The Russian Revolution (23 page)

Modern technology, as Stalin never tired of pointing out, was essential to the process of catching up and surpassing. The new auto and tractor factories were built for assembly-line production, although many experts had advised against it, because the legendary capitalist Ford must be beaten at his own game. In practice, the new conveyor belts often stood idle during the First Five-Year Plan, while workers painstakingly assembled a single tractor by traditional methods on the shop floor. But even an idle conveyor belt had a function. In substantive terms, it was part of the First Five-Year Plan investment in future production. In symbolic terms, photographed by the Soviet press and admired by official and foreign visitors, it passed on the message that Stalin wanted the Soviet people and the world to receive: backward Russia would soon become `Soviet America'; its great breakthrough in economic development was under way.

Collectivization

The Bolsheviks had always believed that collectivized agriculture was superior to individual peasant small farming, but it was assumed during NEP that converting the peasants to this point of view would be a long and arduous process. In 1928, collective farms (kolkhozy) accounted for only 1.2 per cent of the total sown area, with 1.5 per cent in state farms, and the remaining 97.3 per cent under individual peasant cultivation.16 The First Five-Year Plan did not anticipate any large-scale transition to collectivized agriculture during its term; and indeed the formidable problems of rapid industrialization seemed quite enough for the regime to handle for the next few years, without adding a basic reorganization of agriculture.

However, as Stalin recognized-and as both Preobrazhensky and Bukharin had done in their debates a few years earlier (see above, pp. 116-17)-the question of industrialization was closely linked to the question of peasant agriculture. For the industrialization drive to succeed, the state needed reliable grain deliveries and low grain prices. The procurements crisis of 1927-8 underlined the fact that the peasants-or the small minority of relatively prosperous peasants who provided most of the marketed grain-could `hold the state to ransom' as long as a free market existed and the state's grain prices were effectively negotiable, as they had been during NEP.

As early as January 1928, Stalin had indicated that he saw the kulak hoarder as the villain in the procurements crisis, and believed that collectivization of peasant agriculture would provide the lever of control that the state needed to guarantee adequate deliveries at the state's time and price. But encouragement of voluntary collectivization in 1928 and the first half of 1929 produced only modest results; and procurements remained an acute problem, preoccupying the regime not only because of the food shortages in the towns but also because of the commitment to grain export as a means of financing industrial purchases abroad. With the coercive procurement methods favoured by Stalin generally in the ascendant, hostility mounted between the regime and the peasantry: despite intensive efforts to discredit kulaks and stimulate class antagonism within the peasantry, village unity seemed rather to have been reinforced by outside pressure than to be crumbling from within.

In the summer of 1929, having largely eliminated the free market in grain, the regime imposed procurement quotas with penalties for non-delivery. In the autumn, attacks on the kulaks became more strident, and the party leaders began to speak of an irresistible peasant movement towards mass collectivization. This no doubt reflected their sense that the regime's confrontation with the peasantry had gone so far that there was no drawing back, since few can have deceived themselves that the process could be accomplished without a bitter struggle. In the words of Yurii Pyatakov, a former Trotskyite who had become an enthusiastic supporter of the First Five-Year Plan:

There is no solution to the problem of agriculture within the framework of individual farming, and therefore we are obliged to adopt extreme rates of collectivisation of agriculture ... In our work we must adopt the rates of the Civil War. Of course I am not saying we must adopt the methods of the Civil War, but that each of us ... is obliged to work with the same tension with which we worked in the time of armed struggle with our class enemy. The heroic period of our socialist construction has arrived.17

By the end of 1929, the party had committed itself to an all-out drive to collectivize peasant agriculture. But the kulaks, class enemies of the soviet regime, were not to be admitted to the new collectives. Their exploitative tendencies could no longer be tolerated, Stalin announced in December. The kulaks must be `liquidated as a class'.

The winter of 1929-30 was a time of frenzy, when the party's apocalyptic mood and wildly revolutionary rhetoric did indeed recall that of an earlier `heroic period'-the desperate climax of the Civil War and War Communism in 192o. But in 1930 it was not just rhetorical revolution that the Communists were bringing to the countryside, and they were not simply raiding the villages for food and departing, as they had done during the Civil War. Collectivization was an attempt to reorganize peasant life, and at the same time establish administrative controls that would reach down to village level. The exact nature of the required reorganization must have been unclear to many Communists in the provinces, since instructions from the centre were both fervent and imprecise. But it was clear that control was one of the objectives, and that the method of reorganization was belligerent confrontation.

