Page 58 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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membership in the Communist Party. While Lenin lay ill in 1923, Stalin's
power continued in the party to grow and upon Lenin's death, he be-
came the supreme authority. In the five years between 1924 and 1929, he
cleared the party of all his opponents by assassination, execution, or
exile. Even Trotsky, one of the architects of the October Revolution, be-
came the object of his rage and was driven out of the Soviet Union.
After consolidating his power, Stalin turned his iron fist on society.
Lenin had tried to nationalize all the agricultural land in Russia, but the
devastation caused by the great famine of 1920-1921 forced him to post-
pone this undertaking. Stalin, determined to put his plan into effect,
began to apply a policy called "collectivization." Its aim was to national-
ize all of the villagers' property, seize and export their crops, and use the
revenue to bolster Soviet industry and strengthen the military.
Stalin carried out his collectivization policy by torture, murder and
starvation. Six million people died of famine, while he exported hun-
dreds of thousands of tons of grain. Once again, Stalin documented the
savagery of Materialist-Darwinist ideas, which regarded humanity as an
animal species that had to be trained by inflicting pain as corrective pun-
ishment.

The Savagery of Collectivization

This policy of Stalin's began in 1929. According to his plan, all pri-
vate property was to be abolished. Every villager would have to give to
the state a certain quota of his production and was prohibited from sell-
ing his own produce. The villagers' quotas were very high and to meet it,
most had to surrender everything they had. The tyranny Lenin had
begun in the 1920's resumed once more.
To implement collectivization, Stalin employed the cruelest meth-
ods. Those who resisted were killed, exiled to Siberia (essentially, mur-
der over the long term) or left to starve (slow murder). Throughout the
whole country, kulaks (rich landowners) who resisted collectivization—
and, therefore, Communism in general—were hunted down. The Black
Book of Communism describes this policy:
T The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were