Agriculture
Background
Once serfdom in Russia ended, the newly emancipated peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated. They soon asked for all land to be redistributed among them. But, due to the simple cultivation technology of Russian peasants at the time, there wasn’t enough land for everyone who wanted their own farm. The government did little, and the Bolshevik party didn’t have any other choice than to allow the peasants to take the land and farm it privately. However in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks began to think more about the idea of collective agriculture.
In 1928, requisition of grain was reintroduced due to the demand by the state. But peasants resisted the seizures, and violence spread across the countryside. Faced with the refusal of the peasants to hand their grain over, the government decided at the Central Committee in November 1929 to begin a nationwide program of collectivization. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy, initiated by Lenin that allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market.
The Soviet Communist Party have never agreed with private agriculture, and saw collectivization as the best possible answer for the peasants and future Russia. Stalin began his economic plans for massive industrialization, and needed larger surpluses from agriculture to feed the expanding work force and pay for imports of machinery. He also wanted to export grain as a source of foreign currency needed to import the technologies necessary for Soviet industry.
Collectivisation
“Agriculture is developing slowly, comrades. This is because we have about 25 million individually owned farms. They are the most primitive and undeveloped form of economy. We must do our utmost to develop large farms and to convert them into grain factories for the country organized on a modem scientific basis." – Stalin, 1928
Stalin saw mass collectivization as the answer to feeding the country, sustaining industrialization, and surviving. Stalin believed that it was the key to the success of the Five Year Plans, because the peasant farmers would be providing food for the factory workers. He also sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, by having large parcels of land farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific and most effective methods.
To put it simply, collectivization was the idea of taking all the small, privately owned farms and gathering them together to form large massive ones. The means of production, including equipment, land, and livestock, was to be totally socialized, meaning removed from the control of individual peasant families. Stalin had a vision of Soviet agriculture on a mass scale, where colossal machines were to work the fields, in contrast to the previous peasant small-scale work. By Stalin’s orders, all boundary lines separating the land allotments were eliminated and all fields were combined into a single land mass.
Stalin began his plan efficiently and quickly; between September and December 1929, collectivization rose from 7.4% to 15%. Then in the first two months of 1930, there were eleven million collectivized households, making the total to nearly 60%. Because of the immediate success Stalin had to call an abrupt halt to collectivization, only to be intensified again until 1936, 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
During collectivization, Stalin began the expropriation or liquidation of the kulaks. In the winters of 1929 and 1930, kulak families were brutally removed out of their homes and forcibly led in slow cattle trucks to camps. Left with minimum belongings, the kulaks were then forced to dig their own shelters, deliberate murder ordered by Stalin. With propaganda, Stalin made the class seem like the enemy, and it is estimated that 6.5 million were killed.
Peasant Reactions
With collectivization, Stalin expected landless peasants to be the largest beneficiaries, because it gave them an opportunity to take share in the land and labor. But for those peasants who owned property, collectivization meant giving up their land to collective farms and selling what they produced at low prices set by the government. Also since peasants weren’t protected by labor laws like industrial workers, material incentives disappeared with the free market. It became more likely that investment in the land led to higher losses because state payments didn’t cover costs of production. This meant inefficient labor.
Many peasants opposed the process, and so reacted with violent acts. This included sabotage by burning crops and slaughtering livestock, destroying property, and attacking officials and members of the collectives. The government reacted by cutting off food rations to peasants who lived in violent areas. Many peasants that opposed collectivization were executed or sent to forced labor camps. Families were exiled from the Soviet Union, and placed in Siberia or Kazakhstan, but many died on the way.
Results
The Soviet Communist Party viewed collectivization as a success, 26 million peasant families were collectivized, and grain procurement rose as intended. But procurement was ruthlessly calculated on the biological yield, meaning peasants initially declared the entire harvest before gathering later. There is always bound to be loss of between growing and final grain yield, but the state took the amount of the initial yield. As a result, the state took more than the peasants could afford to give and many starved.
Peasant living standards declined during collectivization, especially during the famine of 1932-1933. During the famine, there were severe harvest failures in Ukraine, southern Russia, and northern Caucasus. The government didn’t officially recognize the famine and state procurements continued. Once again, Stalin used propaganda by banning journalists from famine areas. It is estimated 7 million peasants alone died in the famine of 1932-1933.
