Forced collectivisation would lead to the starvation of millions, to the imprisonment of millions more. Hundreds of thousands would be simply murdered in hidden courtyards, after confessions extracted by torture and contemptible sham trials. Stalin encouraged a bizarre class struggle, creating a group of "rich peasants" named "kulaks" and labeling them as oppressors, which simply set the very poorest peasants against those who, say, had an extra cow or the like. The big landowners had been driven off or otherwise dealt with and so the war against the kulaks was almost a complete fraud, a way of terrorizing all the peasants and shrewdly using petty envy as a weapon in the terror.
By the end of 1929, forced collectivisation was in full force in the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. Arrests were made in a million households, with fathers sent off to new forced-labor camps and the families deported to Siberia. The first wave swept off the more prosperous level of the peasantry. In the winter of 1930, the sweep went lower, scything through the poorer peasantry. 120 million people in 600,000 communities were confronted with expropriation, eviction, and transportation. An internal passport system kept the movements of the peasantry under control. They would go where Stalin wanted them to go and nowhere else.
The terror was carried out by special food detachments, recruited from young men from the towns who had few attachments to the peasantry, and the increasingly powerful security apparatus, then known as the "OGPU", originally Lenin's "Cheka". There were many small uprisings, all of which were brutally crushed. A million peasants died of starvation in the north Caucasus. Five million died in the Ukraine when their grain disappeared into the Soviet apparatus. Villages became ghost towns. Three million men went into the network of prison camps that was at first known by the acronym "STON" (which translates literally into English as "Moan") and would later become known as the "Gulag". There they would work on everything from canals to power plants to the Moscow subway, building a new Soviet state on their blood and bones.
Most would be worked to death within a few months of their arrival, reduced to "camp dust", as the saying had it. Stalin needed prisoner labor to achieve his goals. There was no need to worry about their well-being. Calculations were performed to show that it was more economically cost-effective to work prisoners to death over a few months on a starvation diet than to keep them alive. Those that survived would usually be broken for the rest of their lives, their health ruined and their heads full of a disorderly jumble of realities and fantasies: when realities are more terrible than nightmares, it becomes impossible to tell the two apart. As for those who died in endless ranks, there were still many more where they came from, and if the ones that fell were also people who were suspected of not being completely obedient, so much the better.
