless corpses, and their women were strewn across the landscape, fighting like Olga’s mother for survival. A crust of bread and a plate of soup were about all that any mother could afford to provide for her malnourished breed of unhappy children in those days. They were days of uncertainty where even the government and the machinery of state were in turmoil and the hapless father figure of Russia, the ill-fated tsar, did not know what to do.

At the beginning of World War I in 1914, Mother Russia was so entangled in a series of treaties designed to protect Britain and France in the event of war with Germany that Tsar Nicholas II felt compelled to fulfil his international obligations. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, whereupon Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and Germany followed suit. When Russia began to mobilise its army in anticipation of war, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914. The Tsar responded by declaring war on Germany after German troops marched into Belgium, and so began the first terrible experience of modern warfare on a worldwide scale.

The Russian armies performed relatively well at first, especially at the Battle of Frankenau, but on 26–29 August 1914 the Russian Second Army was surrounded and captured during the German offensive at the Battle of Tannenberg. After a three-day battle, the Russians had managed to defeat an Austrian army on 3 September, but the Russians themselves were again overcome by the Germans in another three-day battle at the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia on 10–12 September. All the Russian troops were badly led and poorly supplied, and they lacked all the essential weapons and munitions of war that were necessary to fight against the might of Germany. Indeed, there was only one rifle to be shared amongst every ten men and, by the end of 1914, they had all but used up their supplies of ammunition for small arms and artillery. Thus, Holy Russia continued to suffer the pangs of unavoidable defeat and it was believed that her armies suffered the greatest slaughter in those early military campaigns that the world had ever known.

On the Western Front in France, 135 German divisions were ranged against the British and French armies that were struggling to halt the German advance towards Paris. Facing the Russians on the northern front were 164 German and Austrian divisions, all of which were highly trained and excellently equipped. Almost inevitably, when fighting broke out again around Masuria on 7–27 February 1915, the Russians suffered another major disaster and were encircled, with the loss of a further 100,000 men. An additional defeat with heavy losses on 2–4 May brought the northern front to a general state of collapse, which forced the Russians to begin a general withdrawal. In an effort to bolster morale, Tsar Nicholas hurriedly assumed personal command of the Russian Front on 5 September 1915 but his presence could not stop the slaughter. His sudden appearance only added to the bitterness that the Russians felt when they sought to defend their country with the little equipment that they had. They readily blamed the Tsar and his incompetent staff for all the disasters that Russia suffered during its time of dire needs. To make matters worse, some 250,000 Ukrainians served with the Austrian army against 3.5 million Ukrainians who fought for the allies. This unfortunate distribution of Ukrainian forces made it necessary for people of the same nationality to fight and kill each other.

During the great Russian Bruselov offensive of 1916, which coincided with the British mass attack on the Somme in France, the Russian soldiers again proved their mettle but, despite the loss of up to a million soldiers, they could not extend their gains. Altogether, over eight million Russian soldiers were killed, wounded or captured before the troops fully realised that they had suffered the highest military casualties of the war, simply to help Britain and France.

In commemoration of their losses, Field Marshall von Hindenburg, the German commander, wrote that ‘In the Great War ledger, the pages on which the Russian losses were written have been torn out. No one knows the figures. Five or eight million. We, too, have no idea. All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we have to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves. Imagination may try to reconstruct the figure of their losses, but an accurate calculation will remain for ever a vain thing.’

While the Tsar’s troops were wilting in the trenches without boots and proper clothing, and with no weapons to fight off the advancing enemy, Ukraine was being overrun in all directions by the German armies that were penetrating ever deeper into the territories further north.

