Collectivisation

9 Key excerpts on "Collectivisation"

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  Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin

  Accommodation, Survival, Resistance

  • Boris B. Gorshkov(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  All of this signified a new turn in Soviet life which would alter it and the peasants’ lives forever. Perhaps no state has imposed an agrarian policy that resulted in such disastrous consequences (dispossession, mass resistance, forced relocation, famine, and devastating mortality) than the Soviet Union’s collectivization and nationalization of agriculture. The program began in 1928 and, with stops and starts, reached its completion by 1934 (after-effects continued much longer). 13 Peasant Life during Collectivization Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin 192 Following realpolitik principles and methods, the Bolsheviks and their new leader, the increasingly dictatorial Joseph Stalin, ruthlessly executed the plan which at first had not been fully revealed to the Soviet public. Collectivization, as the policy came to be called, had a devastating impact on the lives of millions of Soviet citizens; peasants were deprived of their land and property; and many perished in labor camps or in wilderness areas of the far north where people were brought and left without any means of survival. Although the Bolshevik government had shown awareness of ecological concerns as regards preservation of wilderness areas and related issues, in this case it displayed scant knowledge of or attention to ecological concerns: consideration of local or regional environmental circumstances simply played no role. Agriculture of all regions of the geographically diverse USSR was to be collectivized, regardless of its status or type in any given region or whether any other factors existed. Although the geography of collectivization was state-wide, the areas that endured the direst weight of the policy were the black-earth regions of the south, the Volga region, Ukraine, and Western Siberia, that is, the major grain-producing areas. The long-term consequence of collectivization, as the future would reveal, were decades of stagnation, decay in the Russian village, and endemic food shortages.

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  Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars

  • F. Trentmann, F. Just, F. Trentmann, F. Just(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  6 Stalin, Soviet Agriculture, and Collectivisation Mark B. Tauger The Collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s may have been the most significant and traumatic of the many transformations to which the Communist regime subjected the people of the former Russian empire. Historical and other literatures have viewed this policy with considerable ambivalence. On the one hand, it involved considerable violence and the harsh policy of ‘dekulakisation’, provoked numerous peasant protests, disrupted the agricultural system, and was a factor in the great famine of 1931–33, though not the most important cause. 1 At the same time, Collectivisation brought substantial modernisation to traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relat- ively high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s. 2 This ambivalence regarding collective agriculture extends to the inten- tions of the Soviet regime in implementing Collectivisation. In particular, Stalin’s attitudes toward peasants and agriculture, given the growing authority and power he had by the late 1920s, are central issues for an understanding of the regime’s decision to carry out this policy. Yet scholarly discussions of his views of agriculture and related issues (peas- ants, famines, agricultural development) are problematic. Few, if any studies, for example, discuss his early writings on peasants. Some works simply assume Stalin’s hostility to peasants as the underlying explana- tion for the tragedies that struck them in the 1930s, as for example Robert Conquest’s citation of Khrushchev that ‘for Stalin, peasants were scum’. 3 Aside from such extreme and inadequately supported positions, the historical literature displays several interpretations of Stalin’s views of agrarian topics and his intentions behind the decision to collectivise agriculture.

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  The Red and the Green

  The Rise and Fall of Collectivized Agriculture in Marxist Regimes

  • Frederic L. Pryor(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Such an approach often merely institutionalized traditional peasant practices. Fourth, most nations set up different levels of collective farms, where the levels varied according to the extent that means of production (land, equipment and tools, and draft power) were shared and income was di- vided according to the amount of land and labor contributed. Some coun- tries, aside from the Soviet Union, have not employed such intermediate steps; these included nations moving directly to state farms or countries such as Grenada or Zimbabwe, which established collective farms on ex- propriated or purchased land, rather than by encouraging private farmers to combine their properties. 15 13 Mongolia actually began a major collectivization drive several months before that of the Soviet Union, but the Soviets were the first nation to establish a functioning collective farm system. 14 Kovacio (1980) and Loncarevic (1974) describe in detail the various ways in which the service cooperatives in Yugoslavia have provided such services to the private sector. He- genbarth (1977) presents the same kind of discussion for Poland. 15 With regard to Zimbabwe I refer to "Model B." "Model C" farms combine several of the above elements: they consist of a "core farm," owned cooperatively, which provides services and inputs to a group of associated individual farms. By 1989, however, the gov- ernment had established only one such farm. The different models of farms are discussed in detail in Stoneman and Cliflfe (1989); see also footnote 17. STATK AND COLLECTIVE FARMS 123 It is not certain that any of these preliminary stages made farmers more willing to be collectivized, but if such measures were to have their in- tended effect, the process had to be slow. Unfortunately, many Marxist leaders became impatient.

