The Soviet Union introduced collectivization (Russian: коллективизация) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: kolkhozes and sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927. This problem became more severe as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.
In October 1929, approximately 7.5% of the peasant households were in collective farms, and by February 1930, 52.7% had been collectivised. The collectivization era saw a period of famine, as well as peasant resistance to collectivization. Resistance took the form of protests and armed resistance amongst peasants to the Soviet regime.
Background
During the period of war communism introduced during the Russian Civil War the policy of prodrazvyorstka was introduced (the same policy was used even before the October Revolution during World War I), which meant that the peasantry was obligated to surrender the surpluses of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and specifically, with the replacement of prodrazvyorstka with less drastic prodnalog or "food tax."
Leon Trotsky and the Opposition bloc had advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis. According to Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialization and collectivization. Other scholars have argued that the economic programme of Trotsky differed from the forced policy of collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928 due to the levels of brutality associated with its enforcement.
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 kulaks, peasants with enough land and money to own several animals and hire a few labourers. Kulaks were blamed for withholding surpluses of agricultural produce. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist), and 82% of the country's population were peasants. According to Robert Conquest, the definition of "kulak" also varied depending on who was using it; "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [~2 ha] more than their neighbors" were labeled kulaks" in Stalin's first Five Year Plan.
The small shares of most of the peasants resulted in food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates which had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced manufactured goods, the peasants chose to consume their produce rather than sell it. As a result, 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 Communist Party of the Soviet Union 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 workforce and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served through the mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise that would provide social services to the people and empower the state. Stalin was suspicious of the peasants, viewing them as a major threat to socialism. Stalin's use of the collectivization process served to not only address the grain shortages, but his greater concern over the peasants' willingness to conform to the collective farm system and state mandated grain acquisitions.
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 Soviet Union from neighbouring markets. Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Stalin tried to appear as being on the side of the peasants, but it did not help, and the peasants as a whole resented the grain seizures. The peasants did everything they could to protest what they considered unfair seizures. 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." The impact that this had on poorer peasants forced them to move to the cities. The peasants moved in search of jobs in the rapidly expanding industry. This, however, had a fairly negative impact upon their arrival as the peasants brought with them their habits from the farms. They struggled with punctuality and demonstrated a rather poor work ethic, which hindered their ability to perform in the workplace. 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:
- Association for Joint Cultivation of Land (Товарищество по совместной обработке земли, ТОЗ/TOZ), where only land was in common use;
- agricultural artel (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, with the highest level of common use of resources.
Also, various cooperatives for the 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. Peasants that were willing to conform and join the kolkhozes were rewarded with higher quality land and tax breaks, whereas peasants unwilling to join the kolkhozes were punished with lower quality land and increased taxes. The taxes imposed on the peasants was primarily to fund the industrial blitz that Stalin had made a priority. If these lesser forms of social coercion proved to be ineffective then the central government would resort to harsher forms of state coercion. Stalin had many kulaks transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labour camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often began 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 1% of farmland was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic first five-year plan only forecast 15 per cent of farms to be run collectively.
All-out drive, winter 1929–30
The situation changed quickly in the autumn of 1929 and the 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%.
To assist collectivization, the Party decided to send 25,000 "socially conscious" industry workers to the countryside. This was accomplished from 1929 to 1933, and these workers have become known as twenty-five-thousanders ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Soviet officials had hoped that by sending the twenty-five thousanders to the countryside that they would be able to produce grain more rapidly. Their hopes were that key areas in the North Caucasus and Volga regions would be collectivized by 1931, and then the other regions by 1932.
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 favour of collectivization.
The agricultural means of production (land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "commonalised" ("обобществлены"), i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households.
"Dizzy with Success"
The zeal for collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article Dizzy with Success (Russian: Головокружение от успехов, lit. 'Dizziness from 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. By 1930 only 23.6% of peasants were part of collective farms, i.e., the numbers dropped by 50%. But soon collectivization was intensified again. In particular, March 1931 decrees "О совхозном строительстве" and "О колхозном строительстве" forbade peasants to leave collective farms. By 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
Later a number of authors suggested that this Stalin's article was picking scapegoats, putting the blame on rank-and-file functionaries for his own excesses and quenching the rising discontent.
Peasants' resistance
Stalin's efforts to implement agricultural collectivization played a significant role in the overall mortality figures attributed to his regime, notably evidenced by the Ukrainian famine, a single famine responsible for 3 to 5 million deaths. Some 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 understandably had little support from experienced farmers.
The oversimplified intent was to withhold grain from the market and increase the total crop and food supply via state collective farms, with the surplus funding future industrialization. The kulaks were coerced into giving up their land to make way for these collective farms or risk being killed, deported, or sent to labor camps. Inexperienced peasants from urban areas would then replace the missing workforce of the agriculture sector, which was then considered overstaffed, inefficient and import-dependent. Under Stalin's grossly inefficient system, agricultural yields declined rather than increased.
To make matters worse, tractors promised to the peasants could not be produced due to the poor policies in the Industrial sector of the Soviet Union.