Such peasants, the Bolsheviks reasoned, would be just as incorrigible enemies to collectivism as the aristocrats and industrialists. They had to die. They did die. This was the greatest Soviet mass slaughter, because there were a great many more such peasants than there were aristocrats, or industrialists, or intelligentsia. It took about two years to do away with the kulaks. Tens of thousands of G.P.U. troops and agents sought out every family of better-than-average peasants throughout the entire Soviet Union, and forced them into boxcars and herded them off to places of exile, down to Kazakstan or up to Narimsky Krai, to places where it was too hot or too cold to live. It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 of these more enterprising farm workers and their families died at once, or within a few years. This process destroyed what there was left of the originally non-Communist party talent in Russia. You would have thought that this ought to satisfy the Bolsheviks. It did, but it did not satisfy Stalin. There was no more opposition to the Bolshevik program. There was not a human being left in Russia who had any connection with the old regime. Not in modern history has there been such a clean wiping of the slate. The Bolsheviks were left not only as absolute masters, but containing a country in which every living person was their hopeful or cowed collaborator. Then came the fatal quarrel between Stalin and Trotzky. Out of this quarrel came the great purges by Stalin which destroyed for the second time within a generation the principal talent of Russia. This may be regarded as the most fateful slaughter of all. Bolsheviks could argue that the extermination of every vestige of Czarist Russia could be justified on account of the inefficiency, inhumanity, unproductivity of the old regime, and the fact that, according to Bolshevik reasoning, members of the old regime would never cooperate with the new. But now Stalin was destroying not the old, but the new regime, all its talents, its best intellects, its best characters if you like. Beginning with the politicians, he killed off in the course of four years of uninterrupted purges, the top fourth or fifth, to estimate it conservatively, of the Party itself, of the Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders and then of the new Bolshevik intelligentsia, the foremost technicians, managers, supervisors, scientists. There is, of course, enough youth among 200,000,000 for the nation to recover even after such a purge. The youth whom Stalin spared have proved in battle how boundless are the forces of Russia, the first country Hitler ever tackled with lives to waste! Q. _You have not made it clear, if the Soviet system is so brutal a tyranny, how it is that the Red Army has been able to stand up so well to the Germans._