All Topics  
Collectivisation in the USSR

 
Collectivisation in the USSR

   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link






 

Collectivisation in the USSR



 
 
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
 was a policy pursued under Stalin
Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....
, between 1928 and 1940, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farm
Collective farm

It is a large farm leased from the state to groups of peasant farmers. See Collective farming.References...
s (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 ????????????? ??????????, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of ????????? ????????? ....
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Collectivisation in the USSR'
Start a new discussion about 'Collectivisation in the USSR'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Collectivization in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
 was a policy pursued under Stalin
Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....
, between 1928 and 1940, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farm
Collective farm

It is a large farm leased from the state to groups of peasant farmers. See Collective farming.References...
s (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 ????????????? ??????????, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of ????????? ????????? ....
, plural kolkhozy). The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed since 1927 and was becoming 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 while the issue of economic advantages of collective farms remains largely undecided.

Background

Following the end of Russian serfdom
Russian serfdom

The origins of serfdom in Russia are traced to Kievan Rus in the 11th century. Legal documents of the epoch, such as Russkaya Pravda, distinguished several degrees of feudal dependency of peasants....
 and emancipation 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 reforms
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 ....
 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, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
. The Russian Provisional Government
Russian Provisional Government

The Russian Provisional government Government was formed in Saint Petersburg in 1917 after the February Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II of Russia....
 accomplished little during the difficult wartime
World War I

World War I, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
 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
Mir (social)

File:KorovinS NaMiru.jpgThe Russian language word 'mir' , besides its direct meanings of peace and world P. Smirnovskiy. A Textbook in Russian Grammar....
 became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and also known by the pseudonyms V.I. Lenin and N. Lenin, was a Russians revolutionary, a Bolshevik Communism politician, the principal leader of the October Revolution and the first head of the USSR....
 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 was the economic and political system that existed in the Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921. According to Soviet historiography, this policy was adopted by the Bolsheviks with the aim of keeping towns and the Red Army supplied with weapons and food, in conditions when all normal economic mechanisms...
, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka

Prodrazvyorstka , translated as food apportionment, 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 and the Bolshevik party assumed power in Saint Petersburg....
 ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy

The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin to prevent the Russian economy from collapsing....
 (NEP) and specifically, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka
Prodrazvyorstka

Prodrazvyorstka , translated as food apportionment, was a governmental program in Russia which obliged peasantry to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price....
 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 amount increases. "Progressive" describes a distribution effect on income or Consumption , 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.

Lunch in Commune
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. 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 and well-endowed peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged as a result of the Stolypin reform which began in 1906....
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 in which wealth, and the means of producing wealth, are private property and controlled rather than commonly, publicly, or state-owned and controlled....
), 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%. 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. .

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, Stalin also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialisation 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. The state also hoped to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy industrialisation. Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilisation 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

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, short for Political Bureau, Russian language Politicheskoye Buro, is the executive organization for a number of political parties, most notably those of Communist Party....
 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....
 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, abbreviated in Russian as ??, "Tse-ka", was the highest body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Its full name was ??????????? ??????? ???????????????? ?????? ?????????? ????? = ?? ????; Tsentralnyy Komitet Kommunistitcheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza = TsK KPSS, or the Central Committee of the Commun...
 in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization.

Several forms of collective farming
Collective farming

Collective farming is an organization of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise. A collective farm is essentially an agricultural cooperative in which members-owners engage jointly in farming activities....
 were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem), ranging in the level of common property:
  • Association for Joint Cultivation of Land
    Association for Joint Cultivation of Land

    An 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....
     (???????????? ?? ?????????? ????????? ?????, ???/TOZ), where only land was in common use;
  • agricultural artel
    Artel

    Artel is a general term for various cooperative associations in Russia, historical and modern.Historically, artels were semi-formal associations for various enterprises: fishing, mining, commerce, of loaders, loggers, thieves, beggars, etc....
     (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 commune
    Commune (intentional community)

    A commune is an intentional community of people living together, sharing common interests, property, possessions, resources, employment and income....
    , 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 most commonly refers to the central executive unit of a Leninist or Communist party, whether ruling or non-ruling. In a Communist party, the Central Committee is made up of delegates elected at a Party Congress....
 decided to implement accelerated collectivisation 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 to prevent the Russian economy from collapsing....
 (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, 6 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 big industrial cities of the Soviet Union, 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 the early 1930s....
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 and well-endowed peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged as a result of the Stolypin reform which began in 1906....
s and their "agents".

