November 19, 2019, 00:28 / Opinions

The price of Stalin's collectivization

Historian Viktor Kondrashin about how the village was sacrificed to industrialization

Stalin's collectivization, the 90th anniversary of which is celebrated these days, has become one of the symbols and phenomena of the Soviet era, the tragedy of the Soviet village. In popular memory, it is associated primarily with the dispossession of hardworking peasants, exile and the mass famine of 1932–1933.

The assessment of collectivization as a tragic result of the policies of the Stalinist leadership of the USSR in the post-Soviet years was confirmed in the works of Russian and foreign historians and fundamental collections of documents “The Tragedy of the Soviet Village: Collectivization and Dispossession”, prepared by a large team of Russian and foreign historians and archivists under the scientific leadership of Viktor Danilov. In them, on the basis of diverse and reliable sources, the real picture of collectivization was restored.

It was a consequence of accelerated industrialization, the implementation of which became possible thanks to the creation of the collective farm system - the most important source of its resources. In 1930–1932 4.7 billion poods of bread were pumped out of the collective farm village for the needs of industrialization (1.3 times more than in seven years of NEP), which was exported to the West: foreign currency was needed to pay for machines, technologies and the labor of thousands of invited foreign specialists. In addition, this bread fed the workers who built the flagships of the first five-year plan. But the price of the “success” of industrialization was the death from starvation in the main grain-producing regions of the country of at least 5 million peasants due to the forced export of all grain available to state control. We should also remember about the 5 million “kulaks” and members of their families who were taken to uninhabited areas of the North, Siberia and Kazakhstan; hundreds of thousands of them died from hunger and the hardships of “kulak exile.” On the notorious “island of cannibals” in the middle reaches of the Ob River in May–June 1933, 2,000 special settlers died painfully from hunger due to the cessation of food supplies.

Forced collectivization was a consequence of the victory of Stalin and his circle in the discussion on methods of solving the food crisis that arose in the country in 1927 as a grain procurement crisis. The peasants did not want to sell grain to the state at reduced and unprofitable prices for them, preferring to hold it or sell it on the private market at market prices. As a result, by the end of 1927, bread prices increased sharply, its deficit in the cities amounted to 128 million poods, and grain exports decreased 27 times compared to 1926 (from 150 million to 5.6 million poods). At the same time, the USSR had already proclaimed a course towards industrialization, its implementation provided for a rapid increase in the marketability of agricultural production.

In the conditions of the grain procurement crisis in the Soviet countryside in 1927, sentiments spread that the security officers called “defeatist.” According to reports from the OGPU, due to the deterioration of relations between the USSR and Poland (due to the murder of the Soviet ambassador Pyotr Voikov in Warsaw) and Great Britain (due to the severance of diplomatic relations), a significant mass of peasants did not want to defend Soviet power in the event of war with these states. In a number of cases, peasants, usually from the kulaks and the wealthy, even waited for war to take revenge on the communists for their predatory tax and grain procurement policies. At the same time, the idea of creating a peasant party (union) in opposition to the “workers’ party” of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to protect the interests of the village took root in the countryside, and the anti-urban and anti-communist sentiments of the mass of the rural population intensified.

In such conditions - the negative mood of the peasantry and the increasing pace of industrialization - the Soviet state had to find a way out of the food crisis.

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On the one hand, it has been proven that the grain procurement crisis was associated with the low level of marketability of peasant individual farms, which reached the limit of their development by the mid-1920s. For grain crops it amounted to 20% of the pre-revolutionary level (1.3 billion poods were harvested in 1913, 725.5 million in 1926). On the other hand, the grain procurement crisis had objective reasons: the inability to satisfy the needs of the village due to the weakness of industry. Hence the price scissors: high prices for manufactured goods and low prices for agricultural products - and as a reaction to this - “peasant sabotage” of grain procurements and a food crisis in the country.

The Stalinist leadership found a way out of it in violent anti-peasant collectivization through dispossession and forced grain procurements. The signal for them was the decisions of the November plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1929 and the January resolutions of the Central Committee in 1930 on the pace of collectivization and the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” Even before their adoption at the April and July plenums of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1929, the Stalinist majority rejected the “alternative,” that is, the right-wing proposal put forward a year earlier to abandon emergency methods of grain procurement and violence against the peasantry. At the same time, the initiative to purchase 100–150 million poods of bread for foreign currency in order to alleviate the severity of the food crisis in the cities did not receive support. Stalin and his associates did not want to spend their meager foreign exchange reserves on the purchase of bread, which would not be enough to solve the food problem. Supporting the position of the right meant the suspension and mothballing of the Five-Year Plan construction projects, increased unemployment in the countryside, as well as serious problems with the remuneration of invited foreign specialists.

It should be noted that in 1929 - early 1930, in order to obtain foreign currency for the needs of industrialization (the shortage of foreign currency was increasing), the Stalinist leadership planned to sharply increase grain exports in 1930, up to 5 million tons. The need to save forced industrialization by pumping resources out of the countryside predetermined the USSR's slide into an emergency of complete collectivization.