There was an air of unreality about everything at the Russian military headquarters, and no one seemed to know what was happening at the front. Regardless of all the national problems confronting the country, the Tsar spent more time worrying about his wife and children than he did about his military units. He was particularly concerned about his son and heir, who suffered from haemophilia, an inherited blood disease for which there was no known cure. At home, his German-born wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, imagined herself to be another Catherine the Great while she remained under the influence of the lecherous Rasputin, that peculiar Russian monk who had wheedled his way into her life. All of Russia seemed to know of her foolish attachment to this strange man and ugly rumours had already spread to Russia’s beleaguered troops. Although Rasputin was a figure loathed by all and believed to be secretly in league with the Germans, he was still able to use his hypnotic powers to dismiss ministers and advise the Tsar on how to conduct the war, about which he knew nothing. Six months later, in December, Rasputin was murdered by two aristocratic patriots, but only after he had done immense harm to the reputation of the royal family.

War is a bloody and heartless business, and Olga’s mother had her own worries. The cost of living had increased by four hundred per cent during the previous two years and the population was in such an explosive mood of resentment that it was bordering on revolution. Her immediate need was to return to work, as deferred labour meant empty pockets and no food. Within an hour of her child’s birth, she took her children and new-born baby to the fields where she found a shaded corner under a tree, and there she left them while she returned to attend to the rapidly ripening crops. Ukraine was blest with beautiful black soil that extended to a depth of twelve feet and it was certain to produce a rich harvest if only the warring parties would stay away long enough to permit the peasants to gather it in and take it to market.

As she sweated in the hot sun, she thought continually of the miseries that had befallen her. She had to find the time to work consistently in the fields, look after her children, and feed a new addition to her family. Past experience allowed her the reprieve of knowing that she would have a good supply of milk and hopefully she would manage to satisfy the baby’s wants for a year, but all that depended on her own physical strength. Would she be able to work from dawn till dusk, care for her children, and maintain her health in the present uncertain times of war and revolutionary unrest? The country was seething with rumours of rebellion and even the smallest villages were talking of rising against the absentee landlords. Her future was precarious and her immediate desire was to break down and cry.

At the end of the day, she gathered her children together and returned to the hovel that they lived in. It was a poorly constructed dwelling made of unpainted wood and its roof was mainly thatched, though there were some weak-looking beams spanning the width of the structure to provide support. Her home consisted of one room with an earthen floor and a single window. There were no toilet facilities, and no fireplace to provide heat during the freezing winter months. Water was obtained from the village well about 200 metres away, and it was carried back in two badly dented buckets. All laundry and personal ablutions were done with water poured into a large, chipped enamel basin. The only wall decoration that she had was a cracked mirror that was hanging with a definite lean to one side, as if it purposely wanted to defy gravity. Once inside her home, she delved into a box in the corner and brought to light a little bread and some vegetables, which she boiled in a pot to feed her hungry offspring. All the while, she wondered how she was going to earn the $150 or so per year for the next 15–20 years that she would need to maintain her home and family.

Olga’s mother was a woman of average height but, like most Ukrainian women, she had rather square physical features. However, she was not unattractive by any means; her face was round and smooth, and her golden hair fell in masses over her shoulders. She was 27 years old and she could well light the sparks of love in any man who was seeking a strong, honest wife. But where were these men to be found? They were all in the army and dying miserably in the hope of saving their country. Some were deserting and secretly returning to their villages, but they had to be careful to evade the ever-watchful eyes of the secret police. The warmth of the summer months could not last forever, and soon winter would be upon them with its freezing temperatures and prolonged darkness. Ice was to be seen everywhere and the howling winter storms seemed to last interminably as the swirling sleet swept across the steppes.

Military action and winter’s fearful storms brought sudden unexpected changes to the nation which no one could have anticipated during that sad season of despair. War on two fronts had convinced Germany quite early on that revolution in Russia was absolutely essential for her own survival, so she was not averse to stirring up trouble beyond her borders. With German and Japanese collusion, financial organisations began their clandestine activities. Revolutionary groups suddenly emerged from the underground and swept the Tsar’s government out of office. The Tsar and his family were captured and taken to Siberia, where they were imprisoned and had to bide their time while they awaited their uncertain fate. Political parties fought for supremacy as the Russian armies melted away and new names were heard that were strange and unknown to the majority of people in this beleaguered nation. St Petersburg (later re-named Petrograd, then Leningrad) was at the centre of all this commotion, but it was not long before Moscow was caught up in this web of revolution as well.

