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The author indicates that the collectivizers believed that “the end justified the means.” Explain the meaning of this expression as it applies to the collectivizers and use details from the text to explain why they believed in it.
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Klavdiia Rublyova was born in 1913, the third of eleven children in a peasant family in the Irbei region of Krasnoiarsk in Siberia. Her mother died
in 1924, while giving birth, leaving her father, Ilia, to bring up all the children on his own. An enterprising man, llia took advantage of the NEP
[New Economic Policy] to branch out from farming to market gardening. He grew poppy seeds and cucumbers, which could easily be tended by
his young children. For this he was branded a 'kulak', arrested and imprisoned, and later sent to a labour camp, leaving his children in the care
of Klavdiia, who was then aged just seventeen. The children were deprived of all their father's property: the house, which he had built, was
taken over by the village Soviet, while the horses, cows and sheep and the farm tools were transferred to the kolkhoz. For several weeks, the
children lived in the bath-house, until officials came to take them all away to an orphanage. Klavdiia ran off with the youngest child to Kansk,
near Krasnoiarsk, where her grown-up sister Raisa lived. Before they went they sold their last possessions to the other villagers. "We had
nothing much to sell, we were just children," Klavdiia recalls. There was a fur-lined blanket and an old sheepskin, a feather mattress, and a
mirror, which somehow we had rescued from our house. That was all we had to sell.
What were the motives of the men and women who carried out this brutal war against the peasantry? Most of the collectivizers were conscripted
soldiers and workers – people anxious to carry out orders from above (and in some cases, to line their pockets). Hatred of the 'kulaks' had been
drummed into them by their commanders and by propaganda which portrayed the 'kulak parasites' and 'bloodsuckers' as dangerous 'enemies
of the people'. We were trained to see the kulaks, not as human beings, but as vermin, lice, which had to be destroyed,' recalls one young
activist, the leader of a Komsomol brigade in the Kuban. 'Without the kolkhoz, wrote another collectivizer in the 1980s, the kulaks would have
grabbed us by the throat and skinned us all alive!
Others were carried away by their Communist enthusiasm. Inspired by the romantic revolutionary passions stirred up by the propaganda of the
Five Year Plan, they believed with the Bolsheviks that any miracle could be achieved by sheer human will. As one student in those years recalls:
'We were convinced that we were creating a Communist society, that it would be achieved by the Five Year Plans, and we were ready for any
sacrifice. Today, it is easy to underestimate the emotional force of those messianic hopes and the fanaticism that it engendered, particularly in
the younger generation, which had been brought up on the 'cult of struggle' and the romance of the Civil War. These young people wanted to
believe that it was their calling to carry on the fight, in the words of the 'Internationale', for a 'new and better life'. In the words of one of the](https://content.bartleby.com/qna-images/question/fdaca907-88c7-4e55-bb61-a93d2a9c25c8/3b12d017-3976-4fb5-a78d-869db9f210aa/pzduap_processed.png)
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Klavdiia Rublyova was born in 1913, the third of eleven children in a peasant family in the Irbei region of Krasnoiarsk in Siberia. Her mother died
in 1924, while giving birth, leaving her father, Ilia, to bring up all the children on his own. An enterprising man, llia took advantage of the NEP
[New Economic Policy] to branch out from farming to market gardening. He grew poppy seeds and cucumbers, which could easily be tended by
his young children. For this he was branded a 'kulak', arrested and imprisoned, and later sent to a labour camp, leaving his children in the care
of Klavdiia, who was then aged just seventeen. The children were deprived of all their father's property: the house, which he had built, was
taken over by the village Soviet, while the horses, cows and sheep and the farm tools were transferred to the kolkhoz. For several weeks, the
children lived in the bath-house, until officials came to take them all away to an orphanage. Klavdiia ran off with the youngest child to Kansk,
near Krasnoiarsk, where her grown-up sister Raisa lived. Before they went they sold their last possessions to the other villagers. "We had
nothing much to sell, we were just children," Klavdiia recalls. There was a fur-lined blanket and an old sheepskin, a feather mattress, and a
mirror, which somehow we had rescued from our house. That was all we had to sell.
What were the motives of the men and women who carried out this brutal war against the peasantry? Most of the collectivizers were conscripted
soldiers and workers – people anxious to carry out orders from above (and in some cases, to line their pockets). Hatred of the 'kulaks' had been
drummed into them by their commanders and by propaganda which portrayed the 'kulak parasites' and 'bloodsuckers' as dangerous 'enemies
of the people'. We were trained to see the kulaks, not as human beings, but as vermin, lice, which had to be destroyed,' recalls one young
activist, the leader of a Komsomol brigade in the Kuban. 'Without the kolkhoz, wrote another collectivizer in the 1980s, the kulaks would have
grabbed us by the throat and skinned us all alive!
Others were carried away by their Communist enthusiasm. Inspired by the romantic revolutionary passions stirred up by the propaganda of the
Five Year Plan, they believed with the Bolsheviks that any miracle could be achieved by sheer human will. As one student in those years recalls:
'We were convinced that we were creating a Communist society, that it would be achieved by the Five Year Plans, and we were ready for any
sacrifice. Today, it is easy to underestimate the emotional force of those messianic hopes and the fanaticism that it engendered, particularly in
the younger generation, which had been brought up on the 'cult of struggle' and the romance of the Civil War. These young people wanted to
believe that it was their calling to carry on the fight, in the words of the 'Internationale', for a 'new and better life'. In the words of one of the
Transcribed Image Text:A apps.studysync.com/#!/assignments/127398250/read
'25,000ers' – the urban army of enthusiasts sent into the countryside to help carry out the collectivization campaign: 'Constant struggle,
struggle, and more struggle! This was how we had been taught to think – that nothing was achieved without struggle, which was a norm of
social life.
According to this militant world-view, the creation of a new society would involve and indeed necessitate a bitter struggle with the forces of the
old society (a logic reinforced by the propaganda of the Five Year Plan, with its constant talk of 'campaigns,' 'battles' and 'offensives' on the
social, economic, international and internal 'fronts'). In this way the Communist idealists reconciled the 'anti-kulak' terror with their own utopian
beliefs. Some were appalled by the brutal violence. Some were even sickened by their own role in it. But they all knew what they were doing
(they could not plead that they were ignorant or that they were simply 'following orders'). And they all believed that the end justified the means.
Lev Kopelev, a young Communist who took part in some of the worst atrocities against the Ukrainian peasants, explained how he rationalized
his actions. Kopelev had volunteered for a Komsomol brigade which requisitioned grain from the 'kulaks' in 1932. They took everything down to
the last loaf of bread. Looking back on the experience in the 1970s, Kopelev recalled the children's screams and the appearance of the peasant
men -'frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad daring ferocity':
It was excruciating to see and hear all this. And even worse to take part in it .And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn't give in to
debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist
fatherland. For the Five Year Plan.
Excerpted from The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes, published by Henry Holt and Company.
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