Wladimir Gawriilowitsch Krikhatzkij   the First Tractor
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
Fordson tractor

The Fordson model F tractor by the Ford Motor Company was the first agricultural tractor to be mass production. It was a lightweight, frameless tractor with a vapouriser-fed engine and four metal wheels, but lacking a cabin....
 (called "???????" 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 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 ????????????? ??????????, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of ????????? ????????? ....
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 remained in their traditional, somewhat primitive, villages.

The means of production (land, equipment, livestock) was 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 Central and Eastern Europe. This is a small plot of land attached to a rural residence....
 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.


"Dizzy with Success"

The price of collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of Pravda
Pravda

Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1912 and 1991....
 contained Stalin's article , 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 over fulfilled 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 Professor Emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University, a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society....
, 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 reaction

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. However the rural areas did not have many landless peasants, given the wholesale redistribution of land following the Revolution. For those with property, however, collectivization meant giving it up to the collective farms and selling most of the food that they produced to the state at minimal prices set by the state itself, so they were opposed 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 obshchina
Obshchina

Obshchina were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word ?????, obshchiy ....
 or mir
Mir (commune)

Mir, in Russian, means both peace and world. The exact date of origin of the Russian mir or commune, is unknown. But the communal land ownership of the Mir predated serfdom and survived emancipation and even the Russian Revolution ....
. 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 region of Asia from the Caspian Sea in the west to central China in the east, and from southern Russia in the north to northern India in the south....
, and in the trans-Volga steppe
Steppe

In physical geography, a steppe , pronounced , is a grassland plain without trees . The prairie can be considered a steppe. It may be semi-desert, or covered with Poaceae or shrubs or both, depending on the season and latitude....
s, where for a family to have a herd of livestock was not only a matter of sustenance, but of pride as well.

Many peasants opposed collectivization, and often responded with acts of sabotage, included burning of crops and slaughtering 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, former prime minister (1919-1920) of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), 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".

Results

Due to high government quota
Quota

Quota may refer to:A level business* Quota samplingAffirmative action* Racial quota* Reservations in India* Quotas in Pakistan...
s peasants got, 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
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
 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. The CPSU blamed problems on kulak
Kulak

Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent and well-endowed peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged as a result of the Stolypin reform which began in 1906....
s (Russian: fist; prosperous peasants), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices.

The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there was opposition to collectivization, especially in the Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
. Hundreds of thousands of those who opposed collectivization were executed or sent to forced-labor camps
Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the penal labor camps of the Soviet Union. Gulag is the Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies of the NKVD....
. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia
Siberia

Siberia , is the name given to the vast region constituting almost all of North Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the Soviet Union from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the 16th century....
 and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also Kazakstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a large Eurasian country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the List of countries by area as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km? ....
 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 in the Soviet Union....
 and a significant number died on the way.

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
Law of Spikelets

Law of Spikelets was a common name of the law based on the decree of Supreme Soviet and Sovnarkom of the USSR "About protection of the property of state enterprises, kolkhozes and cooperatives, and strengthening of the public property" dated August 7, 1932....
 ("????? ? ????????"), 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 an England novelist, essayist, professor, and short story writer, and the son of the novelist and poet Kingsley Amis. His works include such novels as Money , London Fields and The Information ....
 writes in Koba the Dread that the number of sentences for this particular offense in the bad harvest period from August 1932 to December 1933 was 125,000.

