Collectivization in the Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, collectivisation was a policy introduced in the late 1920s, of consolidation of individual land and labour into co-operatives called collective farms (Russian: колхоз, kolkhoz) with the goals to increase the agricultural production and to put it under the control of the state.

File:Collectivization-get-rid-of-kulak.jpg

The collectivisation campaign in the USSR, 1930s. The slogan reads: "We kolkhoz farmers are liquidating the kulaks as a class, on the basis of complete collectivisation."

Traditional farming

In Imperial Russia, the Stolypin Reform was aimed at the development of capitalism in agriculture by giving incentives for creation of large farms. The World War I and the following Russian Revolution stopped this process in Russia. After the revolution, the agricultural land was repartitioned, according to one of the revolutionary slogan "Land — to Peasants".

Although conditions varied over the vast expanse of the Soviet Union and among ethnic groups and enclaves, traditional farming on the most territory of the European part of the state and in Siberia was carried on by a host of individual small landowners who lived ether at isolated settlements (khutors) or in villages. Farmland was characteristically laid out in strips divided by boundary ridges and dead furrows, and could be worked by small horse-drawn equipment, but not by modern tractors. The richer peasants might own 2 or 3 horses, 4 or more cows and work 30 or 40 acres (120,000 or 160,000 m²) of land with the help of seasonal employees. The poorest peasants often could not afford a single horse.

The cities' need for food

The World War I, Revolution and subsequent Civil War disrupted farming and food distribution in Russia. Because of the collapse of industrial production and the monetary system, there was little incentive for farmers to sell their products. The money was, in their view, no good, and in any event there was little available to buy. During the Civil War the authorities resorted to the policy of war communism. In agriculture, it amounted to food requisition according to state-defined quotas (продразверстка), with the leaders of a community often held hostage pending delivery of food. The New Economic Policy (NEP) replaced requisitions by a foodstuffs tax (продналог); however, it turned out to favor the capitalistic sector of the peasantry, known as kulaks, an undesirable outcome from the communist point of view.

Goals of collectivisation

Collectivisation sought to modernise Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. In fact, an American Fordson tractor (called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivisation.

Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilisation of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.

It was argued that collectivisation would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks. It was hoped that the goals of collectivisation could be achieved voluntarily, but when the new farms failed to attract the number of peasants hoped, the government blamed the oppression of the kulaks and resorted to forceful implementation of the plan.

Given the goals of the First Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy industrialisation.

Implementation

Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivisation, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in labour and its rewards. For those with property, however, collectivisation meant giving it up to the collective farms and selling most of the food that they produced to the state at low prices set by the state itself, so they were opposed to the idea. Furthermore, collectivisation involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short timeframe, with a high potential for causing alienation, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in obshchinas. The changes were even more dramatic in other places, such as in Ukraine, with its tradition of individual farming, in the Soviet republics of Central Asia, and in the trans-Volga steppes, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.

Due to the aforementioned factors and a number of others, opposition to collectivisation proved to be widespread among the Soviet rural population. Therefore less radical forms of collective farming were also implemented, such as agricultural cooperatives, as well as agricultural associations, known as "Associations for Joint Tillage of Land" (Товарищество по совместной обработке земли, ТОЗ). Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.

However in November 1928, the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivisation. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Grain requisitioning intensified, and wealthy peasants were forced to join the collective farms, giving up their private plots of land. In response to this, many such peasants initiated an armed resistance. As a form of protest, many of the targeted peasants preferred to slaughter their animals rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.

To assist collectivisation, the Party decided to send 25,000 "socially conscious" industry workers to the countryside. This was accomplished during 1929–1933, and these workers have become known as twenty-five-thousanders ("dvadtsatipyatitysyachniki").

In an attempt to overcome this resistance, shock brigades were used to coerce reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and to remove those who were daclared kulaks and "kulaks' helpers".

The price of forced collectivisation was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he discouraged overzealousness:

"It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 per cent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivised. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivisation by more than 100 per cent... some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision."

After the publication of the article, the pressure for collectivisation temporarily decreased and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivisation intensified, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivised.

Due to unreasonably high government quotas, farmers often got far less for their labor than they did before collectivisation, and some refused to work. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivisation was to reduce grain output and almost halve livestock. Despite the initial plans and expectations, collectivisation, accompanied by the famine of 1932–1933, led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940.

Stalin blamed this drop in food production on kulaks (Russian: fist; prosperous peasants), whom he believed were capitalistic parasites who were organising resistance to collectivisation. Indeed, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices. The term "kulak" also came to be used loosely to describe anyone who opposed collectivisation, which included many peasants who were anything but rich.