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  Daily Life in the Soviet Union

  • Katherine Eaton(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Collectivization was massively enforced during the early weeks of 1930. Laws permitting the hiring of labor or leasing of land were revoked. Kulaks and their families were targeted for deportation. Their property— land, livestock, buildings, and equipment—went to collectives and were used as enticements to encourage poor peasants to join kolkhozes and sovkhozes (Russian, kolkhozy, sovkhozy). Some kulaks committed suicide or killed their families and themselves rather than face the loss of all they owned and then deportation. Many peasants slaughtered their farm ani- mals rather than turn them over to the collectives. Some attacked city workers and officials sent out to the villages as kolkhoz organizers. 16 Daily Life in the Soviet Union Because the upheaval threatened to seriously disrupt spring planting, Stalin called a temporary halt to collectivization. He did this by having Pravda, the Party newspaper, publish his article, "Dizziness from Success" (March 2, 1930). In it he blamed workers and rural officials who were directly involved in forcing peasants into collectives with being overzeal- ous. In fact, their all-out effort was precisely what the great leader had demanded of them. Assured now that joining was voluntary, millions of peasants withdrew from collectives. But theirs was a momentary reprieve. Voluntarism was a fiction and private farming had become a dead end. Any peasant who persisted in farming privately and prospered in the face of state restrictions and penalties was bound to suffer the consequences of being labeled a kulak. In the fall of 1930 forced collectivizing was resumed. As an enticement and concession to private initiative, each household entering a collective was permitted to have a small garden plot and a few animals of its own. About half of all peasant households, some 13 million, were collectivized by the spring of 1931. 8 Collectivization directly affected the great majority of Soviet peoples.

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  Nomads and Soviet Rule

  Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin

  • Alun Thomas(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 6 Collectivisation Collectivisation haunts each chapter of this book. The period in the late 1920s and early 1930s in which rural communities had their property confiscated, were dissociated from their land, forced into new agricultural collectives and in many cases were arrested, exiled or executed makes its presence felt in analysis of any facet of nomadic life under the New Economic Policy (NEP) as a portent of things to come. In the longer story of the nomadic experience of Soviet power, it is definitive: a specific feature of the Collectivisation campaign in Central Asia was that it almost totally terminated nomadism. Following the campaign, nomadism was pursued by a small proportion of those who had practised it before Collectivisation began. This applies across ethnonational divides, to the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Kalmyks, Buryats and others alongside ‘the smaller nationalities of the Far North’. 1 The Communist Party came to call this process of termination ‘sedentarisation’, implying that it was of a piece with other, earlier settlement initiatives and the product of an orchestrated campaign. 2 This is misleading; it was in fact just one part of a humanitarian catastrophe, precipitated by the Party but hardly coordinated by it, and culminating in millions of fatalities. Collectivisation so disrupted Central Asian life that many of those forced to settle are better characterised as refugees than nomads regardless of their habits before famine struck. Nomadic pastoralism was thus primarily a collateral victim of Collectivisation instead of its target; caught in a vortex of displacement and hardship rather than singled out and persecuted. Even at this most tragic moment, then, the Party’s thinking was dominated and motivated by other problems, imagined or real. Nevertheless, the results of this period make it impossible to draw compelling conclusions about nomadic life in the early Soviet period without regard to Collectivisation.

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  Farming the Red Land

  Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924-1941

  • Jonathan L. Dekel-Chen(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  In Crimea, one quarter of the farming population left their villages during the  s. 9 Collectivization also brought the village and state into open conflict. Faced with imminent peasant revolt and the failure to sow in the spring, in March  Stalin temporarily rescinded forcible collectivization, af-ter which more than half of the peasants left the kolkhozes. 10 How did the regime survive this catastrophe? In part, policies enacted during the Great Turn often accommodated national sensitivities and thereby avoided some unneces-sary conflicts. In addition, an outstanding nationwide harvest in  guaran-teed higher spirits among the entire peasantry, the Jewish colonists included. 11 This windfall gave Moscow a critical interval for recovery and consolidation before the ruinous harvests of  –  . Collectivization seemingly delivered the village to Soviet control by disman-tling the traditional source of rural political power—the mir (the village gov-ernment or commune). Henceforth, peasant resistance became an individual act designed to avoid, not confront, the state. These new Soviet peasants kept their families fed through the provision of cash (called workday payments or trudodnia ) and farm produce for their labor on the kolkhoz, petty theft, and whatever could be sold from the small household plot. 12 Using a mix of aggres-sive policy and conciliation, the state arrived at a modicum of understanding with the peasantry by the mid- s. Defining wider circles of potential “class enemies” was a central theme of the Great Turn. Eventually, the regime identified adversaries among foreign capi-talists, bourgeois specialists working for the government, the established intel-ligentsia, and even Stalin’s closest comrades. 13 Most important for Jewish colo-Collectivization and Its Limits 133 nization, Aleksei Rykov’s defense of the noncommunist specialists in  made him a prime target for Stalin’s suspicion.