Olga’s mother knew nothing about politics, but soon new names such as Lenin, Trotsky and Kerensky began to be heard as their parties struggled for supremacy in a revolution that was to rock the world. Most people began to believe that Bosheviks (derived from the Russian word ‘Bolshinstvo’ meaning ‘majority’) and Menshoviks (derived from the Russian word ‘Menshinstvo’ meaning ‘minority’) were running the country, but few citizens knew who or what they were. An unknown revolutionary by the name of Lenin set up an élite group controlled by himself to govern the country as a dictatorship, but his opponents preferred a more democratic system of government. Lenin lobbied tirelessly and was not averse to using underhand methods to gain the ascendancy. Eventually a vote gave Lenin a majority of two (hence the name Bolshevik) and, with his usual ruthless determination, he set about attempting to gain control of the government. Civil war broke out, with this minimal majority group, calling itself Bolsheviks, and the minority group, calling itself Menshoviks, fighting for supremacy.

A million Cossacks in Russia and Ukraine added further confusion to the conflict by stirring up the countryside and casting their support in favour of the royal family. These unruly bands of untamed men roamed all over Ukraine and their presence was feared everywhere. To add to Russia’s woes, six nations despatched troops across her borders to take advantage of her plight. War! War! War! One Englishman described war as the great remedy that kills arrogance, self-esteem and pride, but it would be hard to see how that could be so.

War is the never-ending creation of man. The politicians who start them care nothing for those who die in that terrible furnace of death, and yet they themselves enjoy the luxuries of protection while they devise more diabolical plans for their endless campaigns. Millions of soldiers had died on the Western Front, and millions more on the Russian front, but still the politicians were not satiated by the bloodbath. British troops landed at Murmansk and Odessa, Japanese military forces attacked Vladivostok, Czech forces attempted to take control of the trans-Siberian railway, and Finland and Ukraine began fighting for independence. French, Italian and Serbian troops joined the British forces until an army of 18,000 men were amassed, but then the British army mutinied and had to be withdrawn. Some 40,000 troops, including 13,000 American soldiers, recruited by the ‘West’, also supported the Tsarist armies and fascist Siberian Republic. Remarkably, Britain and France were quite content to ignore the terrible losses that Russia had suffered on their behalf when it came to their aid during the years 1914 to 1917. Their sole aim was to destroy the communist government, reinstate the royal family and exploit Russia’s commercial interests. An immense struggle took place until the Bolsheviks finally achieved victory and drove all the invading armies out of their territories.

The fight for supremacy was prolonged, bitter and hard-fought but not everybody cared about it. Most of the population were concerned with fighting poverty and striving to stay alive. As the Ukrainian men began to slowly drift back to their villages, Olga’s mother thought only of seeking a new husband to help her to bear the burdens of her life, and she considered herself to be a fortunate woman when a reasonably handsome young man agreed to accept her in marriage. He was a gentle man with a placid nature, but he had one major fault that was common to all the inhabitants of his country. He had been suckled with milk when he was a baby but, when he was weaned, he took to vodka and stayed with it for the rest of his life. His occasional labours earned him the barest minimum wage to feed the family, and the rest of his earnings were invested in alcohol. For the next eleven years he lived in amity with his thankful wife and he cherished her children as if they were his own, but no advance was made to guarantee their financial security.