Many peasants, notably the kulaks, attempted to sabotage collectivisation, to the extent of burning crops, slaughtering draught animals (half of all Soviet livestock by 1932), destroying property, and attacking officials and members of the collectives. [1] Isaac Mazepa, leader of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian Nationalist movement, boasted of "[t]he catastrophe of 1932", the result of "passive resistance … which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest". In his words, "[w]hole tracts were left unsown, [and as much as] 50 per cent [of the crop] was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing". [2] The policy of "раскулачивание", liquidation of kulaks as a class, formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant forced-labour camps or executions for those who were guilty of violence or other destructive acts. Most expropriated kulaks were forcibly resettled in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

On August 7, 1932, the Ukase about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for "any sabotage (вредительство) or theft of communal property" ranged from ten years of incarceration up to the death sentence. Soon it became infamously known as the Law of spikelets ("Закон о колосках"): peasants (including children) who attempted to hand-collect the leftovers of grains in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for "damaging the state grain production". Martin Amis writes in Koba the Dread that the number of sentences only for this particular offence in the period from August 1932 to December 1933 was 125,000.

Casualties

Most historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivisation and the resistance of the kulaks worsened famine conditions during the time of drought of 1932-1933, especially in the Ukraine, a region famous for its rich soil (chernozem). In Ukraine this particular famine is known as the Holodomor. In 1998 the fourth Saturday of each November was set aside as National Day of Remembrance of Famine Victims in the Ukraine. The Famine monument on Mykhailivskyi Square in Kiev commemorates the victims of the Great Famine. The famine also affected Kazakhstan, the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region.

The number of casualties continues to be disputed, with estimates of many millions in the books of Robert Conquest. Such estimates include those who died in the resulting famine, 6 million according to Nicolas Werth. In 1990, however, when Soviet archives were opened to outside scholars, the following figures were released by Soviet and foreign scholars, such as Nicolas Werth. Of the 1,803,392 persons relocated, 1,317,022 reached the labour colonies; the remaining 486,370 either died (mostly from epidemics, poor sanitary conditions, or the failure of local officials to comply with state policy) or escaped. Deaths between 1932 and the end of 1940 totalled 389,521, most of these being from natural causes. Those executed represented only a fraction of the 63,000 kulaks classified as "active counterrevolutionaries". [3] [4] These data imply that the most generous estimate of the death toll for the entire period from 1930 to 1940 is about 750,000. [5]

Many estimates of the death toll of collectivisation include those who died in the resulting famine, 6 million according to Nicolas Werth. For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski estimated that the collectivisation caused 7 million deaths, not including those who died in labor camps. Other sources have estimated several hundred thousand deaths, at most 1 or 2 million. [6] [7] Frederick Schuman, a professor from the US who had travelled through the Ukraine during the period concerned, later wrote of "[l]urid accounts, mostly fictional, [that] appeared in the Nazi press in Germany and in the Hearst press in the United States, often illustrated with photographs that turned out to have been taken along the Volga in 1921" and explained that "[m]ost of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops". [8]

References and further reading

• Robert Conquest The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford University Press, October 1986, hardcover, ISBN 0888641109; trade paperback, Oxford University Press, November, 1987, ISBN 0195051807; hardcover, ISBN 0195040546
• Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village, Indiana University Press, 1988, hardcover, ISBN 0253349532; trade paperback, Indiana University Press, 1988, 372 pages, ISBN 0253204852; earlier editions dating from 1931 are available at used book sellers.
• Ludo Martens, Un autre regard sur Staline, Éditions EPO, 1994, 347 pages, ISBN 2872620818. See the section "External links" for an English translation.
• Nancy Nimitz. "Farm Development 1928–62", in Soviet and East European Agricultures, Jerry F. Karcz, ed. Berkeley, California (US): University of California, 1967.
• The Russians Hedrick Smith (1976) ISBN 0812905210
• Douglas Tottle. Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books, 1987. ISBN 0919396518.
• The Second Socialist Revolution, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, ISBN 0253206146 (a survey by a Soviet sociologist written in the late 1980s which advocated restructuring of the economy)

Related articles

• History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)

External links

• Ukrainian Famine: Excerpts from the Original Electronic Text at the web site of Revelations from the Russian Archives
• "The Collectivization 'Genocide'", in Another View of Stalin, by Ludo Martens. Translated from the French book Un autre regard sur Staline, listed above under "References and further reading".
• "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-year-old famine feeds the right"
• "Soviet Agriculture: A critique of the myths constructed by Western critics", by Joseph E. Medley, Department of Economics, University of Southern Maine (US).
• Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard, by Douglas Tottle.