Collectivisation in the USSR
Encyclopedia
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
was a policy pursued under Stalin
between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms
' onMouseout='HidePop("93680")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.
Already in the early 1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I
. The Russian Provisional Government
accomplished little during the difficult wartime
months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Bread, and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.
During the period of war communism
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War
ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
(NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog
or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax
, those with more money paid more.
Until this time, the Bolsheviks had little choice but to allow the peasants to take the land and farm it privately. In the 1920s, however, they began to lean toward the idea of collective agriculture. Memories of World War I were that soldiers from the Green cadres (Yugoslavia)
maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia)
and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier
, when the Red Army
began to conquer Tomsk
in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulak
s. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist
), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.
The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).
The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin
also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
— Izvestia
, November 1928
This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2 million ton shortfall in grains purchased by the state. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo
adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.
The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928 and again the government resorted to requisitions. Much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method
of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.
Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee
in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.
Several forms of collective farming
were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), distinguished according to the extent to which property was held in common:
Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.
In November 1929, the Central Committee
decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps. It has been calculated that one in five of these deportees, many of them women and children, died. In all, 26 million peasants lost their lives to the conditions of the transportation or the conditions of the work camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.
Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic First Five Year Plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.
To assist collectivization, 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-thousander
s ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulak
s and their "agents".
Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. It was often claimed that an American Fordson tractor
(called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.
The means of production
(land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots
were allowed for.
Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.
The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.
The new kolkhoz
y were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as 'gigantomania'. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.
In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes
. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.
contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:
After the publication of the article, the pressure for collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen
, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivization was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
or mir. 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 steppe
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.
Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz
) voluntary. The drive to collectivize came without peasant support. The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it. Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists. Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was 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". Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these crimes. Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.
. Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. This “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm.
Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests. They “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulak
s, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet
and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.
Identifying Soviet power as the Antichrist
also decreased peasant support of the Soviet regime. Rumors spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. It was preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants. The Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state. These rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.
Uncertainty, despair and disorder among peasant society fueled the rumors concerning the Antichrist. These apocalyptic forecasts had existed long before collectivization but became pronounced during the 1930s. Russian villages had faced war, famine, and disease, which were characteristics of the apocalypse. Throughout the years, the eschatological thinking became more common and widespread because of the instability of the peasant mood. Peasants saw the Soviets bringing a different life to them. The collective farm was the coming of the end because it foreshadowed “the reign of the Antichrist on earth.” Rumors of the war and invasion were also derived from apocalyptic thinking but came as an aftermath of the rumors about Antichrist. During the 1920s, peasants were unsure whether another war would begin and fears grew rapidly. Peasants would hear that if they joined the collective farms they would be conscripted to the military or killed by the army.
Rumors targeted peasants to cause fear among them. If peasants gave in to the Soviets, they would be choosing the Antichrist. Peasants would face many challenges, such as famine and the threat of massacre. As a result, these rumors worked in rallying the peasants to resist the government and collectivization because they gave the peasants a “language of protest”.
s peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod
estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II
and the severe drought of 1946
. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.
Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU
blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.
The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
and Kazakhstan
into exile settlements
, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps
.
On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz
or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets
("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis
writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.
The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
It is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin
confided to Winston Churchill
at Yalta
that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization. However this allegation has been criticized by historian Michael Parenti
. At Yalta, Churchill asked Stalin about the famine in the USSR to which Stalin responded by raising his hands, gesturing an unwillingness to speak about the subject, which Churchill, counting the Soviet leader's fingers, interpreted as Stalin confessing a death-toll of 10 million people.
had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
, Omsk Oblast
, Novosibirsk Oblast
, Kemerovo Oblast
, Khakassia
, Irkutsk Oblast
). Stolypin's program
of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast
in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).
It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
was a policy pursued under Stalin
between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms
' onMouseout='HidePop("79498")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.
Already in the early 1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I
. The Russian Provisional Government
accomplished little during the difficult wartime
months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Bread, and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.
During the period of war communism
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War
ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
(NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog
or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax
, those with more money paid more.
Until this time, the Bolsheviks had little choice but to allow the peasants to take the land and farm it privately. In the 1920s, however, they began to lean toward the idea of collective agriculture. Memories of World War I were that soldiers from the Green cadres (Yugoslavia)
maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia)
and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier
, when the Red Army
began to conquer Tomsk
in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulak
s. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist
), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.
The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).
The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin
also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
— Izvestia
, November 1928
This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2 million ton shortfall in grains purchased by the state. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo
adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.
The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928 and again the government resorted to requisitions. Much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method
of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.
Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee
in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.
Several forms of collective farming
were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), distinguished according to the extent to which property was held in common:
Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.
In November 1929, the Central Committee
decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps. It has been calculated that one in five of these deportees, many of them women and children, died. In all, 26 million peasants lost their lives to the conditions of the transportation or the conditions of the work camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.
Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic First Five Year Plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.
To assist collectivization, 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-thousander
s ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulak
s and their "agents".
Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. It was often claimed that an American Fordson tractor
(called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.
The means of production
(land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots
were allowed for.
Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.
The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.
The new kolkhoz
y were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as 'gigantomania'. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.
In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes
. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.
contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:
After the publication of the article, the pressure for collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen
, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivization was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
or mir. 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 steppe
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.
Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz
) voluntary. The drive to collectivize came without peasant support. The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it. Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists. Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was 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". Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these crimes. Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.
. Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. This “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm.
Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests. They “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulak
s, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet
and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.
Identifying Soviet power as the Antichrist
also decreased peasant support of the Soviet regime. Rumors spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. It was preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants. The Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state. These rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.
Uncertainty, despair and disorder among peasant society fueled the rumors concerning the Antichrist. These apocalyptic forecasts had existed long before collectivization but became pronounced during the 1930s. Russian villages had faced war, famine, and disease, which were characteristics of the apocalypse. Throughout the years, the eschatological thinking became more common and widespread because of the instability of the peasant mood. Peasants saw the Soviets bringing a different life to them. The collective farm was the coming of the end because it foreshadowed “the reign of the Antichrist on earth.” Rumors of the war and invasion were also derived from apocalyptic thinking but came as an aftermath of the rumors about Antichrist. During the 1920s, peasants were unsure whether another war would begin and fears grew rapidly. Peasants would hear that if they joined the collective farms they would be conscripted to the military or killed by the army.
Rumors targeted peasants to cause fear among them. If peasants gave in to the Soviets, they would be choosing the Antichrist. Peasants would face many challenges, such as famine and the threat of massacre. As a result, these rumors worked in rallying the peasants to resist the government and collectivization because they gave the peasants a “language of protest”.
s peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod
estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II
and the severe drought of 1946
. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.
Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU
blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.
The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
and Kazakhstan
into exile settlements
, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps
.
On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz
or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets
("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis
writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.
The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
It is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin
confided to Winston Churchill
at Yalta
that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization. However this allegation has been criticized by historian Michael Parenti
. At Yalta, Churchill asked Stalin about the famine in the USSR to which Stalin responded by raising his hands, gesturing an unwillingness to speak about the subject, which Churchill, counting the Soviet leader's fingers, interpreted as Stalin confessing a death-toll of 10 million people.
had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
, Omsk Oblast
, Novosibirsk Oblast
, Kemerovo Oblast
, Khakassia
, Irkutsk Oblast
). Stolypin's program
of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast
in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).
It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
was a policy pursued under Stalin
between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms
' onMouseout='HidePop("90630")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.
Already in the early 1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I
. The Russian Provisional Government
accomplished little during the difficult wartime
months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Bread, and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.
During the period of war communism
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War
ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
(NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog
or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax
, those with more money paid more.
Until this time, the Bolsheviks had little choice but to allow the peasants to take the land and farm it privately. In the 1920s, however, they began to lean toward the idea of collective agriculture. Memories of World War I were that soldiers from the Green cadres (Yugoslavia)
maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia)
and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier
, when the Red Army
began to conquer Tomsk
in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulak
s. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist
), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.
The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).
The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin
also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
— Izvestia
, November 1928
This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2 million ton shortfall in grains purchased by the state. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo
adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.
