“All these words had their effect on me too. I was only a girl—and during meetings and special briefings, from films, books, articles, and radio broadcasts, from Stalin himself, I kept hearing one and the same thing: that kulaks are parasites, that kulaks burn bread and murder children. The fury of the masses had to be ignited against them—yes, those were the words; it was proclaimed that the kulaks must be destroyed as a class, every accursed one of them…I too began to fall under this spell. It seemed that every misfortune was because of the kulaks; if we were to annihilate them immediately, then happy days would dawn for us all. No mercy was to be shown to the kulaks. They were not even human beings; goodness knows what they were—some kind of beasts, I suppose. And so I became an activist. And there were all sorts among us activists. There were those who truly believed, who hated the ‘parasites’ and who really did do all they could for the poorest peasants; there were those with selfish aims of their own; and then there were those—the majority—who were simply obeying orders, people willing to beat their own mothers and fathers to death if that was what they were told to do.”
–Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, 118-119
