The Village and the Class War: Anti-Kulak Campaign in Estonia 1944-49

Chapter 5 Participation at the Local Level

Chapter 5 participation at the local level The anti-kulak campaign was in its nature specifically characteristic of soviet society and must be understood with a reference to the Marxist theory of class struggle. local people receiving orders to single out kulak families were supposed to apply class criteria and class analysis to the task. While this would be a difficult task for a trained social scientist , for untrained and unprepared rural residents the task must have seemed incomprehensible. still, it was crucial that it should be carried out by them, the “people”, labelled as the poor and middle peasantry of Viljandi County. They were to be the spearheads of the proclaimed class struggle, and their participation was not a question of their wish or will to participate, but a principle applied from above.1 This participation , its conditions and the people participating, are at the centre of this chapter. as explained in Chapter 1, partisans and sympathisers of the Communist party were few in interwar estonia. it is also obvious that those conducting the local anti-kulak campaign had not volunteered to do so, as the procedure analysed in Chapter 3 showed. The occur1 Werth, L’ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs, 20–22 makes this distinction. The boundaries of these groups are far from clear. security forces also participated in mass operations; and the Communist party was, as usual, involved in everything. But popular participation in an organized form, rather than through denunciations, distinguishes the dekulakisation campaigns. 160 THE VILLAGE AND THE CLASS WAR rence of mass participation in acts of repression is a particularly burdensome legacy of communist societies, and goes some way to explain why post-communist societies still today have special difficulty in coming to terms with the past. Victims of the system wish to find, and often look in vain for clear-cut perpetrators in specific cases, not just stalin himself. When they examine the documents, they are confronted by bureaucratic forms with several signatures and the appearance of legality. still, the individuals behind these bureaucratic processes must have been aware of how their following of the rules affected the victims. so who then were the participants and why did they participate? earlier studies of perpetrators of mass persecutions have pointed out—as briefly discussed in Chapter 2—a few motives or driving forces. some of these findings have found more corroboration than others in this local study. ideological and political motives might have bearing on decisions on the central level—on the local level people with communist convictions have not featured very prominently in the present study. a closer study at the local level allows for consideration of both, personal convictions among the actors and the character of Communist party relations towards other groups and individuals. Zygmunt Bauman emphasised characteristics of modernity such as division of labour and obedience. on the lower levels of hierarchies, obeying or being a cog in a larger machinery lifts the personal responsibility off the individual, which in Bauman’s view is characteristic of modern societies.2 From this point of view, perpetrators have bureaucratic rather than primitive characteristics. The bureaucratic character of the whole process was emphasised in Chapter 3. it was not driven by individual initiatives such as denouncements, but by orders, and carried through with the help of registers, census data, and systematic surveys of the population. The question is, do bureaucratic motives, and the tendency to minimize personal responsibility and replace it with obedience in particular, also play a part on the individual level? Christopher Browning, in his famous book Ordinary Men, as well as Jan T. gross in his work about the soviet conquest of poland in 1939 (Revolution from Abroad) points to social peer pressure in addition to the lack of personal responsibility among the perpetrators of the 2 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 98–102 161 Participation at the Local Level auxiliary police battalion he describes.3 The ural-siberian method in the 1929–34 anti-kulak campaign used the same kind of mechanism.4 To what extent were the same kind of methods applied in the areas of estonia examined in this local study? Were they important for the individual actors in the estonian countryside? gross also points to old quarrels and vindication.5 in his research, the local perpetrators seemed to form a local network, with previous contacts, or as he put it, “clans”. Finally, stephen Kotkin...