Some years were to elapse after the end of World War I before the communist Bolshevik Party could achieve complete victory in Russia and, in a small way, their success could be termed a capitalist revolution. All the land in the Soviet Republic was nationalised and given to the peasants by Lenin for their own use, but not as their own property. This amazing transfer of land created a mass of 125 million peasant proprietors who could be termed small-time private capitalists, but the scheme was unworkable. There were not enough machines, horses, ploughs or seeds to supply everyone’s needs and the farms, which ranged between nine and thirty-five acres in size, were too small to be really productive. To make matters worse, the peasant farmers were only interested in producing enough grain and other produce to satisfy their own family requirements; consequently, the nation’s annual agricultural production fell until yields of wheat and rye were only slightly higher than those achieved on English estates during the 14th century.

Russia had been a grain-exporting country before the revolution, but laziness soon reduced it to a grain-importing country. Lenin and others tried to solve the problem by attempting to define the farm workers as ‘poor’ and ‘middle’ peasants, but this stratagem could not possibly succeed, as it was only a way of playing with words. The Bolsheviks were well aware that a peasant dairy farmer located near a big town might not be poor even if he had no horse at all, while a peasant farmer living further away on the steppes with three horses might not be a rich man either. Beyond that narrow range of thinking, nothing extra was taken into consideration and no further adjustments were made.

After Lenin died in 1924, a new man called Joseph Stalin gradually achieved power and became the driving force behind the Soviet government. Stalin was every bit as ruthless as his predecessor, but he was more practical and he preferred to refrain from Lenin’s insistence on world revolution in order to establish the Soviet Union as a self-supporting industrial power. The ultimate aim under Lenin had been to convert Russia into a communist state in accordance with the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but Stalin was a more realistic man than Lenin and never took the state beyond socialism.

Principles of ‘socialism’ required the administration to control the economic and political systems of government such as major industrial production, banking, transport, public utilities, and so on, with the intention of ensuring a more equitable distribution of property and wealth. ‘Communism’, on the other hand, is a more extreme social system in which all private property is abolished and everything, including the entire nation’s wealth and resources, are held in common by the working class. According to Engels, the existence of a ‘state’ is an admission that society is made up of antagonistic political parties or classes that are irreconcilable and, to prevent these classes consuming themselves through conflict, Engels believed that a power standing above and arising out of society was necessary to moderate the conflict.

Engels argued that, under ‘capitalism’, the state’s richest and most economically powerful class would become the state’s most dominant class politically, and this ruling wealthy class would use the army, police and prisons as the chief instruments of state power to subdue and exploit the oppressed working class. Officials in a capitalist state, who were originally employed as the servants of society, were encouraged by this powerful dominant rich class to increase their power until they held down and exploited the oppressed working class. These powerful capitalistic groups ultimately stand above society and issue special laws to ensure the sanctity and inviolability of their officials while they increasingly oppress the working class. In a capitalist system, the modern state thus becomes an instrument for the exploitation of poor, wage-earning labourers by rich capitalists. Marx, Engels and Lenin firmly believed and advocated that truly committed communists should endeavour to overcome this injustice by revolution, but the principles enunciated by these three men left much to be desired.

Marx and Engels, who were extreme revolutionaries, proclaimed that the proletariat (labouring class) should forcefully seize state power and transform all the means of production into state-owned property. Government over ‘persons’ would then be replaced by the administration of ‘things and the processes of production’. According to Lenin, ‘Engels speaks here of the destruction of the bourgeois (rich commercial class) state by the proletarian revolution’. These changes would ultimately result in putting an end to itself as the proletariat, but it would also put an end to class differences and class antagonism. By these means, the state would not be ‘abolished’ as a true entity but it would ‘wither away’ and all class antagonism would be abolished overnight.

The words ‘withering away’ or ‘wither away’ refer to the remains of a proletarian statehood after the socialist revolution has been completed. What ‘withers away’ after the revolution is the proletariat state or semi-state. Lenin attempted to clarify this situation further by adding, ‘The ‘withering away’ (or the state ‘becoming dormant’) refers to the period after the ‘seizure of the means of production (by the state) in the name of society’, that is, ‘after the socialist revolution.’ Democracy is also a state; consequently democracy will also ‘wither away’ and disappear when the state disappears.

