time human tragedy in European history, and one remarkably
poorly reported at the time.
The OGPUplayed a critical role in the execution of Joseph
Stalin’s agricultural policy. The OGPU and Red Army military units
put down thousands of peasant revolts, 6,528 in March 1928 alone.
To control peasant villages, the security service recruited inform-
ants, arrested, tried, and executed rebels, and opened hundreds of
new gulagand exilecommunities. According to the Soviet archives,
in 1929–1932 almost 900,000 people were arrested for counterrevo-
lutionary crimes, and more than 10,000 were executed. Under the law
of “seven-eights,” so called because it was passed on 7 August 1932,
more than 54,000 peasants were convicted and more than 5,400 were
shot for gleaning more than five shocks of wheat from collective
farm fields. As in the Pavlik Morozovcase, some people informed
on their own parents.
During the great Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, the OGPU and
military units stripped peasant households of grain so that the Soviet
Union could continue to export it. OGPU troops prevented peasants
from fleeing starving villages; peasants who had reached cities were
forcibly escorted back to their villages, where they starved. Accord-
ing to one survivor, it was “Auschwitz without the ovens.”
The prisoners and the exiles arrested by the OGPU were the basis
of the Soviet penal camp empire. Thousands of former peasants were
set to work building railroads, lumbering, and mining for gold. Thou-
sands perished building the Belomor Canal. Collectivization had an-
other important impact on the security service: the need to monitor
and punish the rural population and to expand the gulag system
meant that the security service had to expand rapidly. The OGPU had
become by 1934 a major player in Soviet politics at every level, from
Stalin’s Politburo to the collectivized village.COMINTERN. The Communist International, or Comintern, was
founded in Moscow in March 1919 to serve as the general staff of the
world revolution. The second conference of the Comintern in 1920
laid out 21 conditions that socialist and communist partieshad to ad-
here to for membership; foremost among them was loyalty to the So-
viet Union. Created by Vladimir Leninto mobilize support for the
BolshevikRevolution and spread revolution, the Comintern becameCOMINTERN •5106-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 51