Between 1929 and 1932 there was a massive fall in agricultural production and famine in the countryside. Stalin blamed the well-to-do peasants, referred to as 'kulaks', who he said had sabotaged grain collection and resolved to eliminate them as a class. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called 'kulak' families, or perhaps some five million people, were sent to forced labor camps. Estimates of the deaths from starvation or disease directly caused by collectivization have been estimated as between four and ten million. According to official Soviet figures some 24 million peasants disappeared from rural areas with only an extra 12.6 million moving 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 twelve million people.

In 1945 Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....
 confides to Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, Order of the Garter, Order of Merit, Order of the Companions of Honour, Territorial Decoration, Fellow of the Royal Society, Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, Queen's Privy Council for Canada was a Politics of the United Kingdom known chiefly for his leadership of the United King...
 at Yalta
Yalta

Yalta is a city in Crimea, southern Ukraine, on the north coast of the Black Sea.The city is located on the site of an ancient Greece colony, said to have been founded by Greek sailors who were looking for a safe shore on which to land....
 that 10 million people have died in the course of collectivization.

Siberia

Since the second half of the 19th century, Siberia
Siberia

Siberia , is the name given to the vast region constituting almost all of North Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the Soviet Union from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the 16th century....
 had been a major agricultural region within Russia, esp?cially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai
Altai Krai

Altai Krai is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia in the Siberian Federal District. It borders with, clockwise from the south, Kazakhstan, Novosibirsk Oblast and Kemerovo Oblasts, and the Altai Republic....
, Omsk Oblast
Omsk Oblast

Omsk Oblast is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia. It has an area of 139,700 km? and a population of with 1.1 million living in Omsk, the administrative center....
, Novosibirsk Oblast
Novosibirsk Oblast

Novosibirsk Oblast is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia . Its administrative center is the types of inhabited localities in Russia of Novosibirsk....
, Kemerovo Oblast
Kemerovo Oblast

Kemerovo Oblast , often called Kuzbass after the Kuznetsk Basin, is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia , is located in southwestern Siberia, where the West-Siberian Plain meets the South Siberian mountains....
, Khakassia
Khakassia

Republic of Khakassia or Khakasiya is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia located in south central Siberia.Abakan is the administrative centre of Khakassia, and with a population of around 160,000 making it the largest city....
, Irkutsk Oblast
Irkutsk Oblast

Irkutsk Oblast is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia , located in south-eastern Siberia in the basins of Angara River, Lena River, and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers....
). 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

File:Tomsk weisses Haus.jpgTomsk Oblast is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia . It lies in the southeastern West Siberian Plain, in the southwest of the Siberian Federal District....
 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" (???? ??????????????? ??????? ? ???????????).

Central Asia and Kazakhstan

Uzb Coll
In areas where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, collectivization met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakhstan 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. Of those who remained as many as a million died in the resulting famine. In Mongolia
Mongolia

Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia and Central Asia. It borders Russia to the north and People's Republic of China to the south, east and west....
, then a Soviet dependency, attempted collectivization was abandoned in 1932 after the loss of 8 million head of livestock.

Ukraine


Holodomor2
Most historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization and the resistance of the peasants significantly contributed to the Great Famine of 1932–1933, especially in Ukraine
Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east; Belarus to the north; Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west; Romania and Moldova to the southwest; and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south....
, a region famous for its rich soil (chernozem). This particular period is called "Holodomor
Holodomor

The Holodomor refers to the famine of 1932?1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies that forced farmers into Collectivization in the Soviet Unions....
" in Ukrainian. During the similar famines of 1921–1923, numerous campaigns, 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%. The center of the famine, however, was Ukraine and surrounding regions, including the Don, the Kuban
Kuban

Kuban is a geographic region of Southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, Volga Delta and the Caucasus....
, the Northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also Kazakstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a large Eurasian country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the List of countries by area as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km? ....
 where the toll was one million dead. The countryside was affected more than cities, but 120,000 died in Kharkiv
Kharkiv