In Lenin’s opinion, the workers needed a temporary ‘state’ to give them time to crush resistance and get rid of exploiters and opportunists. The proletariat thus becomes organised as a ruling class and needs state power (centralised organisation of force) for the purpose of guiding the great mass of the population in the work of organising a socialist economy. The dictatorship of the proletariat would be a form of power shared with none and relying directly upon the armed force of the masses. Engels, for his part, proclaimed that ‘The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the proletariat, organised as the ruling class to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible’.

These notable philosophers had initiated ideas that were to spread around the world, but the ideas of communism were not new. Students of the New Testament can read of the principles of communism in the Acts of the Apostles but they should also note that, after a very short time, the whole experiment collapsed because the theory of communism did not take into consideration the failings of human nature. History has shown repeatedly that, when members of the working class achieve power, they can be equally as dictatorial and oppressive as the capitalist class. Regardless of class differences, greed and selfishness generally take precedence over all other principles in the lives of human individuals.

‘Wealth is the holiest of our gods.

But as yet, Pernicious Money, you inhabit no shrine.’

—Juvenal (c60–c140 AD)

Capitalism arose to satisfy the appetite for power and wealth in all individuals but, in the end, it only served to concentrate all money, power and other riches in the hands of a few people while the rest of the world’s population were enslaved by poverty. Thus Juvenal is incorrect, for the world’s banks have become the shrines of ‘pernicious money’.

Socialism attempted to remedy most of these discrepancies by sharing some of the nation’s wealth with the majority of the population, but socialism can only be effective in wealthy nations that have sufficient resources and income to bear the costs.

Communism attempted to give all the sources of national wealth to the working class, but it was never possible to impose this idealistic system on any country. No matter how serious its protagonists are, cracks in the theories of communism ultimately enlarge until they became yawning chasms. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin were never able to devise a suitable system that could fulfil the ultimate aims of true communism.

Marx, Engels and Lenin proclaimed that the workers of the world should arm themselves and forcibly take control of the state by revolutionary means. They were then to seize all wealth from the ruling classes and control all the means of production and administration of the state. Lenin believed that communes must replace the state by a fuller democracy that was not of a parliamentary kind. Communes were to become a working executive and legislature at the same time, wherein all high dignitaries would disappear and universal suffrage would serve the people. Officials and judges were to be elected and subject to recall at all times, and all officials in all branches of administration would be paid no more than a working man’s wage. The organ of suppression would now be the majority of the population and not the minority, and this majority would eventually make a police force and army unnecessary. In other words, the police and army were to be stripped of all their power. In this sense, the state would begin to ‘wither away’ and all responsibility would devolve to the people. There would be no special privileges or remunerations and all men would be equal.

Engels expressed his views in a slightly different way. He said that ‘communes’ were to be small administrative bodies set up in every city, town and village by people who would have common rights and that these communes were to fill all posts – administrative, judicial and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage, with the right of electors to recall their delegates at all times. All officials, high and low, were to be paid only the wages received by other workers. The commune could not be a state, as the state remnants would of themselves have ‘withered away’.

Marx was fully aware that distribution would be unequal at the start of the experiment, as one man would receive more than the others or he would be richer. He reasoned that, in order to avoid these defects, rights would have to be unequal at first, instead of being equal. However, he felt certain that, sooner or later, when the higher level of a communist society was reached, the principle would be, ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ This comment is usually interpreted as, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, or, ‘for an equal quantity of labour, an equal quantity of products’. Thus, striving for socialism would eventually lead to communism, where all the need for force and the subjection of one man to another would disappear. People would become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social existence without force and without subjection. Engels spoke of a new generation ‘reared under new and free social conditions, which will be able to eliminate every kind of state, including the democratic-republican state.’