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  Rewriting History in Soviet Russia

  The Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–1974

  • R. Markwick(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  These, he believed, made collectiviza- tion and the elimination of the kulak a ‘law-governed’, ‘objective’ process, not one driven by the ‘general theoretical considerations’ of the communist party leadership. He linked the imperative for collec- tivization to the sorts of changes in the countryside in the 1920s that had been unleashed by the October Revolution. Labouring under the burden of the Short Course approach, Soviet historians had neglected the social ramifications of eradicating the gentry estates and redistrib- uting the land among the peasantry in 1917–18, a process that had promoted the middle peasantry by the averaging of land holdings. Stalin had compounded the Short Course’s neglect of changing rural social relations in the 1920s by his ‘categorical’ pronouncements in 1952 that purely ‘capitalist’ relations of production prevailed up until full-scale collectivization. 56 A vital component of Danilov’s resuscitation of the 1920s as a field of research was his call for recognition of ‘the peasant household as the basic productive unit of agriculture’. The task, as Danilov saw it, was to locate the various households (poor, middle and kulak) in the overall system of relations of production. In this scenario, peasant ‘land rela- tions’ became the focus of research, instead of being merely a passive ‘background’ to the ‘measures of the state for the preparation and implementation’ of collectivization, as it was in the standard Soviet interpretation. In this respect the April 1961 conference on agrarian history had been a landmark because it had established that the social structure of the Soviet countryside prior to collectivization was a Writing and Rewriting the History of Collectivization 123 ‘complex combination’ of relations – ‘capitalist and petty bourgeois, socialist and transitional to socialism’.

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  China's Economic Development

  Growth And Structural Change

  • Chu-yuan Cheng(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  3 Collectivization of Agriculture The crux of China’s economic problems is its growing agrarian population coupled with a scarcity of arable land. Of China’s 9.6 million square kilometers of territory, only 15 percent is arable. Since 80 percent of the population is engaged in agriculture for a living, per capita landholding is extremely meager. Aware of the unfavorable man-land ratio and the poverty of modern farm inputs, the Chinese Communist leadership saw organizational and attitudinal changes as possible substitutes for capital investment as a stimulus for agricultural development. Moreover, the Chinese revolution was essentially an agrarian revolution. For more than twenty-two years, prior to their victory in 1949, the Chinese Communists had penetrated deeply into the villages and transformed many backward rural areas into Communist military bases. To gain peasant support during the civil war, the Communists had called for land redistribution. As far back as 1927, Mao had emphasized that the distribution of land to the peasants was the basic starting point for all other components of the Chinese revolution. He regarded the peasant question as the central revolutionary problem 1 and adhered to Lenin’s dictum that the peasantry constitutes the last bourgeois class. Thus, it was not surprising that once the Communists had won nationwide control, they initiated a series of policies to transform the peasants into an agrarian proletariat. In three successive steps spanning a nine-year period, Mao engineered the land reform of 1949–1952, the collectivization of 1951–1957, and the commune movement, which began in April 1958

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  Transforming Peasants, Property and Power

  The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962

  • Constantin Iordachi, Dorin Dobrincu, Constantin Iordachi, Dorin Dobrincu(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Central European University Press

    (Publisher)

  The use of the broad term “Agricultural Production Cooperative” (CAP) to refer to a range of different types of organiza-tions at the inception of the collectivization effort would later provide a basis for confusion among writers on the subject. Just as the cooperative form was employed to create a more efficient agricul-tural system out of a fragmented and often uneconomic patchwork of individual landholdings, so was the question of the consolidation of landholdings to create more efficient agriculture addressed by the Plenary. This issue was addressed by Ministry of Agriculture Decree no. 151 of June 10, 1950 “For the Consolidation and Circulation of Agricultural Goods,” which replaced Law no. 203 of 1947. De-claring that the existence of property “crumbled into tens of millions of lots” con-stitutes a “brake on the development of our agriculture,” the Minister of Agriculture was charged with organizing a consolidation of land to be accompli-shed through exchange of property (Arts. 1 and 2). Distribution of land was to be based on a plan drawn up by a local commission and approved by the District People’s Council (Art. 4). The procedure and norms of the consolidation were to be established by the Minister of Agriculture, who would also draft the contracts for the acts of exchange (Art. 6–7). As was the case with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1945, actions taken under Decree-Law no. 151 could not be challenged in court. The concept of “acts of gov- The Collectivization of Agriculture: General Aspects 90 ernment” had been transformed into virtually all “administrative acts” outside the scope of judicial review. 56 In one notable and rare piece of analysis in Justiţia Nouă, 57 Professor Z. Oprea argued that the judiciary had erred in failing to con-sider the claims of a peasant who had attempted to transfer the land he had received in the Act of Exchange to another person, only to see the land given to another by the local authorities.

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