The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928 and again the government resorted to requisitions. Much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method
of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.
Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee
in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.
Several forms of collective farming
were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), distinguished according to the extent to which property was held in common:
Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.
In November 1929, the Central Committee
decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps. It has been calculated that one in five of these deportees, many of them women and children, died. In all, 26 million peasants lost their lives to the conditions of the transportation or the conditions of the work camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.
Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic First Five Year Plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.
To assist collectivization, 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-thousander
s ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulak
s and their "agents".
Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. It was often claimed that an American Fordson tractor
(called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.
The means of production
(land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots
were allowed for.
Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.
The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.
The new kolkhoz
y were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as 'gigantomania'. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.
In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes
. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.
contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:
After the publication of the article, the pressure for collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen
, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivization was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
or mir. 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 steppe
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.
Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz
) voluntary. The drive to collectivize came without peasant support. The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it. Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists. Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was 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". Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these crimes. Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.
. Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. This “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm.
Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests. They “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulak
s, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet
and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.
Identifying Soviet power as the Antichrist
also decreased peasant support of the Soviet regime. Rumors spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. It was preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants. The Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state. These rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.
Uncertainty, despair and disorder among peasant society fueled the rumors concerning the Antichrist. These apocalyptic forecasts had existed long before collectivization but became pronounced during the 1930s. Russian villages had faced war, famine, and disease, which were characteristics of the apocalypse. Throughout the years, the eschatological thinking became more common and widespread because of the instability of the peasant mood. Peasants saw the Soviets bringing a different life to them. The collective farm was the coming of the end because it foreshadowed “the reign of the Antichrist on earth.” Rumors of the war and invasion were also derived from apocalyptic thinking but came as an aftermath of the rumors about Antichrist. During the 1920s, peasants were unsure whether another war would begin and fears grew rapidly. Peasants would hear that if they joined the collective farms they would be conscripted to the military or killed by the army.
Rumors targeted peasants to cause fear among them. If peasants gave in to the Soviets, they would be choosing the Antichrist. Peasants would face many challenges, such as famine and the threat of massacre. As a result, these rumors worked in rallying the peasants to resist the government and collectivization because they gave the peasants a “language of protest”.
s peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod
estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II
and the severe drought of 1946
. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.
Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU
blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.
The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
and Kazakhstan
into exile settlements
, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps
.
On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz
or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets
("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis
writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.
The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
It is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin
confided to Winston Churchill
at Yalta
that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization. However this allegation has been criticized by historian Michael Parenti
. At Yalta, Churchill asked Stalin about the famine in the USSR to which Stalin responded by raising his hands, gesturing an unwillingness to speak about the subject, which Churchill, counting the Soviet leader's fingers, interpreted as Stalin confessing a death-toll of 10 million people.
had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
, Omsk Oblast
, Novosibirsk Oblast
, Kemerovo Oblast
, Khakassia
, Irkutsk Oblast
). Stolypin's program
of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast
in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).
It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.
About 40 million people were affected by the food shortages including areas near Moscow where mortality rates increased by 50% people were deported and resettled at various points throughout the USSR.
After these deportations, the pace of collectivization increased as a flood of farmers rushed into kolkhozes. Within two weeks 1740 new kolkhozes were established and by the end of 1950, just 4.5% of Latvian farmsteads remained outside the collectivized units; about 226,900 farmsteads belonged to collectives, of which there were now around 14,700. Rural life changed as farmers' daily movements were dictated to by plans, decisions and quotas formulated elsewhere and delivered through an intermediate non-farming hierarchy. The new kolkhozes, especially smaller ones, were ill-equipped and poor - at first farmers were paid once a year in kind
and then in cash, but salaries were very small and at times farmers went unpaid or even ended up owing money to the kholhoz. Farmers still had small pieces of land (not larger than 0.5 ha) around their houses were they grew food for themselves. Along with collectivization, the government tried to uproot the custom of living in individual farmsteads by resettling people in villages. However this process failed due to lack of money since the Soviets planned to move houses as well.
Sources: Sotsialisticheskoe sel'skoe khoziaistvo SSSR, Gosplanizdat, Moscow-Leningrad, 1939 (pp. 42, 43); supplementary numbers for 1927-1935 from Sel'skoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1935, Narkomzem SSSR, Moscow, 1936 (pp. 630, 634, 1347, 1369); 1937 from Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 22, Moscow, 1953 (p. 81); 1939 from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1917-1987, Moscow, 1987 (pp. 35); 1940 from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922-1972, Moscow, 1972 (pp. 215, 240).
The official numbers for collectivized area (the column with percent of sown area in collective use in the table above) are biased upward by two technical factors. First, these official numbers are calculated as percent of sown area in peasant farmsteads, excluding the area cultivated by sovkhozes and other agricultural users. Estimates based on total sown area (including state farms) reduce the share of collective farms between 1935-1940 to about 80%. Second, the household plots of kolkhoz members (i.e., collectivized farmsteads) are included in the land base of collective farms. Without the household plots, arable land in collective cultivation in 1940 was 96.4% of land in collective farms, and not 99.8% as shown by official statistics. Although there is no arguing with the fact that collectivization was sweeping and total between 1928 and 1940, the table below provides different (more realistic) numbers on the extent of collectivization of sown areas.
Distribution of sown area by land users, 1928 and 1940
Source: Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922-1972, Moscow, 1972 (p. 240).
During World War II
, Alfred Rosenberg
, in his capacity as the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
, issued a series of posters announcing the end of the Soviet collective farms in areas of the USSR under German occupation. He also issued an Agrarian Law in February 1942, annulling all Soviet legislation on farming, restoring family farms for those willing to collaborate with the occupiers. But decollectivization conflicted with the wider demands of wartime food production, and Hermann Göring
demanded that the kolkhoz be retained, save for a change of name. Hitler himself denounced the redistribution of land as 'stupid.' In the end, the German occupation authorities retained most of the kolkhozes and simply renamed them "community farms" . German propaganda described this as a preparatory step toward ultimate dissolution of the kolkhozes into private farms, which would be granted to peasants who had loyally delivered compulsory quotas of farm produce to the Germans. By 1943, the German occupation authorities had converted 30% of the kolkhozes into German-sponsored "agricultural cooperatives", but as yet had made no conversions to private farms.
The image on the left is a reproduction of a fake issue of the newspaper Pravda distributed by Germans in the Occupied Eastern Territories in February 1942. It announces "a gift of Adolf Hitler to the Russian people" — a land reform for "the long-suffering Russian peasant". As part of the land reform, "kolkhozes are abolished and an order of community farms is established as a transitional stage to individual peasant farms". The text under the German eagle reads:
Peasants. The German government, having liberated you from bolshevism, has decided to give peasants land in individual use... Own land to the toiling peasant.
The two photographs of man and woman are captioned "Free people on free land!"
Note that the standard Pravda slogan "Workers of all countries unite" is modified in this fake newspaper to "Workers of all countries unite in a fight against Bolshevism".
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
was a policy pursued under Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
' onMouseout='HidePop("93680")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.
Already in the early 1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
Background
After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated, and began to ask for the redistribution of all land. Aspirations to land for all the peasants, however, would be difficult to achieve; given the simple cultivation technology of Russian peasants at the time, there wasn't enough land to sustain everyone who wanted their own farm. The Stolypin agricultural reformsStolypin reform
The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. The Russian Provisional Government
Russian Provisional Government
The Russian Provisional Government was the short-lived administrative body which sought to govern Russia immediately following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II . On September 14, the State Duma of the Russian Empire was officially dissolved by the newly created Directorate, and the country was...
accomplished little during the difficult wartime
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Bread, and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.
During the period of war communism
War communism
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921...
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka , translated as food apportionment or surplus appropriation system, was a governmental program in Russia which obliged peasantry to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price...
meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog
Prodnalog
Prodnalog or Продналог is the Russian word for a tax on food production, paid in kind in Soviet Russia, and sometimes known as "the Tax in Kind"...
or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax
Progressive tax
A progressive tax is a tax by which the tax rate increases as the taxable base amount increases. "Progressive" describes a distribution effect on income or expenditure, referring to the way the rate progresses from low to high, where the average tax rate is less than the marginal tax rate...