Kharkiv , or Kharkov is the second largest city in Ukraine.It was the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, now the Capital of the Kharkiv Oblast , as well as the administrative center of the surrounding Kharkiv Oblast within the oblast....
, 40,000 in Krasnodar
Krasnodar

Krasnodar is a types of inhabited localities in Russia in Southern Russia on the Kuban River. It is the administrative center of Krasnodar Krai ....
 and 20,000 in Stavropol
Stavropol

Stavropol is a types of inhabited localities in Russia located in south-western Russia and is the administrative center of Stavropol Krai. Population: 355,900 ; ...
.

The declassified Soviet archives show that there were 1.54 million officially registered deaths in Ukraine from famine. Alec Nove claims that registration of deaths largely ceased in many areas during the famine. However, it's been pointed out that the registered deaths in the archives were substantially revised by the demographics officials. The older version of the data showed 600 thousand fewer deaths in Ukraine than the current, revised statistics. In The Black Book of Communism
The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a book which describes a history of repressions, both political and civilian, by Communist states, including Extrajudicial punishments, deportations, and artificial famines....
, the authors claim the number of dead was at least 4 million, and characterize the Great Famine as "a genocide of the Ukrainian people".

Latvia

After the Soviet Occupation of Latvia
Occupation of Latvia 1940-1945

Occupations of Latvia may refer to:* Livonian Crusade* Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940* Occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany* Occupation of Latvia by Soviet Union 1944-1945...
 in June 1940, the country's new rulers were faced with a problem: the agricultural reforms of the inter-war period had expanded individual holdings. The property of "enemies of the people
Enemy of the people

The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation of political or Social class opponents of the group using the term. Its usage is derogatory, and meant to imply that the "enemies" are acting against society as a whole....
" and refugee
Refugee

Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecutionOwing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality,...
s, as well as those above 30 hectares, was nationalised in 1940-'44, but those who were still landless were then given plots of 15 hectares each. Thus, Latvian agriculture remained essentially dependent on personal smallholdings, making central planning difficult. In 1940-'41 the Communist Party repeatedly said that collectivization would not occur forcibly, but rather voluntarily and by example. To encourage collectivization high taxes were enforced and new farms given no government support. But after 1945 the Party dropped its restrained approach as the voluntary approach was not yielding results. Latvians were accustomed to individual holdings (viensetas), which had existed even during serfdom, and for many farmers the plots awarded to them by the interwar reforms were the first their families had ever owned. Furthermore, the countryside was filled with rumours regarding the harshness of collective farm life.

Pressure from Moscow
Moscow

Moscow is the capital and the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of the Russian Federation. It is also the largest European cities and metropolitan areas, with the Moscow metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world....
 to collectivize continued and the authorities of the Latvian SSR
Latvian SSR

The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Latvian SSR for short, was one of the Republics of the Soviet Union that made up the Soviet Union....
 sought to reduce the number of individual farmers (increasingly labelled kulak
Kulak

Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent and well-endowed peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged as a result of the Stolypin reform which began in 1906....
i
or budži) through higher taxes and requisitioning of agricultural products for state use. The first kolkhoz was established only in November 1946 and by 1948, just 617 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 ????????????? ??????????, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of ????????? ????????? ....
es had been established, integrating 13,814 individual farmsteads (12.6% of the total). The process was still judged too slow, and in March 1949 just under 13,000 kulak families as well as a large number of individuals were identified. Between March 24 and March 30, 1949, about 40,000 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 Service 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 owed 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


YearNumber of
collective farms
Percent of farmsteads
in collective farms
Percent of sown area
in collective use
192714,800 0.8
192833,300 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 71.487.4
1935 249,400 83.294.1
193690.5 98.2
1937 243,700 93.0 99.1
1938 242,400 93.5 99.8
1939 235,300 95.6
1940236,900 96.999.8
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 users19281940
All farms, '000 hectares113,000 150,600
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....
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 ????????????? ??????????, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of ????????? ????????? ....
y)
1.278.2
Household plots
(in collective and state farms)
1.13.5
Peasant farms and other users 96.29.5
Source: Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922-1972, Moscow, 1972 (p. 240).

