Joseph Stalin's policy to collect private farms into cooperatives and wholly state-owned farms across the USSR began in 1928. Stalin hoped the process of collectivisation would modernise Soviet agriculture, provide a surplus of foodstuffs that could fuel the industrialisation of towns and cities, and greatly increase state control in the countryside where the Communist Party had hitherto struggled to exert its authority. One of the largest experiments in social engineering ever undertaken, collectivisation did achieve some of Stalin's aims but also resulted in massive inefficiencies and widespread opposition, which in turn led to famines, brutal state oppression – particularly against wealthier farmers, and the deaths of from 5 to 8 million civilians.
The Aims of Collectivisation
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) succeeded Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) as the leader of the USSR following the latter's death in 1924 and the ensuing power struggle within the Communist Party. From 1928, Stalin began the first of his five-year plans, a radical shake-up of the economy in the hope of rapidly industrialising the state.
Lenin had overseen the New Economic Policy (NEP), a strategy that involved a measure of private enterprise to encourage the USSR's economic recovery following the hugely damaging Russian Civil War. By 1928, agricultural and industrial output had regained pre-war levels. The standard of living was raised. However, economic growth was slow, and unemployment was still too high for comfort. Technological advances were slow to spread. In 1928, only 1% of agricultural land was farmed using tractors instead of draught animals. Stalin championed a break with the NEP, which was presented as being against the traditional Communist ideals that had fuelled the October Revolution of 1917. In addition, abolishing the NEP meant that Stalin could discredit his chief leadership rival, Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), who was a supporter of it.
Stalin was determined to create an agricultural sector that could provide a surplus, which could be sold to acquire funds to boost industrialisation. Stalin also wanted the state to become heavily involved in agriculture and minimise private ownership. The Soviet leader tapped into the widely held feeling in Communist circles that the full fruits of the Bolshevik Revolution had yet to be reaped. Stalin had personal experience of the inefficiencies of the agricultural sector since he had recently supervised the collecting of grain in the Urals and western Siberia. 1927-8 had seen a grain crisis when the peasantry withheld harvests until prices improved or simply grew other, more lucrative crops. Such a situation must not be allowed to happen again.
The central idea of Stalin's plan to return to a purer form of socialism was to collectivise smaller private farms into much larger collective farms. Collectivising farms was a policy that seemed to exactly replicate in the countryside the Bolshevik/socialist ideal of a community of workers in industry in the cities. Collectivisation, it was hoped, would increase productivity (the official target was to increase it by 55%) but also greatly reduce anti-Communist elements in the countryside.
In 1928, 80% of the USSR's population lived in the countryside, yet only one in 336 was a member of the Communist Party. By radically shaking up rural life and destroying the traditional peasant order of land ownership, Stalin's collectivisation would permit the state to control vast areas where previously it had been almost totally absent in practical terms. This process was couched in militaristic terms as Stalin envisaged nothing short of a war against what he regarded as a backward and money-grabbing peasantry. Collectivisation would be the 1917 Revolution repeated in the countryside.
The Collectivisation Process
The collectivisation process began in January 1929. It was enforced by a mixture of "local party committees, political police, internal security forces and even military units and volunteer gangs from urban factories" (Suny, 195). From 1929 to 1931, "20 million individual farms were amalgamated into 250,000 collectives" (Brown, 393). Land was removed from the hands of the peasantry, landowners were evicted, and small farms were joined together into large operations managed by individuals loyal to the Communist Party but often with little or no knowledge of agriculture. Often entire villages were absorbed into collective farms. There were two types of collective farms: supposedly voluntary cooperatives where the farmers maintained shared ownership (kolkhozy) and fully state-owned farms (sovkhozy) where farmers were little more than paid labourers.
Those outside the collective farms still had to give produce to the state, face higher taxes than in the collective farms, and were heavily fined for not meeting required quotas. Collectivisation was even applied to areas where the people lived as nomadic herders. Kazakhs, for example, were collectivised and so lost almost all of their sheep herds. By 1932, 61.5% of rural households were part of a collective farm; by 1935, the figure had risen to 83%.
As the farms were now bigger, many became dependent on machinery, especially tractors, but the distribution of these was closely controlled by the state. Rural depots known as Machine Tractor Stations (MTSs) monopolised the hiring out of tractors and other equipment to the collective farmers. Not until 1958 could farmers own machinery like tractors themselves. Although 2,500 MTSs were created between 1929 and 1932, there were simply not enough tractors to replace the draught animals that had been slaughtered by protesting peasants. There were also problems of maintenance and storage, so machinery wasted away, and fields had to be left unploughed and at the mercy of weeds.
Dekulakisation
While many peasants of the bedniak class, those who had no land of their own or any means to work it, largely welcomed the idea of collectivisation, the more prosperous landowning peasants, known as the seredniaki, resented the loss of their land and livestock to collective farms. Wealthier members of this latter group became a scapegoat for state inefficiencies and the number one target for the Communist Party, which now wanted to remove all opposition in the countryside. The state called these richer private farmers kulaks, a derogatory term which literally means "tight-fisted." The term kulak was never legally defined and was used indiscriminately against any farmer who opposed the state. Those who sympathised with dispossessed farmers were known as 'subkulaks'. The kulaks were demonised in state-sponsored propaganda; for example, they were presented as hoarders of food when everyone else had very little. The removal of kulaks from the countryside was known as 'dekulakisation'.