An important aspect of the history of collectivization, which largely explains its success, but has not received wide coverage in historiography, is the presence in the Soviet village of a fairly large and active layer of collectivization supporters among rural youth (Komsomol members, village correspondents, etc.) and part of the lower nomenklatura (chairmen village councils, party secretaries, etc.), rural poor and middle peasants.

For example, by the beginning of collectivization in the Soviet village - according to the All-Union Census of 1926 - 67% of peasants were under 30 years of age. Collectivization, together with industrialization and the cultural revolution, was for them a springboard to positions created in collective farms, MTS, factories and factories, in the Red Army, etc. (chairmen, foremen, machine operators, livestock specialists, agronomists, engineers, etc. ). It was they, together with the city “authorized representatives” (“twenty-five thousanders”, etc.) sent to the villages who became the striking force of collectivization and made a significant contribution to its success.

Collectivization caused massive resistance from peasants: in 1930 – the first quarter of 1932, 13,893 anti-collective farm protests took place in the USSR with 2.5 million participants. The state was able to successfully suppress it by using the full power of the administrative-repressive apparatus, which the village could not oppose with serious force. Unlike the Civil War, the peasants did not have enough weapons, which were confiscated by the OGPU during regularly conducted special operations. In addition, dispossession deprived the village of potential leaders of peasant uprisings. It should be noted that not only real kulaks fell under dispossession (their share in the USSR as a whole did not exceed 2.3%), but also an active part of wealthy peasants and middle peasants who were opposed to collective farms and capable of becoming resistance leaders. The new Antonovism and Makhnovism was impossible in a disarmed and decapitated village.

Although collectivization was a success in terms of obtaining resources for accelerated industrialization, which ensured the victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, it also laid a time bomb under the Soviet socio-economic and socio-political system created on its basis. The number of horses in the village in 1933 decreased by half compared to 1928, cattle and pigs by more than 40%, and small livestock by three times. The pre-collective farm level of livestock was reached only in 1958. The average grain yield in 1934–1940. (7.4 c per 1 ha) compared to 1922–1928. (7.7 quintals per 1 ha) also decreased, although slightly. The collective farm system, which arose at the cost of millions of peasant lives, was unable to feed the country and ultimately collapsed with the collapse of the Soviet state as an ineffective economic model that existed solely to satisfy the needs of the state and, last but not least, the interests of rural workers.

In the context of the enormous sacrifices of collectivization, the natural question is whether the tragic development of events could have been avoided. Discussion on this topic continues in historical science. In the early 1990s. historian Viktor Danilov called the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin an alternative to Stalin’s forced collectivization. Allegedly, the program of the right opposition (Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky) provided for a painless option for creating large commercial agriculture in the USSR based on the development of cooperation and the unification of peasant farms with the material support of the Soviet government. Danilov was supported by the English sociologist and historian, professor at the University of Manchester Theodor Shanin, who stated that without collectivization by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War there would have been fewer factories in the USSR, but the ones that existed would have worked more productively than those hastily built during the first five-year plans. But most importantly, it would be possible to avoid huge human losses due to collectivization, as well as a sharp drop in the level of agricultural production. In this case, according to Shanin, the Red Army would have 5 million more defenders from among the peasants who escaped starvation as a result of rejecting Stalin’s collectivization. The “alternative” point of view on collectivization was most clearly expressed by the American economists Holland Hunter and Janos Schirmer. Using mathematical methods, they modeled the development of agriculture in the USSR without collectivization and obtained the result described by Shanin.

The "alternative" concept of collectivization has attracted criticism in Russia and abroad. In particular, the famous Russian agrarian Sergei Yesikov pointed out the main drawback of the program of the right opposition and Bukharin: the “snail’s pace” of industrialization and “building socialism”, and the underestimation of the level of military threat to the USSR. And Birmingham University professor Robert Williams Davis noted the inconsistency of the calculations of Schirmer and Hunter, who took 1928 as the basis for their calculations, when there was already a crisis of grain procurements and NEP in general and there could no longer be any talk of “normal” development of the country’s agriculture.

Statement about the absence of a real military threat to the USSR at the turn of 1920–1930. is refuted by the latest research by Russian historians. As the famous researcher historian Andrei Sokolov points out, the headquarters of the Red Army on the eve of collectivization seriously considered the possibility of a war with the participation of the countries of the Little Entente (Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, etc.) allied with France and Great Britain against the USSR. Therefore, the Soviet military persistently demanded to strengthen the defense component of the five-year plan and discussed the issue of likely opponents and the timing of the start of the war. On August 11, 1932, Joseph Stalin wrote to Lazar Kaganovich about the danger of “losing Ukraine” due to the disruption of grain procurements and chaos in the republic, which “Pilsudski’s agents” could take advantage of. Hence the brutal and massive repressions against the peasantry at the end of 1932, which led to a terrible famine in Ukraine in the first half of 1933. The “alternative” concept of collectivization cannot be accepted, since supporters of its softer version lost the struggle for power to the Stalinist group in the CPSU ( b).

The author is a historian, head of the Center for Economic History of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences