The Penguin History of Modern Russia

The Politburo also resolved the question as to how to handle those peasants who remained in the countryside. After two successive winters of grain seizures, the peasants would not voluntarily maintain their sown area. Bolsheviks already believed that collective farms, with large production units and electrically-powered machinery, were the solution to agrarian backwardness. Thus the Politburo majority, against Bukharin’s counsel, came to the opinion that compulsory collectivization should be initiated (although the fiction was maintained in public that coercion would not be used). To Molotov was entrusted the job of explaining this to the Central Committee in November 1929. Bukharin was sacked from the Politburo at the same meeting and, in the following month, Stalin’s fiftieth birthday was celebrated with extravagant eulogies in the mass media. By January 1930 the Politburo was insisting that a quarter of the sown area should be held by collective farms within two years. An agricultural revolution was heralded.

And yet both agriculture and industry were altogether too chaotic to be described without reservation as being integrated within ‘a planned economy’. For example, the Five-Year Plan of 1928–33 was drawn up six months after it was said to have been inaugurated (and the Plan was said to be completed a year before it was meant to end). Rough commands were of a more practical importance than carefully-elaborated planning; and the commands were based on guesses, prejudices and whims. At best the officials of Gosplan could rectify the worst mistakes before too much damage was done. But huge human suffering occurred before any particular experiment was halted on the grounds of being dyseconomic.

‘Class struggle’ was intensified through a governmental assault upon the so-called kulaks. It was laid down that the collective farms should be formed exclusively from poor and middling peasant households. Kulaks stood to lose most from collectivization in material terms; they tended also to be more assertive than average. At least, this is how Stalin saw things. He set up a Politburo commission to investigate how to decapitate kulak resistance. Its proposals were accepted by him and incorporated in a Sovnarkom decree of February 1930. Kulaks were to be disbarred from joining collective farms and divided into three categories. Those in category one were to be dispatched to forced-labour settlements or shot. Category two comprised households deemed more hostile to the government; these were to go to distant provinces. Category three consisted of the least ‘dangerous’ households, which were allowed to stay in their native district but on a smaller patch of land. Between five and seven million persons were treated as belonging to kulak families.¹⁴

The decree could not be fulfilled without magnifying violence. The Red Army and the OGPU were insufficient in themselves and anyway the Politburo could not depend on the implicit obedience of their officers of rural origins.¹⁵ And so tough young lads from the factories, militia and the party went out to the villages to enforce the establishment of collective farms. About 25,000 of them rallied to the Politburo’s summons. Before they set out from the towns, these ‘25,000-ers’ were told that the kulaks were responsible for organizing a ‘grain strike’ against the towns. They were not issued with detailed instructions as to how to distinguish the rich, middling and poor peasants from each other. Nor were they given limits on their use of violence. The Politburo set targets for grain collection, for collectivization and for de-kulakization, and did not mind how these targets were hit.

But when they arrived in the villages, the ‘25,000-ers’ saw for themselves that many hostile peasants were far from being rich. The central party apparatus imaginatively introduced a special category of ‘sub-kulaks’ who were poor but yet opposed the government.¹⁶ Sub-kulaks were to be treated as if they were kulaks. Consequently Stalin’s collectivizing mayhem, involving executions and deportations, was never confined to the better-off households. The slightest resistance to the authorities was met with punitive violence. With monumental insincerity he wrote an article for Pravda in March 1930, ‘Dizzy with Success’, in which he called local functionaries to task for abusing their authority. But this was a temporizing posture. For Stalin, the priority remained mass collectivization. By the time of the harvest of 1931, collective farms held practically all the land traditionally given over to cereal crops. Stalin and the Politburo had won the agrarian war.

The price was awful. Probably four to five million people perished in 1932–3 from ‘de-kulakization’ and from grain seizures.¹⁷ The dead and the dying were piled on to carts by the urban detachments and pitched into common graves without further ceremony. Pits were dug on the outskirts of villages for the purpose. Child survivors, their stomachs swollen through hunger, gnawed grass and tree-bark and begged for crusts. Human beings were not the only casualties. While the government’s policies were killing peasants, peasants were killing their livestock: they had decided that they would rather eat their cattle and horses than let them be expropriated by the collective farms. Even some of Stalin’s colleagues blanched when they saw the effects with their own eyes. For instance, Ordzhonikidze was aghast at the behaviour of officials in eastern Ukraine;¹⁸ but he felt no need to criticize mass compulsory collectivization as general policy.

Collectivization was a rural nightmare. It is true that the average harvest in 1928–30 was good.¹⁹ But this was chiefly the product of excellent weather conditions. It certainly did not result from improved agricultural management; for often the collective farm chairmen were rural ne’er-do-wells or inexpert party loyalists from the towns. Nor did the state fulfil its promise to supply the countryside with 100,000 tractors by the end of the Five-Year Plan. Only half of these were built,²⁰ and most of them were used inefficiently through lack of experienced drivers and mechanics.

With the exception of 1930, mass collectivization meant that not until the mid-1950s did agriculture regain the level of output achieved in the last years before the Great War. Conditions in the countryside were so dire that the state had to pump additional resources into the country in order to maintain the new agrarian order. Increased investment in tractors was not the only cost incurred. Revenues had to be diverted not only to agronomists, surveyors and farm chairmen but also to soldiers, policemen and informers. Moreover, ‘machine-tractor stations’ had to be built from 1929 to provide equipment and personnel for the introduction of technology (as well as to provide yet another agency to control the peasantry). Otherwise the rickety structure of authority would have collapsed. No major state has inflicted such grievous economic damage on itself in peacetime.

Yet Stalin could draw up a balance sheet that, from his standpoint, was favourable. From collectivization he acquired a reservoir of terrified peasants who would supply him with cheap industrial labour. To some extent, too, he secured his ability to export Soviet raw materials in order to pay for imports of industrial machinery (although problems arose with foreign trade in 1931–2). Above all, he put an end to the recurrent crises faced by the state in relation to urban food supplies as the state’s grain collections rose from 10.8 million tons in 1928–9 to 22.8 million tons in 1931–2.²¹ After collectivization it was the countryside, not the towns, which went hungry if the harvest was bad.

Stalin was still more delighted with the record of industry. The large factories and mines had been governmentally-owned since 1917–19, but the number of such enterprises rose steeply after 1928. Thirty-eight per cent of industrial capital stock by the end of 1934 was located in factories built in the previous half-dozen years.²² Simultaneously the smaller manufacturing firms — most of which had been in private hands during the NEP — were closed down. The First Five-Year Plan was meant to end in September 1933; in fact its completion was announced in December 1932. Mines and factories were claimed to have doubled their production since 1928. This was exaggeration. Yet even sceptical estimates put the annual expansion in industrial output at ten per cent between 1928 and 1941; and the production of capital goods probably grew at twice the rate of consumer goods during the Five-Year Plan.²³ The USSR had at last been pointed decisively towards the goal of a fully industrialized society.

Stalin the Man of Steel boasted that he had introduced ‘socialism’ to the villages. The nature of a collective farm was ill-defined; no Bolshevik before 1917 — not even Lenin — had explained exactly what such farms should be like. There was much practical experimentation with them after 1917: at one end of the range there were farms that required their employees to take decisions collectively and share land, housing, equipment and income equally, regardless of personal input of labour; at the other end it was possible to find arrangements allowing peasant households to form a co-operative and yet keep their land, housing and equipment separately from each other and to make their own separate profits.

The idea of peasants taking most of their own decisions was anathema to Stalin. The government, he insisted, should own the land, appoint the farm chairmen and set the grain-delivery quotas. His ideal organization was the sovkhoz. This was a collective farm run on the same principles as a state-owned factory. Local authorities marked out the land for each sovkhoz and hired peasants for fixed wages. Such a type of farming was thought eminently suitable for the grain-growing expanses in Ukraine and southern Russia. Yet Stalin recognized that most peasants were ill-disposed to becoming wage labourers, and he yielded to the extent of permitting most farms to be of the kolkhoz type. In a kolkhoz the members were rewarded by results. If the quotas were not met, the farm was not paid. Furthermore, each peasant was paid a fraction of the farm wage-fund strictly