In many respects, these ideas are commendable but, although they may be theoretically desirable, they are impracticable. By stretching the imagination a little, most people could possibly say that they are similar to Christian principles, but Marx and Lenin would deny that. The problem is that all these theories do not make any allowances for human nature. Who would agree to earn a labourer’s salary if he had spent many years learning to be a surgeon or engineer, and who would want to spend their lives in a small commune? Who would want to accept the responsibility of attending to international affairs such as foreign policy or trade if he was to have only a labourer’s salary? How can one guarantee that all the citizens would invariably be perfect individuals and incapable of committing any crimes? This small list of deficiencies can be enlarged if there is a desire to illustrate further the failings of Marx and Engel’s communist theory. Nothing would be achieved in doing so, however, as very few people would want to be squeezed into the common mould of communism merely to suit the ideas of a few theorists.

Stalin was well aware that the state must continue to exist, so he did not try to make all citizens in the Soviet Union adjust their lives to comply with the needs of the majority. In the 1990s, popular resistance to communism ultimately forced his successors to face a revolution that was anti-communist rather than pro-communist, for the people and the peasants no longer wanted to be told what they had to do to suit the convenience of politicians. Citizens of the Soviet Union ultimately objected to the continuation of a communist or socialist dictatorship and they made it quite clear that they were not happy to live within a communist state forever. In the 1990s the people no longer wanted a communist state, but in the years that followed the first Great War, they had no option.

When Stalin reviewed national farming and Lenin’s land policy, he realised that all the independent peasant farmers who had received small tracts of land would ultimately devour or destroy the state if they were allowed to continue operating separately. The small farms were inefficient because small-scale production was uneconomical and they were also dangerous from Stalin’s point of view, because the government could not control production. By 1928, farmers constituted eighty per cent of the population but deliveries of foodstuffs to the state and cities had fallen sharply, despite the state’s efforts to squeeze more out of the peasants.

To tackle this major problem, Stalin ordained in 1929 that collective farms (kolkhoz) were to take priority in the agricultural field and that all major estates were to be incorporated into this new system of agricultural production. This arrangement would allow any expensive machinery that was in short supply to be shared between the farms as required. To achieve this aim, 100–300 small peasant families were formed into collectives and made to work on and administer these farms on the basis of cooperative ownership. In this way they would have to share their labour and the costs required to increase production. Eventually collective farms were increased in size until they covered 5,000 acres to 60,000 acres, while larger state farms grew to an average size of 25,000 acres. The biggest state farms eventually covered up to 375,000 acres and were fully productive. Each collective farm was to be serviced by scientists who specialised in soil and farming practices, and each was to be organised as a self-sustaining community with its own schools, social centres, health services and other facilities. As more than two-thirds of the population were employed on the land, families working on these collective farms were entitled to have a private garden plot, ranging in size from half an acre to an acre, on which they could maintain a few animals and grow vegetables for their own consumption or for sale.

Nation-wide resistance to this scheme was strong, and villagers took to slaughtering their livestock rather than surrender to government dictation. In 1928 alone, 32 million horses and 14 million head of cattle were killed by the rebellious peasants to prevent the state gaining an advantage over them. To overcome these wilful acts of disobedience, the government decided that all those who resisted the collective will of the nation – that is, all those who resisted Stalin’s proclamations – were to be arrested and sent to Siberia. This was an unfortunate fate for any dissident to face, as exile in Siberia was not a pleasant thing. Mikhailovich Dostoevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn both described Siberia as being a land where they were buried alive. But Stalin himself had been imprisoned in Siberia a number of times, and he tended to be more philosophical. He described his frequent exiles to Siberia during his earlier revolutionary years as not being the usual kind of imprisonment where unfortunate souls are incarcerated in lonely cells. Prisoners were expected to travel to Siberia at their own expense and proceed like normal travellers to their lonely destination. On the way, these exiles had to report to the authorities, as there were no guards to supervise their journeys, nor were there any guards at their destination. Prisoners were simply assigned to villages and allowed to live in huts at their leisure, except that they were not allowed to leave the area without permission. Apart from that, each prisoner was a free man and could do as he pleased. He could work at a job, get married, study, or read books provided by a local library or those purchased of his own accord. The main drawback was the isolation and difficulty in communicating with family and friends, and this led Stalin to make a number of escapes to freedom. In later years, prisoners were used as forced labour to develop Siberia, building roads, railways and cities, working in mines and performing any other tasks required by the government. This usually constituted a much harsher form of punishment than Stalin had experienced, and many of these exiles died from the combined affects of over-work, malnutrition and inadequate protection from the bitterly cold Siberian winters.