, those with more money paid more.
Green cadres
Green cadres consisted of Croatian deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army who, during World War I due to the harsh conditions of warfare and poor motivation, hid in the woods, as outlaws. In the villages they had supporters who have sent them food and clothing, and they often robbed traders and...
maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia)
Red Guards (Russia)
In the context of the history of Russia and Soviet Union, Red Guards were paramilitary formations consisting of workers and partially of soldiers and sailors formed in the time frame of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier
Military Frontier
The Military Frontier was a borderland of Habsburg Austria and later the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which acted as the cordon sanitaire against incursions from the Ottoman Empire...
, when the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
began to conquer Tomsk
Tomsk
Tomsk is a city and the administrative center of Tomsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Tom River. One of the oldest towns in Siberia, Tomsk celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2004...
in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.
The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).
The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
The crisis of 1928
— Izvestia
Izvestia
Izvestia is a long-running high-circulation daily newspaper in Russia. The word "izvestiya" in Russian means "delivered messages", derived from the verb izveshchat . In the context of newspapers it is usually translated as "news" or "reports".-Origin:The newspaper began as the News of the...
, November 1928
This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2 million ton shortfall in grains purchased by the state. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.
The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928 and again the government resorted to requisitions. Much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method
Ural-Siberian method
The Ural-Siberian method was an extraordinary approach launched in the Soviet Union for the collection of grain from the countryside. It was introduced in Urals and Siberia, hence the name. The Ural-Siberian method was a return to the drastic policies that had characterized War Communism in the...
of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.
Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.
Several forms of collective farming
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), distinguished according to the extent to which property was held in common:
- Association for Joint Cultivation of LandAssociation for Joint Cultivation of LandAn Association for Joint Cultivation of Land , TOZ, was a form of Agricultural cooperative in early Soviet Union . In a TOZ, only land and labor were common....
(Товарищество по совместной обработке земли, ТОЗ/TOZ), where only land was in common use; - agricultural artelArtelArtel is a general term for various cooperative associations in Russia and Ukraine, historical and modern.Historically, artels were semi-formal associations for various enterprises: fishing, mining, commerce, of loaders, loggers, thieves, beggars, etc. Often artels worked far from home and lived...
(initially in a loose meaning, later formalized to become an organizational basis of kolkhozes, via The Standard Statute of an Agricultural Artel adopted by Sovnarkom in March 1930); - agricultural communeAgricultural commune-Karl Marx:In his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Karl Marx wrote that historically the "agricultural commune" is the most recent type of archaic forms of societies...
, with the highest level of common use of resources.
Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.
In November 1929, the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps. It has been calculated that one in five of these deportees, many of them women and children, died. In all, 26 million peasants lost their lives to the conditions of the transportation or the conditions of the work camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.
Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic First Five Year Plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.
The all-out drive, winter 1929-30
The situation changed incredibly quickly in the fall of 1929 and winter of 1930. Between September and December 1929, collectivization increased from 7.4% to 15%, but in the first two months of 1930, 11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60% almost overnight.To assist collectivization, 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-thousander
Twenty-five-thousander
Twenty-five-thousanders was a collective name for the frontline workers from the major industrial cities of the USSR, who voluntarily left their homes for rural areas at the call of the CPSU in order to improve the performance of kolkhozes during the agricultural collectivisation in the USSR in...
s ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s and their "agents".
Fordson tractor
Fordson was a brand name used on a range of mass produced general-purpose tractors manufactured by Henry Ford & Son, Inc, from 1917 until 1920 when it was merged into the Ford Motor Company, which used the name until 1964...
(called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.
The means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
(land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots
Household plot
Household plot is a legally defined farm type in all former socialist countries in CIS and CEE. This is a small plot of land attached to a rural residence. The household plot is primarily cultivated for subsistence and its traditional purpose since the Soviet times has been to provide the family...
were allowed for.
Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.
The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.
The new kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
y were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as 'gigantomania'. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.
In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.
"Dizzy with Success"
The price of collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of PravdaPravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:
"It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 percent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivized. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivization 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 collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen
Martin Kitchen
Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. Professor Emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University, he started teaching in 1966...
, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivization was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
Peasant resistance
Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivization, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in labor and its rewards. In fact, however, rural areas did not have many landless peasants, given the wholesale redistribution of land following the Revolution. Alternatively, for those with property, collectivization meant forfeiting land up to the collective farms and selling most of the harvest to the state at minimal prices set by the state itself. This, in turn, engendered opposition to the idea. Furthermore, collectivization involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short time frame, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in the village obshchinaObshchina
Obshchina or Mir ) or Selskoye obshestvo were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy ....
or mir. 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
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
, and in the trans-Volga steppe
Steppe
In physical geography, steppe is an ecoregion, in the montane grasslands and shrublands and temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biomes, characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes...
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.
Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
) voluntary. The drive to collectivize came without peasant support. The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it. Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists. Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was 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". Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these crimes. Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.
Collectivization as a "second serfdom"
Rumors circulated in the villages warning the rural residents that collectivization would bring disorder, hunger, famine, and the destruction of crops and livestock. Readings and reinterpretations of Soviet newspapers labeled collectivization as a second serfdomSerfdom
Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted to the mid-19th century...
. Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. This “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm.
Women's role in resistance
Women were, and still are the primary vehicle for rumors that touched upon issues of family and everyday life. Fears that collectivization would result in the socialization of children, the export of women’s hair, communal wife-sharing, and the notorious common blanket affected many women, causing them to revolt. For example, when it was announced that a collective farm in Crimea would become a commune and that the children would be socialized, women killed their soon-to-be socialized livestock, which spared the children. Stories that the Communists believed short hair gave women a more urban and industrial look insulted peasant women. After local activists in a village in North Caucasus actually confiscated all blankets, more fear dispersed among villagers. The common blanket meant that all men and women would sleep on a seven-hundred meter long bed under a seven-hundred-meter long blanket. Historians argue that women took advantage of these rumors without actually believing them so they could attack the collective farm “under the guise of irrational, nonpolitical protest.” Women were less vulnerable to repression than peasant men, and therefore able to get away with a lot more.Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests. They “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet
Soviet (council)
Soviet was a name used for several Russian political organizations. Examples include the Czar's Council of Ministers, which was called the “Soviet of Ministers”; a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia; and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union....
and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.
Soviet power as the Antichrist
The Communist assault on religion and the church angered many peasants, giving them more reason to revolt. Riots exploded after the closing of churches as early as 1929. Collectivization did not just entail the acquisition of land from farmers but also the closing of churches, burning of icons, and the arrests of priests. Associating the church with the tsarist regime, the Soviet state continued to undermine the church through expropriations and repression. They cut off state financial support to the church and secularized church schools. Peasants began to associate Communists with atheists because the attack on the church was so devastating.Identifying Soviet power as the Antichrist
Antichrist
The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, refers to a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ, while resembling him in a deceptive manner...
also decreased peasant support of the Soviet regime. Rumors spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. It was preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants. The Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state. These rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.
Uncertainty, despair and disorder among peasant society fueled the rumors concerning the Antichrist. These apocalyptic forecasts had existed long before collectivization but became pronounced during the 1930s. Russian villages had faced war, famine, and disease, which were characteristics of the apocalypse. Throughout the years, the eschatological thinking became more common and widespread because of the instability of the peasant mood. Peasants saw the Soviets bringing a different life to them. The collective farm was the coming of the end because it foreshadowed “the reign of the Antichrist on earth.” Rumors of the war and invasion were also derived from apocalyptic thinking but came as an aftermath of the rumors about Antichrist. During the 1920s, peasants were unsure whether another war would begin and fears grew rapidly. Peasants would hear that if they joined the collective farms they would be conscripted to the military or killed by the army.
Rumors targeted peasants to cause fear among them. If peasants gave in to the Soviets, they would be choosing the Antichrist. Peasants would face many challenges, such as famine and the threat of massacre. As a result, these rumors worked in rallying the peasants to resist the government and collectivization because they gave the peasants a “language of protest”.
