Village protest

On social networks, mass slaughter of livestock in the Novosibirsk region is compared to collectivization

Livestock is being confiscated en masse from residents of the Novosibirsk region and destroyed. Hundreds of cows are burned in village areas. Officials do not say anything to local residents - they only refer to some particularly dangerous disease. Driven to despair, some even began to slaughter their own livestock so as not to hand it over to officials for burning. Many are actively protesting - local police are fining protesters, and local authorities are trying to intimidate them. On social networks, some compare what is happening with collectivization and dispossession of the 30s. Historian Rustam Alexander recalls what the confrontation between officials and peasants looked like almost a century ago.

In the winter of 1929–1930, the Soviet government began the so-called “collectivization” in the villages. Rural residents, who previously had their own land, cows and horses and could work for themselves, now had to unite the land and livestock into one common collective farm (kolkhoz) and give the harvest to the state at a nominal cost. So the state hoped to increase the size of grain procurements and solve the problem of grain shortages. Officials promised the peasants that with collective farming, productivity would increase. But the peasants perceived collectivization as an attempt at exploitation, because working for themselves was much more profitable. Almost in parallel with this, the state launched a campaign of “dekulakization”—the confiscation of property from wealthy peasants and sending them into exile.

Local officials did not have clear instructions on how to carry out collectivization. Workers from district and village councils, city communists and Komsomol members, as well as workers and students who were heading to the villages were involved. All these people did not have local connections and therefore could carry out collectivization more effectively and strictly. But many of them knew nothing about agriculture.

Representatives of the authorities held special meetings in the villages, at which the peasants had to be forced by any means to sign documents agreeing to transfer the farm - land and livestock - to the state: for the Soviet government it was important that the process seemed “democratic”. Many peasants were skeptical about this and did everything to disrupt such events.

So, at one of the meetings, at the moment the signatures began, elderly women burst into singing “Christ is risen!” Someone would come running with the news that there was a fire in the neighboring village and they had to run to put it out. Sometimes children would run into a collectivization meeting shouting: “Uncle, uncle, your horse has been stolen!” All this, of course, disrupted the collection of signatures. Some protests took completely unexpected forms. So, in one of the regions where government officials went from house to house, describing the property of peasants transferred to the state, one woman met the officials completely naked with the words: “Come on, describe it.”

The position of the authorities quickly hardened: rural residents were directly told that those who refused to join the collective farm would be declared “kulaks,” their property would be confiscated, and they themselves would be sent into exile. Thus, one official in the Urals traveled around villages, accompanied by the chief of police, and said: “Whoever wants to join the collective farm, sign up with me; whoever doesn’t want to, sign up with the chief of police.” Twelve people who refused to join were immediately arrested. Often the collectivizers brandished revolvers, threatening to shoot the resisting peasants. Sometimes they came to villages with an orchestra: if a peasant agreed to join the collective farm, a bravura march was played, and in case of refusal, a funeral march. Other forms of pressure were also widely used: peasants were summoned at night to village councils, where they could be held for several days and subjected to beatings.

Despite attempts to present entry into collective farms as a voluntary and even “democratic” procedure - with a formal collection of signatures - in practice everything was accompanied by arbitrariness. Horses and cows were taken away without warning. One peasant woman recalled: “I went... for kerosene, returned home, and by that time the cow had already been taken away.” Representatives of the authorities tore off the locks from the barns and took away the cattle by force.

When state commissioners began to massively confiscate horses, cows, pigs and sheep from peasants, declaring them state property, many peasants resorted to desperate actions. Not wanting to give up the cattle, they slaughtered them themselves. Livestock slaughter became one of the most common forms of protest against collectivization. Thus, in the Central Black Earth Region, in the first three months of 1930 alone, about 25% of cattle, 53% of pigs, 55% of sheep and 40% of poultry were destroyed. At the same time, the peasants themselves often understood that the confiscated animals would most likely die due to inept and careless care on collective farms.

On January 9, 1930, an article appeared in the Pravda newspaper: “Resist the maneuvers of the class enemy! Save livestock for collective farms." The text said: “The kulak, in response to the stormy collective farm movement... launched a frenzied campaign for the extermination of livestock...

In a number of districts and districts, secret slaughterhouses have been discovered where Gostorg and Kozhtrust, circumventing the laws, kill livestock. City markets are literally inundated with fresh carcasses of meat, which are often sold for next to nothing. The situation is very alarming."

The tough and decisive rebuff from the villagers to attempts to take their property to the collective farm initially forced the authorities to take them into account. On March 2, 1930, the Pravda newspaper published Stalin’s article “Dizziness from Success,” in which the Secretary General shifted all responsibility for the excessively harsh implementation of collectivization in the villages to local leaders.

Stalin's article stunned the officials who carried out collectivization - for many of them it was an outright betrayal. Thus, one of the party secretaries in the Volga region, having read Stalin’s article, got drunk out of grief and tore up his portrait in his anger. The collectivization campaign was temporarily stopped, and some local officials were convicted.

The peasants were happy: many of them thought that Stalin’s article was an official permission to leave the collective farms. In the following weeks, millions of peasants withdrew their signatures from the lists. However, the state was not going to let anyone go: dispossession continued, and soon collectivization was resumed - as historians now well know, at the cost of enormous human casualties and millions of ruined destinies.

Based on materials from: Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Stalin's Peasants. Social history of Soviet Russia in the 30s: the village" (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001).