Collective farms were to be the backbone of the nation, but the peasants fought grimly to retain some degree of personal ownership. They refused to grant their labour to the state and obstructed government designs to increase the harvest in every possible way. The outcome was that the Soviet Union’s stocks of grain were depleted and the nation had to consider further importation of grain to make up the shortfall. Unfortunately, Russia was facing a severe financial crisis at the time, and the nation was also desperately short of machine tools and industrial equipment that were so necessary to maintain full employment in the factories. When the government was left with no alternative but to choose between importing grain or importing tools and industrial equipment, it opted for the latter. To make matters worse, Stalin had to find the ways and means of feeding the hungry city populations. With Russia’s capital reserves almost exhausted, the government chose to demand greater returns from the land. Peasant obstinacy and resistance made Stalin equally determined to make the peasants bend to his will. His unflinching reply to their intransigence was ‘We must soil ourselves with a little filth. We are ready even for this extreme measure in the interest of our cause’.

The first Five Year Plan was launched in October 1928 with industrial construction and expansion going on everywhere, but supplies of food and clothing were diminishing. To feed the cities, Stalin insisted on greater grain collections, but the obstinate peasants chose to let the crops rot in the fields rather than comply with his demands. Now that he was faced with a bitter class struggle, Stalin decided in 1930 to allow any peasants who wished to leave the collective farms to do so, but the disorganisation that followed caused an unexpected disaster. Within two months, the number of families on the collectivised farms fell from 57.6% to 23.6% and grain production fell from 83.5 million tons to 22 million tons. To make matters worse, there were serious crop failures over large areas of Ukraine in 1932. The days when the hills and steppes were covered under countless square miles of wheat were now but a part of living memory. Waves of rich grain, green in spring and golden in summer, had disappeared and the bare, rich black soil of Ukraine that stretched as far as the eye could see now lay fallow and unused.

With the cities facing starvation, Stalin ordered the army and secret police to seize any hoarded grain that could be found on the farms. Peasants discovered to their dismay that they were to be denied food if they did not produce sufficient grain to meet government requirements, yet they still remained steadfast and refused to capitulate. The outcome was that by 1931 the first pangs of hunger were felt. By the winter of 1932–1933 the peasants were in desperate straights, and seven million were to die from starvation. Additional punishments were inflicted upon them when hundreds of thousands of recalcitrant peasants were transferred to Siberia or other distant regions in an effort to avoid further confrontations. Tales of hunger were rife and people lay dying in the streets when weakness overtook them. ‘O God!’ they cried, ‘that bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap!’ There were persistent reports of starving people eating human flesh, and almost as many stories stating that parents were reduced to eating their own dead children.

‘Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart…

Was it needless death after all?’

—W.B. Yeats

Before the Revolution, peasants lived in houses that were grouped together in nameless unpaved streets in Ukrainian villages. All were rudely beamed, plastered with clay, and thatched with straw. A house with a steel roof was believed to be a sign of prosperity, but in all of these villages most of the houses had only one room, which was used by the family for all purposes. Although wooden floors were rare and the walls were constructed of clay, the houses were always clean and neat, no matter how primitive they were. A dog would lounge on the porch or at the gate, and geese, chickens and ducks would wander about the yard or amongst the flowers and fruit trees. A few pigs, one or two cows and a horse would be housed in the barn. After a hard day’s work in the spring and summer, the villagers gathered in groups and danced long into the night as they played and sang with much eating and drinking. It was customary in those close-knit communities for neighbours to help one another, as hospitality was a matter of honour. Houses were never locked and they were always open to welcome guests. The collectives disrupted this community spirit and altered the peasants’ way of life.