Resistance to collectivization and consequences
Due to high government production quotaProduction quota
A production quota is a goal for the production of a good. It is typically set by a government or an organization, and can be applied to an individual worker, firm, industry or country. Quotas can be set high to encourage production, or can be used to limit production to control the supply of goods...
s peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod was an American political scientist best known for his work on public administration and as a scholar of the Soviet Union...
estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and the severe drought of 1946
Famines in Russia and USSR
Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR tended to occur on a fairly regular basis, with famine occurring every 10–13 years and droughts every 5–7 years...
. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.
Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.
The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
into exile settlements
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
.
On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets
Law of Spikelets
Law of Spikelets or Law of Three Spikelets was a common name of the Soviet law to protect state property of kolkhozes. The common name came into use because the law was used to prosecute not only property thieves but also anyone who collected as little as a handful of grain or "spikelets" left...
("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.
The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
It is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
confided to Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
at Yalta
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization. However this allegation has been criticized by historian Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an award-winning, internationally known American political scientist, historian, and culture critic who has been writing on a wide range of both scholarly and popular subjects for over forty years. He has taught at several universities and colleges and has been a frequent guest...
. At Yalta, Churchill asked Stalin about the famine in the USSR to which Stalin responded by raising his hands, gesturing an unwillingness to speak about the subject, which Churchill, counting the Soviet leader's fingers, interpreted as Stalin confessing a death-toll of 10 million people.
Siberia
Since the second half of the 19th century, SiberiaSiberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
Altai Krai
Altai Krai is a federal subject of Russia . It borders with, clockwise from the south, Kazakhstan, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo Oblasts, and the Altai Republic. The krai's administrative center is the city of Barnaul...
, Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia. The oblast has an area of and a population of with the majority, 1.15 million, living in Omsk, the administrative center....
, Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia located in southwestern Siberia. Its administrative and economic center is the city of Novosibirsk. Population: -Overview:...
, Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast , also known as Kuzbass after the Kuznetsk Basin, is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia, where the West Siberian Plain meets the South Siberian mountains...
, Khakassia
Khakassia
The Republic of Khakassia or Khakasiya is a federal subject of Russia located in south-central Siberia. Its capital city is Abakan, which is also the largest city in the republic...
, Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia , located in southeastern Siberia in the basins of Angara River, Lena, and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers. The administrative center is the city of Irkutsk. Population: -History:...
). Stolypin's program
Stolypin reform
The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast
Tomsk Oblast
Tomsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . It lies in the southeastern West Siberian Plain, in the southwest of the Siberian Federal District. Its administrative center is the city of Tomsk. Population:...
in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).
It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.
Central Asia and Kazakhstan
In areas where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, collectivization met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakistan fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. Restrictions on migration proved ineffective and half a million migrated to other regions of Central Asia and 1.5 million to ChinaCollectivization in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
was a policy pursued under Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
' onMouseout='HidePop("79498")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.
Already in the early 1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
Background
After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated, and began to ask for the redistribution of all land. Aspirations to land for all the peasants, however, would be difficult to achieve; given the simple cultivation technology of Russian peasants at the time, there wasn't enough land to sustain everyone who wanted their own farm. The Stolypin agricultural reformsStolypin reform
The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. The Russian Provisional Government
Russian Provisional Government
The Russian Provisional Government was the short-lived administrative body which sought to govern Russia immediately following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II . On September 14, the State Duma of the Russian Empire was officially dissolved by the newly created Directorate, and the country was...
accomplished little during the difficult wartime
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Bread, and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.
During the period of war communism
War communism
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921...
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka , translated as food apportionment or surplus appropriation system, was a governmental program in Russia which obliged peasantry to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price...
meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog
Prodnalog
Prodnalog or Продналог is the Russian word for a tax on food production, paid in kind in Soviet Russia, and sometimes known as "the Tax in Kind"...
or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax
Progressive tax
A progressive tax is a tax by which the tax rate increases as the taxable base amount increases. "Progressive" describes a distribution effect on income or expenditure, referring to the way the rate progresses from low to high, where the average tax rate is less than the marginal tax rate...
, those with more money paid more.
Green cadres
Green cadres consisted of Croatian deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army who, during World War I due to the harsh conditions of warfare and poor motivation, hid in the woods, as outlaws. In the villages they had supporters who have sent them food and clothing, and they often robbed traders and...
maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia)
Red Guards (Russia)
In the context of the history of Russia and Soviet Union, Red Guards were paramilitary formations consisting of workers and partially of soldiers and sailors formed in the time frame of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier
Military Frontier
The Military Frontier was a borderland of Habsburg Austria and later the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which acted as the cordon sanitaire against incursions from the Ottoman Empire...
, when the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
began to conquer Tomsk
Tomsk
Tomsk is a city and the administrative center of Tomsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Tom River. One of the oldest towns in Siberia, Tomsk celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2004...
in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.
The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).
The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
The crisis of 1928
— Izvestia
Izvestia
Izvestia is a long-running high-circulation daily newspaper in Russia. The word "izvestiya" in Russian means "delivered messages", derived from the verb izveshchat . In the context of newspapers it is usually translated as "news" or "reports".-Origin:The newspaper began as the News of the...
, November 1928
This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2 million ton shortfall in grains purchased by the state. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.
The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928 and again the government resorted to requisitions. Much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method
Ural-Siberian method
The Ural-Siberian method was an extraordinary approach launched in the Soviet Union for the collection of grain from the countryside. It was introduced in Urals and Siberia, hence the name. The Ural-Siberian method was a return to the drastic policies that had characterized War Communism in the...
of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.
Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.
Several forms of collective farming
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), distinguished according to the extent to which property was held in common:
- Association for Joint Cultivation of LandAssociation for Joint Cultivation of LandAn Association for Joint Cultivation of Land , TOZ, was a form of Agricultural cooperative in early Soviet Union . In a TOZ, only land and labor were common....
(Товарищество по совместной обработке земли, ТОЗ/TOZ), where only land was in common use; - agricultural artelArtelArtel is a general term for various cooperative associations in Russia and Ukraine, historical and modern.Historically, artels were semi-formal associations for various enterprises: fishing, mining, commerce, of loaders, loggers, thieves, beggars, etc. Often artels worked far from home and lived...
(initially in a loose meaning, later formalized to become an organizational basis of kolkhozes, via The Standard Statute of an Agricultural Artel adopted by Sovnarkom in March 1930); - agricultural communeAgricultural commune-Karl Marx:In his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Karl Marx wrote that historically the "agricultural commune" is the most recent type of archaic forms of societies...
, with the highest level of common use of resources.
Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.
In November 1929, the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps. It has been calculated that one in five of these deportees, many of them women and children, died. In all, 26 million peasants lost their lives to the conditions of the transportation or the conditions of the work camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.
Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic First Five Year Plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.
The all-out drive, winter 1929-30
The situation changed incredibly quickly in the fall of 1929 and winter of 1930. Between September and December 1929, collectivization increased from 7.4% to 15%, but in the first two months of 1930, 11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60% almost overnight.To assist collectivization, 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-thousander
Twenty-five-thousander
Twenty-five-thousanders was a collective name for the frontline workers from the major industrial cities of the USSR, who voluntarily left their homes for rural areas at the call of the CPSU in order to improve the performance of kolkhozes during the agricultural collectivisation in the USSR in...
s ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s and their "agents".
Fordson tractor
Fordson was a brand name used on a range of mass produced general-purpose tractors manufactured by Henry Ford & Son, Inc, from 1917 until 1920 when it was merged into the Ford Motor Company, which used the name until 1964...
(called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.
The means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
(land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots
Household plot
Household plot is a legally defined farm type in all former socialist countries in CIS and CEE. This is a small plot of land attached to a rural residence. The household plot is primarily cultivated for subsistence and its traditional purpose since the Soviet times has been to provide the family...
were allowed for.
Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.
The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.
The new kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
y were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as 'gigantomania'. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.
In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.
"Dizzy with Success"
The price of collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of PravdaPravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:
"It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 percent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivized. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivization 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 collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen
Martin Kitchen
Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. Professor Emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University, he started teaching in 1966...
, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivization was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
Peasant resistance
Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivization, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in labor and its rewards. In fact, however, rural areas did not have many landless peasants, given the wholesale redistribution of land following the Revolution. Alternatively, for those with property, collectivization meant forfeiting land up to the collective farms and selling most of the harvest to the state at minimal prices set by the state itself. This, in turn, engendered opposition to the idea. Furthermore, collectivization involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short time frame, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in the village obshchinaObshchina
Obshchina or Mir ) or Selskoye obshestvo were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy ....
or mir. 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
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
, and in the trans-Volga steppe
Steppe
In physical geography, steppe is an ecoregion, in the montane grasslands and shrublands and temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biomes, characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes...
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.
Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
) voluntary. The drive to collectivize came without peasant support. The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it. Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists. Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was 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". Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these crimes. Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.
Collectivization as a "second serfdom"
Rumors circulated in the villages warning the rural residents that collectivization would bring disorder, hunger, famine, and the destruction of crops and livestock. Readings and reinterpretations of Soviet newspapers labeled collectivization as a second serfdomSerfdom
Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted to the mid-19th century...
. Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. This “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm.
Women's role in resistance
Women were, and still are the primary vehicle for rumors that touched upon issues of family and everyday life. Fears that collectivization would result in the socialization of children, the export of women’s hair, communal wife-sharing, and the notorious common blanket affected many women, causing them to revolt. For example, when it was announced that a collective farm in Crimea would become a commune and that the children would be socialized, women killed their soon-to-be socialized livestock, which spared the children. Stories that the Communists believed short hair gave women a more urban and industrial look insulted peasant women. After local activists in a village in North Caucasus actually confiscated all blankets, more fear dispersed among villagers. The common blanket meant that all men and women would sleep on a seven-hundred meter long bed under a seven-hundred-meter long blanket. Historians argue that women took advantage of these rumors without actually believing them so they could attack the collective farm “under the guise of irrational, nonpolitical protest.” Women were less vulnerable to repression than peasant men, and therefore able to get away with a lot more.Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests. They “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet
Soviet (council)
Soviet was a name used for several Russian political organizations. Examples include the Czar's Council of Ministers, which was called the “Soviet of Ministers”; a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia; and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union....
and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.
Soviet power as the Antichrist
The Communist assault on religion and the church angered many peasants, giving them more reason to revolt. Riots exploded after the closing of churches as early as 1929. Collectivization did not just entail the acquisition of land from farmers but also the closing of churches, burning of icons, and the arrests of priests. Associating the church with the tsarist regime, the Soviet state continued to undermine the church through expropriations and repression. They cut off state financial support to the church and secularized church schools. Peasants began to associate Communists with atheists because the attack on the church was so devastating.Identifying Soviet power as the Antichrist
Antichrist
The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, refers to a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ, while resembling him in a deceptive manner...
also decreased peasant support of the Soviet regime. Rumors spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. It was preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants. The Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state. These rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.
Uncertainty, despair and disorder among peasant society fueled the rumors concerning the Antichrist. These apocalyptic forecasts had existed long before collectivization but became pronounced during the 1930s. Russian villages had faced war, famine, and disease, which were characteristics of the apocalypse. Throughout the years, the eschatological thinking became more common and widespread because of the instability of the peasant mood. Peasants saw the Soviets bringing a different life to them. The collective farm was the coming of the end because it foreshadowed “the reign of the Antichrist on earth.” Rumors of the war and invasion were also derived from apocalyptic thinking but came as an aftermath of the rumors about Antichrist. During the 1920s, peasants were unsure whether another war would begin and fears grew rapidly. Peasants would hear that if they joined the collective farms they would be conscripted to the military or killed by the army.
Rumors targeted peasants to cause fear among them. If peasants gave in to the Soviets, they would be choosing the Antichrist. Peasants would face many challenges, such as famine and the threat of massacre. As a result, these rumors worked in rallying the peasants to resist the government and collectivization because they gave the peasants a “language of protest”.
Resistance to collectivization and consequences
Due to high government production quotaProduction quota
A production quota is a goal for the production of a good. It is typically set by a government or an organization, and can be applied to an individual worker, firm, industry or country. Quotas can be set high to encourage production, or can be used to limit production to control the supply of goods...
s peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod was an American political scientist best known for his work on public administration and as a scholar of the Soviet Union...
estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and the severe drought of 1946
Famines in Russia and USSR
Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR tended to occur on a fairly regular basis, with famine occurring every 10–13 years and droughts every 5–7 years...
. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.
Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.
The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
into exile settlements
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
.
On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets
Law of Spikelets
Law of Spikelets or Law of Three Spikelets was a common name of the Soviet law to protect state property of kolkhozes. The common name came into use because the law was used to prosecute not only property thieves but also anyone who collected as little as a handful of grain or "spikelets" left...
("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.
The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
It is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
confided to Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
at Yalta
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization. However this allegation has been criticized by historian Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an award-winning, internationally known American political scientist, historian, and culture critic who has been writing on a wide range of both scholarly and popular subjects for over forty years. He has taught at several universities and colleges and has been a frequent guest...
. At Yalta, Churchill asked Stalin about the famine in the USSR to which Stalin responded by raising his hands, gesturing an unwillingness to speak about the subject, which Churchill, counting the Soviet leader's fingers, interpreted as Stalin confessing a death-toll of 10 million people.
Siberia
Since the second half of the 19th century, SiberiaSiberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
Altai Krai
Altai Krai is a federal subject of Russia . It borders with, clockwise from the south, Kazakhstan, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo Oblasts, and the Altai Republic. The krai's administrative center is the city of Barnaul...
, Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia. The oblast has an area of and a population of with the majority, 1.15 million, living in Omsk, the administrative center....
, Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia located in southwestern Siberia. Its administrative and economic center is the city of Novosibirsk. Population: -Overview:...
, Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast , also known as Kuzbass after the Kuznetsk Basin, is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia, where the West Siberian Plain meets the South Siberian mountains...
, Khakassia
Khakassia
The Republic of Khakassia or Khakasiya is a federal subject of Russia located in south-central Siberia. Its capital city is Abakan, which is also the largest city in the republic...
, Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia , located in southeastern Siberia in the basins of Angara River, Lena, and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers. The administrative center is the city of Irkutsk. Population: -History:...
). Stolypin's program
Stolypin reform
The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast
Tomsk Oblast
Tomsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . It lies in the southeastern West Siberian Plain, in the southwest of the Siberian Federal District. Its administrative center is the city of Tomsk. Population:...
in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).
It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.
Central Asia and Kazakhstan
In areas where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, collectivization met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakistan fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. Restrictions on migration proved ineffective and half a million migrated to other regions of Central Asia and 1.5 million to ChinaCollectivization in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
was a policy pursued under Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
' onMouseout='HidePop("90630")' href="/topics/Kolkhoz">kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase the food supply for urban populations, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program.
Already in the early 1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivized" as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, and other assets. The sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs.
Background
After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated, and began to ask for the redistribution of all land. Aspirations to land for all the peasants, however, would be difficult to achieve; given the simple cultivation technology of Russian peasants at the time, there wasn't enough land to sustain everyone who wanted their own farm. The Stolypin agricultural reformsStolypin reform
The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. The Russian Provisional Government
Russian Provisional Government
The Russian Provisional Government was the short-lived administrative body which sought to govern Russia immediately following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II . On September 14, the State Duma of the Russian Empire was officially dissolved by the newly created Directorate, and the country was...
accomplished little during the difficult wartime
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace, Bread, and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.
During the period of war communism
War communism
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921...
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka , translated as food apportionment or surplus appropriation system, was a governmental program in Russia which obliged peasantry to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price...
meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog
Prodnalog
Prodnalog or Продналог is the Russian word for a tax on food production, paid in kind in Soviet Russia, and sometimes known as "the Tax in Kind"...
or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax
Progressive tax
A progressive tax is a tax by which the tax rate increases as the taxable base amount increases. "Progressive" describes a distribution effect on income or expenditure, referring to the way the rate progresses from low to high, where the average tax rate is less than the marginal tax rate...
, those with more money paid more.
