In Germany, the Nazis succeeded in coercing the capitalists into becoming useful members of the National Socialist Collective. In Russia, the Bolsheviks set out to destroy the capitalists as a class, or rather every human being who by his birth, or position, or accomplishment, had become identified as an active member of the old system. First, they killed off the aristocracy and landed proprietors, numbering several hundred thousand, and including of course the Czar and his family. Then they exterminated the industrialists, not very numerous, because Russia was the least industrialized of the great nations. Nevertheless they were important. With them a little later were exterminated the managers, supervisors and technicians, the scientists, the professional men, dentists, surgeons, lawyers, teachers, and judges. These numbered a million or more. By the time I got to Russia in 1925 all these were fully exterminated. By extermination I mean just that. They were either shot, or sent into exile in the Arctic or the deserts of Central Asia, or condemned to penal labor under such conditions that they died within a few years. They were nearly all killed. Only the most meager remnant remained, a few accidents of survival. I shall never forget the man who peddled cigarettes. I shared a house in Moscow with Theo Seibert, correspondent of the _Hamburger Fremdenblatt_, today, alas, editor of the _Voelkischer Beobachter_. Theo and I used to try to get the old man to talk, but he was too frightened to make much sense. The baldheaded trembling man who begged us to buy his cigarettes had been a Justice of the Moscow Supreme Court! His survival was just an accident. After this initial massacre the Bolsheviks let a pause ensue and for several years no great killings took place, just the routine score or so of executions per month. But when the Five-Year Plan was inaugurated, the decision was made to exterminate the kulaks. A kulak was the term applied originally to a peasant who had risen sufficiently above his neighbors to employ labor. That made him an exploiter, a person who lived from the surplus value produced by his hired hands. The Bolsheviks, however, chose to amplify this category to include all peasants who, even if they did not employ labor, had become in the least degree more prosperous than their neighbors. This prosperity, based for the most part upon the individual industry and sagacity of the kulak, might consist in the possession of two cows to the neighbor’s one. In any case the reasoning of the Bolsheviks was that they could not afford to tolerate the existence of any peasant who, forced to join a collective farm, would at the beginning have to live worse than he had lived as an individual farmer.