The Russian Communist Party did not invent the idea of collective farms, as agricultural communes had existed in Russia long before the Revolution. During those times, rich landlords would set up communes and collective farms on their estates, which were equipped with communal houses, communal kitchens, nurseries and other facilities. Communal members voluntarily gave up their private possessions to lead that sort of life, and they frequently received support from the government and other bodies. Russian emigrants had also set up similar communes in Palestine between 1900 and 1914. After the Revolution, collectives continued to be organised to ensure free cooperation between farmers and to provide state credits, market security, and mutual help for the planting of seeds and harvesting. However, there is a great difference between adopting this form of life on a voluntary basis and having to do so against one’s wishes by state compulsion.

Stalin himself was convinced that the state could only survive if farm production was properly organised, so he refused to yield. Thousands of government grain collectors continued their work until the peasants ultimately capitulated, but peasant hatred knew no bounds. A large proportion of the grain collectors were Jews, who bore the brunt of the peasants’ anger and criticism. Also, many Ukrainians believed that Jews were profiteering by hoarding vast amounts of gold taken from the Ukrainian dead.

Jews were always considered to be a special problem in Ukraine. Although discriminatory laws were strictly prohibited in the Soviet Union and anti-Semitism was a punishable offence, generations of Jews were convinced that Ukrainians were anti-Semitic and that they were responsible for violent atrocities and pogroms against their people. Regardless of the facts, Jews refused to forgive or forget their experiences, and so they, in their turn, allowed their distrust to generate into hate and revenge against Ukrainians. Taking advantage of the anti-discriminatory laws, Jews rapidly infiltrated the Communist Party and used it as a springboard for their own ambitions. They managed to penetrate all branches of central and local government, especially security, justice and the secret police. Many of the Menshevic leaders, including Trotsky, were Jews and it was certainly believed that many leaders in the Bolshevik camp were Jews also. Not only did Jews seem to feature in the upper echelons of government, but they also received great financial support from Jewish sources both inside and outside Russia.

There were not many Jews in the Russian Empire a century before the reign of Catherine the Great but, as Russia extended her empire westward and eastward, she managed to gain a large Jewish population. From the west, some came from Germany, Poland and the Black Sea ports while, in the east, she inherited those Khazarks who converted to the Jewish religion some centuries earlier. The Jews did not blend in well with the population, as they preferred the company of their own kind. They had a devious and obstinate nature that conflicted with that of the general population, and they refused to be Russified. Instead, they chose to live their own secretive lives in isolated communities and this habit gave rise to further suspicion amongst other racial groups. In 1833, the Tsar decided to confine the Jews within a large territorial area that encompassed Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, the Black Sea ports, and Ukraine but, over time, many of these Jews penetrated into Moscow and St Petersburg.

The Jews preferred to speak Yiddish, and they wanted to be allowed to have their own system of community government and schools. In this manner, they became a growing influence in the towns and villages. Because they tended to multiply like rabbits, and because they refused to integrate due to their stubborn insistence on authority and their own unique religion, the Ukranians came to despise them. More important than that was the fear that Jews would take away their jobs and ruin them. Ukrainians continued to believe that Jews were foreign traitors and blood–suckers, and the locals refused to forget how the Jews had acted as agents for their Polish overlords and made their lives unbearable for them in the past. Whereas the general Ukrainian population grew by 87% between 1820 and 1880, the Jewish population increased by 150%. Between 1844 and 1913, the number of inhabitants in Ukraine rose by 265% but the Jews increased by 844% until there were two million Jews in Ukraine alone, and a further five million in the empire. The rate of Jewish