Green cadres
Green cadres consisted of Croatian deserters from the Austro-Hungarian Army who, during World War I due to the harsh conditions of warfare and poor motivation, hid in the woods, as outlaws. In the villages they had supporters who have sent them food and clothing, and they often robbed traders and...
maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia)
Red Guards (Russia)
In the context of the history of Russia and Soviet Union, Red Guards were paramilitary formations consisting of workers and partially of soldiers and sailors formed in the time frame of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier
Military Frontier
The Military Frontier was a borderland of Habsburg Austria and later the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which acted as the cordon sanitaire against incursions from the Ottoman Empire...
, when the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
began to conquer Tomsk
Tomsk
Tomsk is a city and the administrative center of Tomsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Tom River. One of the oldest towns in Siberia, Tomsk celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2004...
in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.
The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).
The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
The crisis of 1928
— Izvestia
Izvestia
Izvestia is a long-running high-circulation daily newspaper in Russia. The word "izvestiya" in Russian means "delivered messages", derived from the verb izveshchat . In the context of newspapers it is usually translated as "news" or "reports".-Origin:The newspaper began as the News of the...
, November 1928
This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2 million ton shortfall in grains purchased by the state. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Instead of raising the price, the Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain.
The seizures of grain discouraged the peasants and less grain was produced during 1928 and again the government resorted to requisitions. Much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the "kulaks." In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method
Ural-Siberian method
The Ural-Siberian method was an extraordinary approach launched in the Soviet Union for the collection of grain from the countryside. It was introduced in Urals and Siberia, hence the name. The Ural-Siberian method was a return to the drastic policies that had characterized War Communism in the...
of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place.
Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.
Several forms of collective farming
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), distinguished according to the extent to which property was held in common:
- Association for Joint Cultivation of LandAssociation for Joint Cultivation of LandAn Association for Joint Cultivation of Land , TOZ, was a form of Agricultural cooperative in early Soviet Union . In a TOZ, only land and labor were common....
(Товарищество по совместной обработке земли, ТОЗ/TOZ), where only land was in common use; - agricultural artelArtelArtel is a general term for various cooperative associations in Russia and Ukraine, historical and modern.Historically, artels were semi-formal associations for various enterprises: fishing, mining, commerce, of loaders, loggers, thieves, beggars, etc. Often artels worked far from home and lived...
(initially in a loose meaning, later formalized to become an organizational basis of kolkhozes, via The Standard Statute of an Agricultural Artel adopted by Sovnarkom in March 1930); - agricultural communeAgricultural commune-Karl Marx:In his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, Karl Marx wrote that historically the "agricultural commune" is the most recent type of archaic forms of societies...
, with the highest level of common use of resources.
Also, various cooperatives for processing of agricultural products were installed.
In November 1929, the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Stalin had many so-called "kulaks" transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labor camps. It has been calculated that one in five of these deportees, many of them women and children, died. In all, 26 million peasants lost their lives to the conditions of the transportation or the conditions of the work camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often arming themselves against the activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock.
Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about one percent of farm land was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic First Five Year Plan only forecast 15 percent of farms to be run collectively.
The all-out drive, winter 1929-30
The situation changed incredibly quickly in the fall of 1929 and winter of 1930. Between September and December 1929, collectivization increased from 7.4% to 15%, but in the first two months of 1930, 11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60% almost overnight.To assist collectivization, 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-thousander
Twenty-five-thousander
Twenty-five-thousanders was a collective name for the frontline workers from the major industrial cities of the USSR, who voluntarily left their homes for rural areas at the call of the CPSU in order to improve the performance of kolkhozes during the agricultural collectivisation in the USSR in...
s ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s and their "agents".
Fordson tractor
Fordson was a brand name used on a range of mass produced general-purpose tractors manufactured by Henry Ford & Son, Inc, from 1917 until 1920 when it was merged into the Ford Motor Company, which used the name until 1964...
(called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.
The means of production
Means of production
Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital...
(land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots
Household plot
Household plot is a legally defined farm type in all former socialist countries in CIS and CEE. This is a small plot of land attached to a rural residence. The household plot is primarily cultivated for subsistence and its traditional purpose since the Soviet times has been to provide the family...
were allowed for.
Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.
The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.
The new kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
y were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as 'gigantomania'. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.
In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.
"Dizzy with Success"
The price of collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of PravdaPravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process:
"It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 percent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivized. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivization 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 collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. According to Martin Kitchen
Martin Kitchen
Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. Professor Emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University, he started teaching in 1966...
, the number of members of collective farms dropped by 50% in 1930. But soon collectivization was intensified again, and by 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
Peasant resistance
Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivization, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in labor and its rewards. In fact, however, rural areas did not have many landless peasants, given the wholesale redistribution of land following the Revolution. Alternatively, for those with property, collectivization meant forfeiting land up to the collective farms and selling most of the harvest to the state at minimal prices set by the state itself. This, in turn, engendered opposition to the idea. Furthermore, collectivization involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short time frame, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in the village obshchinaObshchina
Obshchina or Mir ) or Selskoye obshestvo were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy ....
or mir. 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
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
, and in the trans-Volga steppe
Steppe
In physical geography, steppe is an ecoregion, in the montane grasslands and shrublands and temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biomes, characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes...
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.
Peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
) voluntary. The drive to collectivize came without peasant support. The intent was to increase state grain procurements without giving the peasants the opportunity to withhold grain from the market. Collectivization would increase the total crop and food supply but the locals knew that they were not likely to benefit from it. Peasants tried to protest through peaceful means by speaking out at collectivization meetings and writing letters to the central authorities. When their strategies failed, villagers turned to violence: committing arson, and lynching and murdering local authorities, kolkhoz leaders, and activists. Others responded with acts of sabotage, including the burning of crops and the slaughter of draught animals. According to Party sources, there were also some cases of destruction of property, and attacks on officials and members of the collectives. Isaac Mazepa, prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in 1919–1920, claimed "[t]he catastrophe of 1932" was 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". Fueled by fear and anxiety, rumors spread throughout the villages leading to these crimes. Rumors associated the Soviet government with the Antichrist (godless and evil), threatened an end to traditional ways of peasant life, and worked to unite the peasants to protest against collectivization.
Collectivization as a "second serfdom"
Rumors circulated in the villages warning the rural residents that collectivization would bring disorder, hunger, famine, and the destruction of crops and livestock. Readings and reinterpretations of Soviet newspapers labeled collectivization as a second serfdomSerfdom
Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted to the mid-19th century...
. Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have the right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. This “second serfdom” became code for the Communist betrayal of the revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead they had to give up their land and livestock to the collective farm.
Women's role in resistance
Women were, and still are the primary vehicle for rumors that touched upon issues of family and everyday life. Fears that collectivization would result in the socialization of children, the export of women’s hair, communal wife-sharing, and the notorious common blanket affected many women, causing them to revolt. For example, when it was announced that a collective farm in Crimea would become a commune and that the children would be socialized, women killed their soon-to-be socialized livestock, which spared the children. Stories that the Communists believed short hair gave women a more urban and industrial look insulted peasant women. After local activists in a village in North Caucasus actually confiscated all blankets, more fear dispersed among villagers. The common blanket meant that all men and women would sleep on a seven-hundred meter long bed under a seven-hundred-meter long blanket. Historians argue that women took advantage of these rumors without actually believing them so they could attack the collective farm “under the guise of irrational, nonpolitical protest.” Women were less vulnerable to repression than peasant men, and therefore able to get away with a lot more.Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials’ perceptions of their protests. They “physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials.” Officials ran away and hid to let the riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet
Soviet (council)
Soviet was a name used for several Russian political organizations. Examples include the Czar's Council of Ministers, which was called the “Soviet of Ministers”; a workers' local council in late Imperial Russia; and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union....
and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as the main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization.
Soviet power as the Antichrist
The Communist assault on religion and the church angered many peasants, giving them more reason to revolt. Riots exploded after the closing of churches as early as 1929. Collectivization did not just entail the acquisition of land from farmers but also the closing of churches, burning of icons, and the arrests of priests. Associating the church with the tsarist regime, the Soviet state continued to undermine the church through expropriations and repression. They cut off state financial support to the church and secularized church schools. Peasants began to associate Communists with atheists because the attack on the church was so devastating.Identifying Soviet power as the Antichrist
Antichrist
The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, refers to a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ, while resembling him in a deceptive manner...
also decreased peasant support of the Soviet regime. Rumors spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. It was preached that the Antichrist had come to place “the Devil’s mark” on the peasants. The Soviet state was promising the peasants a better life but was actually signing them up for hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist policies of the state. These rumors of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to the government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages.