Certainly, many land-owning farmers were sceptical of the state's promises that collectivisation would bring lasting prosperity. They were equally sceptical of the government's sweeteners such as a promise to supply new machinery and credits for land requisitioned by the state. Farmers registered their opposition to collectivisation by slaughtering their own livestock rather than hand them over to the state. In this way, at least according to a speech by Stalin in June 1930, one-third of cattle and one-fifth of horses were lost. By 1933, "the numbers of cattle, pigs, and sheep were less than half what they had been in 1928" (Freeze, 350). Other forms of protest included demonstrations and riots (frequently involving women's activists), stealing property such as tools from the collective farm, and murdering state officials.
The state responded to the opposition with brutal oppression. Some farmers were given inferior land to work, but this could be far from their home region. Around one million farmers were exiled and forced to work as labourers in remote Gulag camps in regions like Siberia, where they performed menial tasks like chopping wood. By 1933, around 2 million farmers had been forcibly relocated. It is estimated that there were 3.5 million arrests and 6.5 million deaths as a result of 'dekulakisation' (Berlatsky, 28).
A peasant girl called Katia gives the following account of her family's treatment at the hands of state officials:
My father didn't want to join the kolkhoz. All kinds of people argued with him and took him away and beat him but still he wouldn't go in. They shouted he was a kulak agent…At the station there were many other people like us, from other villages. It seemed like thousands. We were all crushed into a stone barn but they wouldn't let my dog, Volchok, come in though he'd followed us all the way down the road…After a while we were let out and driven into cattle cars…We all shrieked and prayed to the Holy Virgin. Then the train started. No one knew where we were going. Some said Siberia but others said no, the Far North or even the hot deserts. Near Khar'kov my sister Shura and I were allowed out to get some water…Not far away were some peasant huts so we ran as fast as our feet could carry us.
(Ward, 78)
The Consequences of Collectivisation
As in industry, farms were given targets to reach. These targets were Stalin's measure of the success of collectivisation, but the results were hugely disappointing. The target for grain fell short by around 50%. In Ukraine, for example, 9,000 tons of potatoes were grown instead of the target of 25,000 tons. Productivity was so poor that rationing was required for foodstuffs, and this did not end until 1935. Scarcity of even the most basic goods like bread led to prices rising far faster than wages did. The low productivity of collectivised farms became a serious drain on the economy of the USSR, as did the costs of imposing collectivisation, when it had been hoped a booming agricultural sector would boost industrialisation in the cities.
The biggest disaster of all came in Ukraine, previously considered the breadbasket of the USSR. The state and its officials were really only concerned with fulfilling the targets of Stalin's five-year plans, and so grain and foodstuffs were simply seized from the region of Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. These requisitions helped farms in other parts of the USSR meet their targets but caused a devastating famine in Ukraine. The crisis was compounded by farmers running out of seed grain after years of overusing their stock in order to meet overly ambitious targets. The situation was so bad that many Ukrainians resorted to cannibalism in order to survive; there were even cases of families killing and eating their weakest children. Around 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine and around 4 million elsewhere in the USSR, particularly in the North Caucasus and the lower Volga region.
Another problem with collectivisation was the chronic lack of transport to take produce from one place to another. There was investment in the railways, but not enough. All too often, the problem of famine in one region could not be alleviated by the movement of a surplus from another region because the transport system was so antiquated and slow that food rotted before it could reach its destination. Some historians have suggested that food was deliberately withheld from certain regions, notably Ukraine, in order to subdue its population to Communist rule, while other scholars suggest that clear evidence of what would, in effect, be a policy of genocide is lacking, and that state requisitioning, sheer incompetence, and lack of investment were the primary causes of the famines.
Another factor that reduced the effectiveness of collectivisation was corruption. While some farmers were publicly hailed as stars of the Soviet economy – one example is Pasha Angelina, the first Soviet woman to be a tractor driver – the vast majority of farms and farmers failed to reach the ambitious production targets set by the state. To get even close to the targets required all kinds of requisitioning, insider negotiations, and general corruption, such as bribing officials not to examine production figures too closely.
Stalin did achieve at least a partial victory in establishing much more state control in rural communities, where official surveillance and restrictions of movement became a norm of everyday life. Collectivisation also permitted rural labour to be released – around 10 million people between 1928 and 1933 – for Stalin's push for a fully industrialised state. Nevertheless, the widespread peasant resistance had necessitated the granting of "certain concessions, such as the legalization of private plots and the exclusion of domestic animals from the collective" (Freeze, 351). The private plots were not owned by the farmers, but they did help counterbalance the inefficiencies of the collective farms and put food on farmers' tables. The 'private' plots were typically worked by women, who also performed the more menial and back-breaking tasks in the collective farms. Such 'private' plots contributed some 27% of marketed food output by 1940.
Stalin's Second Five-Year Plan began in January 1933, and the aim regarding agriculture was to make the sector fully mechanised. The situation in the agricultural sector did improve somewhat in the mid-1930s as the worst evils of the collectivisation upheaval settled down. 1935 was the first year that grain output was greater than it had been before collectivisation began. Then came the harsh winter of 1937-8 and the consequent poor harvest, which brought back rationing of foodstuffs and disrupted the transport network. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1930s, the vast majority of farmers in the USSR belonged to collective farms, a situation that continued into the 1990s.
Stalin had achieved his collectivisation, but this monumental project had caused millions of deaths from executions, starvation, and the diseases rife in the labour camps. Historians continue to debate just how many millions died, with estimates ranging from at least 5 million to 8 million or even more. The inexact numbers reveal the incomprehensible scale of this complete overturning of traditional rural life. In addition, the majority of those who survived collectivisation only did so by the skin of their teeth. Farmers across the USSR had, as a consequence of collectivisation, been permanently reduced to living harsh lives of subsistence, little better off than their ancestors had been as serfs under the Tsars. As the historian of Stalinism C. Ward notes: "No one would seriously challenge the assertion that collectivization was a tremendous national tragedy" (101).