Decollectivization under German occupation

During Russia's Great Patriotic War, 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 in July 1941 and headed by the Nazi theoretical expert and Baltic German, Alfred Rosenberg....
, 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 G?ring was a Germany politician, military leader and a leading member of the Nazi Party. Among many offices, he was Hitler's designated successor and commander of the Luftwaffe ....
 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" (a throwback to the traditional Russian commune
Mir (social)

File:KorovinS NaMiru.jpgThe Russian language word 'mir' , besides its direct meanings of peace and world P. Smirnovskiy. A Textbook in Russian Grammar....
). 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

  • Dekulakization
    Dekulakization

    Dekulakization was the Soviet Union campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929-1932....
  • Holodomor
    Holodomor

    The Holodomor refers to the famine of 1932?1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies that forced farmers into Collectivization in the Soviet Unions....
  • Denial of the Holodomor
    Denial of the Holodomor

    Denial of the Holodomor is the assertion that the 1932-1933 Holodomor 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)

    This period of the Soviet Union 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....
  • Collectivisation in Hungary
    Collectivisation in Hungary

    In the Hungary, agricultural collectivization was attempted a number of times in the late 1940s, until it was finally successful in the early 1960s. By consolidating individual landowning farmers into agricultural co-operatives, the Communist government hoped to increase production and efficiency, and put agriculture under the control of the state...
  • OZET
    OZET

    OZET 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"....


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, Robert
    Robert Conquest

    Dr. George Robert f Ackworth Conquest , United Kingdom historian, became a well known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication, in 1968, of his account of Joseph Stalin Great Purge of the 1930s, The Great Terror....
    . 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 Industrialisation 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, Moshe
    Moshe Lewin

    Moshe Lewin Bachelor of Arts, Ph.D, is a scholar of History of Russia and History of the Soviet Union. He was a major figure in the revisionist school of Cold War historiography....
    . Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivisation, W.W. Norton (1975), trade paperback, ISBN 0-393-00752-9
  • Library of Congress (primary documents from the period)
  • Martens, Ludo
    Ludo Martens

    Ludo Martens is a Belgian historian noted for his work on francophone Africa and the Soviet Union. He has also been the chairman of the Workers' Party of Belgium....
    . Un autre regard sur Staline, Éditions EPO, 1994, 347 pages, ISBN 2-87262-081-8. See the section "External links
    Collectivisation in the USSR

    Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Joseph Stalin, between 1928 and 1940, to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms ....
    " 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, Douglas
    Douglas Tottle

    Douglas Tottle is a trade union activist and the author of a book about the Holodomor - 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, Tatyana
    Tatyana Zaslavskaya

    Tatyana Zaslavskaya is a Russian economical 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; she was a member of the Consulting Committee to the President of Russia from 1991 to 1992....
    . 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

  • . Translated from the French book Un autre regard sur Staline, listed above under "References and further reading".
  • , by Joseph E. Medley, Department of Economics, University of Southern Maine (US).
  • , by Olexa Woropay
  • on
  • Revelations from the Russian Archives at the Library of Congress
    Library of Congress

    The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books....


Further reading

  • Roy D. Laird, "Collective Farming in Russia: A Political Study of the Soviet Kolkhozy", University of Kansas
    University of Kansas

    The University of Kansas is a public research university with campuses located in Lawrence, Kansas, Kansas City, Kansas, and Overland Park, Kansas, Kansas with the main campus being located atop Mount Oread in Lawrence....
    , Lawrence, KS (1958), 176pp.
  • Robert G. Wesson, "Soviet Communes", Rutgers University Press
    Rutgers University Press

    Rutgers University Press is a nonprofit academic publishing house, operating in Piscataway, New Jersey under the auspices of Rutgers University....
    , 1963