Uncertainty, despair and disorder among peasant society fueled the rumors concerning the Antichrist. These apocalyptic forecasts had existed long before collectivization but became pronounced during the 1930s. Russian villages had faced war, famine, and disease, which were characteristics of the apocalypse. Throughout the years, the eschatological thinking became more common and widespread because of the instability of the peasant mood. Peasants saw the Soviets bringing a different life to them. The collective farm was the coming of the end because it foreshadowed “the reign of the Antichrist on earth.” Rumors of the war and invasion were also derived from apocalyptic thinking but came as an aftermath of the rumors about Antichrist. During the 1920s, peasants were unsure whether another war would begin and fears grew rapidly. Peasants would hear that if they joined the collective farms they would be conscripted to the military or killed by the army.
Rumors targeted peasants to cause fear among them. If peasants gave in to the Soviets, they would be choosing the Antichrist. Peasants would face many challenges, such as famine and the threat of massacre. As a result, these rumors worked in rallying the peasants to resist the government and collectivization because they gave the peasants a “language of protest”.
Resistance to collectivization and consequences
Due to high government production quotaProduction quota
A production quota is a goal for the production of a good. It is typically set by a government or an organization, and can be applied to an individual worker, firm, industry or country. Quotas can be set high to encourage production, or can be used to limit production to control the supply of goods...
s peasants received, as a rule, less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod
Merle Fainsod was an American political scientist best known for his work on public administration and as a scholar of the Soviet Union...
estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce output and cut the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and the severe drought of 1946
Famines in Russia and USSR
Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR tended to occur on a fairly regular basis, with famine occurring every 10–13 years and droughts every 5–7 years...
. However the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels.
Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as 'kulaks' (Russian: fist), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as a class.
The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
into exile settlements
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
, and most of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labor camps
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
.
On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
or cooperative property was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets
Law of Spikelets
Law of Spikelets or Law of Three Spikelets was a common name of the Soviet law to protect state property of kolkhozes. The common name came into use because the law was used to prosecute not only property thieves but also anyone who collected as little as a handful of grain or "spikelets" left...
("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
writes in Koba the Dread that 125,000 sentences were passed for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933.
The deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between 4 and 10 million. According to official Soviet figures, some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas but only 12.6 million moved to state jobs. The implication is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people.
It is said that in 1945, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
confided to Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
at Yalta
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the wartime meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D...
that 10 million people died in the course of collectivization. However this allegation has been criticized by historian Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an award-winning, internationally known American political scientist, historian, and culture critic who has been writing on a wide range of both scholarly and popular subjects for over forty years. He has taught at several universities and colleges and has been a frequent guest...
. At Yalta, Churchill asked Stalin about the famine in the USSR to which Stalin responded by raising his hands, gesturing an unwillingness to speak about the subject, which Churchill, counting the Soviet leader's fingers, interpreted as Stalin confessing a death-toll of 10 million people.
Siberia
Since the second half of the 19th century, SiberiaSiberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
Altai Krai
Altai Krai is a federal subject of Russia . It borders with, clockwise from the south, Kazakhstan, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo Oblasts, and the Altai Republic. The krai's administrative center is the city of Barnaul...
, Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia. The oblast has an area of and a population of with the majority, 1.15 million, living in Omsk, the administrative center....
, Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia located in southwestern Siberia. Its administrative and economic center is the city of Novosibirsk. Population: -Overview:...
, Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast , also known as Kuzbass after the Kuznetsk Basin, is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia, where the West Siberian Plain meets the South Siberian mountains...
, Khakassia
Khakassia
The Republic of Khakassia or Khakasiya is a federal subject of Russia located in south-central Siberia. Its capital city is Abakan, which is also the largest city in the republic...
, Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia , located in southeastern Siberia in the basins of Angara River, Lena, and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers. The administrative center is the city of Irkutsk. Population: -History:...
). Stolypin's program
Stolypin reform
The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...
of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in the empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labeled grain, flour and butter into central Russia and Western Europe.
In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast
Tomsk Oblast
Tomsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . It lies in the southeastern West Siberian Plain, in the southwest of the Siberian Federal District. Its administrative center is the city of Tomsk. Population:...
in the northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества).
It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of peasant against Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonisation of the countryside.
Central Asia and Kazakhstan
In areas where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, collectivization met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakistan fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. Restrictions on migration proved ineffective and half a million migrated to other regions of Central Asia and 1.5 million to China in Ukrainian. During the similar famines of 1921–1923, numerous campaigns, inside the country, as well as internationally were held to raise money and food in support of the population of the affected regions. Nothing similar was done during the drought of 1932–1933, mainly because the information about the disaster was suppressed by Stalin. Moreover, migration of population from the affected areas was restricted.About 40 million people were affected by the food shortages including areas near Moscow where mortality rates increased by 50% people were deported and resettled at various points throughout the USSR.
After these deportations, the pace of collectivization increased as a flood of farmers rushed into kolkhozes. Within two weeks 1740 new kolkhozes were established and by the end of 1950, just 4.5% of Latvian farmsteads remained outside the collectivized units; about 226,900 farmsteads belonged to collectives, of which there were now around 14,700. Rural life changed as farmers' daily movements were dictated to by plans, decisions and quotas formulated elsewhere and delivered through an intermediate non-farming hierarchy. The new kolkhozes, especially smaller ones, were ill-equipped and poor - at first farmers were paid once a year in kind
Payment in kind
Payment in kind refers to payment for goods or services with a medium other than legal tender ....
and then in cash, but salaries were very small and at times farmers went unpaid or even ended up owing money to the kholhoz. Farmers still had small pieces of land (not larger than 0.5 ha) around their houses were they grew food for themselves. Along with collectivization, the government tried to uproot the custom of living in individual farmsteads by resettling people in villages. However this process failed due to lack of money since the Soviets planned to move houses as well.
Progress of collectivization in the USSR 1927-1940
| Year | Number of collective farms | Percent of farmsteads in collective farms | Percent of sown area in collective use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1927 | 14,800 | 0.8 | – |
| 1928 | 33,300 | 1.7 | 2.3 |
| 1929 | 57,000 | 3.9 | 4.9 |
| 1930 | 85,900 | 23.6 | 33.6 |
| 1931 | 211,100 | 52.7 | 67.8 |
| 1932 | 211,100 | 61.5 | 77.7 |
| 1933 | 224,500 | 65.6 | 83.1 |
| 1934 | 233,300 | 71.4 | 87.4 |
| 1935 | 249,400 | 83.2 | 94.1 |
| 1936 | – | 90.5 | 98.2 |
| 1937 | 243,700 | 93.0 | 99.1 |
| 1938 | 242,400 | 93.5 | 99.8 |
| 1939 | 235,300 | 95.6 | – |
| 1940 | 236,900 | 96.9 | 99.8 |
Sources: Sotsialisticheskoe sel'skoe khoziaistvo SSSR, Gosplanizdat, Moscow-Leningrad, 1939 (pp. 42, 43); supplementary numbers for 1927-1935 from Sel'skoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1935, Narkomzem SSSR, Moscow, 1936 (pp. 630, 634, 1347, 1369); 1937 from Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 22, Moscow, 1953 (p. 81); 1939 from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1917-1987, Moscow, 1987 (pp. 35); 1940 from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922-1972, Moscow, 1972 (pp. 215, 240).
The official numbers for collectivized area (the column with percent of sown area in collective use in the table above) are biased upward by two technical factors. First, these official numbers are calculated as percent of sown area in peasant farmsteads, excluding the area cultivated by sovkhozes and other agricultural users. Estimates based on total sown area (including state farms) reduce the share of collective farms between 1935-1940 to about 80%. Second, the household plots of kolkhoz members (i.e., collectivized farmsteads) are included in the land base of collective farms. Without the household plots, arable land in collective cultivation in 1940 was 96.4% of land in collective farms, and not 99.8% as shown by official statistics. Although there is no arguing with the fact that collectivization was sweeping and total between 1928 and 1940, the table below provides different (more realistic) numbers on the extent of collectivization of sown areas.
Distribution of sown area by land users, 1928 and 1940
| Land users | 1928 | 1940 |
|---|---|---|
| All farms, '000 hectares | 113,000 | 150,600 |
| State farms (sovkhoz Sovkhoz A sovkhoz , typically translated as state farm, is a state-owned farm. The term originated in the Soviet Union, hence the name. The term is still in use in some post-Soviet states, e.g., Russia and Belarus. It is usually contrasted with kolkhoz, which is a collective-owned farm... y) |
1.5% | 8.8% |
| Collective farms (kolkhoz Kolkhoz A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство... y) |
1.2 | 78.2 |
| Household plots (in collective and state farms) |
1.1 | 3.5 |
| Peasant farms and other users | 96.2 | 9.5 |
Source: Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922-1972, Moscow, 1972 (p. 240).
Decollectivization under German occupation
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
, in his capacity as the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories
The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was created by Adolf Hitler on July 1941 and headed by the Nazi theoretical expert and Baltic German, Alfred Rosenberg. Alfred Meyer was Rosenberg's deputy. This ministry was created to control the vast areas captured by the Germans in...
, issued a series of posters announcing the end of the Soviet collective farms in areas of the USSR under German occupation. He also issued an Agrarian Law in February 1942, annulling all Soviet legislation on farming, restoring family farms for those willing to collaborate with the occupiers. But decollectivization conflicted with the wider demands of wartime food production, and Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...
demanded that the kolkhoz be retained, save for a change of name. Hitler himself denounced the redistribution of land as 'stupid.' In the end, the German occupation authorities retained most of the kolkhozes and simply renamed them "community farms" . German propaganda described this as a preparatory step toward ultimate dissolution of the kolkhozes into private farms, which would be granted to peasants who had loyally delivered compulsory quotas of farm produce to the Germans. By 1943, the German occupation authorities had converted 30% of the kolkhozes into German-sponsored "agricultural cooperatives", but as yet had made no conversions to private farms.
The image on the left is a reproduction of a fake issue of the newspaper Pravda distributed by Germans in the Occupied Eastern Territories in February 1942. It announces "a gift of Adolf Hitler to the Russian people" — a land reform for "the long-suffering Russian peasant". As part of the land reform, "kolkhozes are abolished and an order of community farms is established as a transitional stage to individual peasant farms". The text under the German eagle reads:
Peasants. The German government, having liberated you from bolshevism, has decided to give peasants land in individual use... Own land to the toiling peasant.
The two photographs of man and woman are captioned "Free people on free land!"
Note that the standard Pravda slogan "Workers of all countries unite" is modified in this fake newspaper to "Workers of all countries unite in a fight against Bolshevism".
See also
- Index of Soviet Union-related articles
- DekulakizationDekulakizationDekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929-1932. The richer peasants were labeled kulaks and considered class enemies...
- HolodomorHolodomorThe Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
- Denial of the HolodomorDenial of the HolodomorDenial of the Holodomor is the assertion that the 1932-1933 Holodomor, an artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine, recognized as a crime against humanity by the European Parliament, did not occur....
- History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)The History of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 was dominated by Joseph Stalin, who sought to reshape Soviet society with aggressive economic planning, in particular a sweeping collectivization of agriculture and development of industrial power...
- Collectivization in Hungary
- OZETOZETOZET was public Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union in the period from 1925 to 1938. Some English sources use the word "Working" instead of "Toiling".- Background :...
- Eastern Bloc economiesEastern Bloc economiesAfter the Soviet Union's occupation of much of the Eastern Bloc during World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin implemented socioeconomic transformations of each of the Eastern Bloc economies that comported with the Soviet Communist economic model...
Further reading
- Ammende, Ewald. "Human life in Russia", (Cleveland: J.T. Zubal, 1984), Reprint, Originally published: London, England: Allen & Unwin, 1936, ISBN 0-939738-54-6
- Conquest, RobertRobert ConquestGeorge Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...
. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford University Press, October 1986, hardcover, ISBN 0-88864-110-9; trade paperback, Oxford University Press, November, 1987, ISBN 0-19-505180-7; hardcover, ISBN 0-19-504054-6 - Davies, R. W. The Socialist Offensive (Volume 1 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia), Harvard University Press (1980), hardcover, ISBN 0-674-81480-0
- Davies, R. W. The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929-1930 (Volume 2 of the Industrialization of Soviet Russia), Harvard University Press (1980), hardcover, ISBN 0-674-82600-0
- Davies, R. W., Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929-1930 (volume 3 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia), Harvard University Press (1989), ISBN 0-674-82655-8
- Davies, R.W. and Stephen G. Wheatcroft. Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933, (volume 4 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia), Palgrave Macmillan (April, 2004), hardcover, ISBN 0-333-31107-8
- Davies, R. W. and S. G. Wheatcroft. Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928-1930, Cambridge University Press (1985), hardcover, 467 pages, ISBN 0-521-26125-2
- Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, W. W. Norton (1987), trade paperback, 231 pages, ISBN 0-393-30416-7; hardcover (1985), ISBN 0-393-01886-5
- Hindus, Maurice. Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village, Indiana University Press, 1988, hardcover, ISBN 0-253-34953-2; trade paperback, Indiana University Press, 1988, 372 pages, ISBN 0-253-20485-2; earlier editions dating from 1931 are available at used book sellers.
- Lewin, MosheMoshe LewinMoshe Lewin was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history; he was a major figure in the revisionist school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s. His surname is pronounced "Luh-VENE".-Early years:...
. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, W.W. Norton (1975), trade paperback, ISBN 0-393-00752-9 - Library of Congress Revelations from the Russian Archives: Collectivization and Industrialization (primary documents from the period)
- Martens, LudoLudo MartensLudo Martens was a Belgian historian noted for his work on francophone Africa and the Soviet Union. Martens wrote on the political history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he has lived and travelled extensively....
. Un autre regard sur Staline, Éditions EPO, 1994, 347 pages, ISBN 2-87262-081-8. See the section "External links" for an English translation. - Nimitz, Nancy. "Farm Development 1928–62", in Soviet and East European Agricultures, Jerry F. Karcz, ed. Berkeley, California (US): University of California, 1967.
- Satter, David. Age of Delirium : The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, Yale University Press (1996), hardcover, 424 pages, ISBN 0-394-52934-0
- ' Smith, Hedrick. The Russians (1976) ISBN 0-8129-0521-0
- Taylor, Sally J. Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty : The New York Times Man in Moscow, Oxford University Press (1990), hardcover, ISBN 0-19-505700-7
- Tottle, DouglasDouglas TottleDouglas Tottle is a Canadian trade union activist and the author of a book about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 entitled Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard...
. Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books, 1987. ISBN 0-919396-51-8. - Zaslavskaya, TatyanaTatyana ZaslavskayaTatyana Zaslavskaya is a Russian economic sociologist, a theoretician of perestroika, an author and co-author of several books on economy of the Soviet Union and in sociology of the countryside and a large number of research papers...
. The Second Socialist Revolution, ISBN 0-253-20614-6 (a survey by a Soviet sociologist written in the late 1980s which advocated restructuring of the economy)
External links
- "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".
- "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" by Stalin
- Ukrainian Famine: Excerpts from the Original Electronic Text at the web site of Revelations from the Russian Archives
- "Soviet Agriculture: A critique of the myths constructed by Western critics", by Joseph E. Medley, Department of Economics, University of Southern Maine (US).
- "The Ninth Circle", by Olexa Woropay
- Prize-winning essay on FamineGenocide.com
- 1932-34 Great Famine: documented view by Dr. Dana Dalrymple
- COLLECTIVIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION Revelations from the Russian Archives at the Library of CongressLibrary of CongressThe Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
Further reading
- Roy D. Laird, "Collective Farming in Russia: A Political Study of the Soviet Kolkhozy", University of KansasUniversity of KansasThe University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
, Lawrence, KS (1958), 176pp. - Robert G. Wesson, "Soviet Communes", Rutgers University PressRutgers University PressRutgers University Press is a nonprofit academic publishing house, operating in Piscataway, New Jersey under the auspices of Rutgers University.-History:...
, 1963