In practical terms, the new policy required officials in the countryside to force an immediate showdown with the kulaks. That meant that local Communists went into the villages, collected a small band of poor or greedy peasants, and proceeded to intimidate a handful of `kulak' families (usually the richest peasants, but sometimes peasants who were simply unpopular in the village, or disliked by the local authorities for some other reason), drive them from their homes, and confiscate their property.

At the same time, local officials were supposed to be encouraging the rest of the peasants to organize themselves voluntarily into collectives-and it was clear from the tone of central instructions in the winter of 1929-30 that this `voluntary' movement had to produce quick and impressive results. What this usually meant in practice was that the officials called a village meeting, announced the organization of a kolkhoz, and lectured and browbeat the villagers until a sufficient number agreed to inscribe their names as voluntary kolkhoz members. Once this had been achieved, the initiators of the new kolkhoz would attempt to take possession of the villagers' animals-the main movable item of peasant propertyand declare them the property of the collective. For good measure, Communist (and particularly Komsomol) collectivizers were likely to desecrate the church or insult local `class enemies' like the priest and the schoolteacher.

These actions produced immediate outrage and chaos in the countryside. Rather than hand over their animals, many peasants slaughtered them on the spot or rushed to the nearest town to sell them. Some expropriated kulaks fled to the towns, but others hid in the woods by day and returned to terrorize the village by night. Wailing peasant women, often in the company of the priest, hurled insults at the collectivizers. Officials were often beaten, stoned, or shot at by unseen assailants as they approached or departed from the villages. Many new kolkhoz members hastily left the villages to find work in the towns or on the new construction projects.

To this manifest disaster, the regime reacted in two ways. In the first place, the OGPU came in to arrest the expropriated kulaks and other troublemakers, and subsequently organized mass deportations to Siberia, the Urals, and the north. In the second place the party leadership backed a few steps away from extreme confrontation with the peasantry as the time for spring sowing approached. In March, Stalin published the famous article entitled `Dizzy with Success', in which he blamed local authorities for exceeding their instructions and ordered that most of the collectivized animals (except those of kulaks) be returned to their original owners.18 Seizing the moment, peasants hastened to withdraw their names from the lists of kolkhoz members, causing the proportion of peasant households officially collectivized throughout the USSR to drop from over half to under a quarter between i March and t June 1930.

Some Communist collectivizers, betrayed and humiliated by `Dizzy with Success', were reported to have turned Stalin's portrait to the wall and succumbed to melancholy thoughts. Nevertheless, the collapse of the collectivization drive was only temporary. Tens of thousands of Communists and urban workers (including the well-known `25,ooo-ers', mainly recruited from the big plants of Moscow, Leningrad, and Ukraine) were urgently mobilized to work in the countryside as kolkhoz organizers and chairmen. Villagers were steadily persuaded or coerced to sign up for the kolkhoz once again, this time keeping their cows and chickens. By 1932, according to official Soviet figures, 62 per cent of peasant households had been collectivized. By 1937, the figure had risen to 93 per cent.19

Collectivization was undoubtedly a real `revolution from above' in the countryside. But it was not quite the kind of revolution described in the contemporary Soviet press, which greatly exaggerated the scope of the changes that had taken place; and in some respects it was actually a less radical reorganization of peasant life than that attempted in the Stolypin reforms of the late Tsarist period (see above, p. 36). As portrayed in the Soviet press, the kolkhoz was a much larger unit than the old village, and its agricultural methods had been transformed by mechanization and the introduction of tractors. In fact, the tractors were largely imaginary in the early 193os; and the highly publicized `kolkhoz giants' of 193o-1 quickly collapsed, or were simply eliminated by the same kind of paper transaction that had created them. The typical kolkhoz was the old village, with the peasants-actually somewhat fewer peasants than before, as a result of migration and deportations, and considerably fewer draught animals-living in the same wooden huts and tilling the same village fields as they had done before. The main things that had changed in the village were its management and its marketing procedures.

The village mir was abolished in 1930, and the kolkhoz administration that took its place was headed by an appointed chairman (in the early years, usually a worker or Communist from the towns). Within the village/kolkhoz, the peasants' traditional leadership had been intimidated, and in part removed by the deportation of the kulaks. According to the Russian historian V. P. Danilov, 381,000 peasant households-at least 1.5 million people-were dekulakized and deported in 1930-1, not counting those who suffered a similar fate in 1932 and the early months of 1933.20 (More than half the deported kulaks were put to work in industry and construction; and, while most of them were working as free rather than convict labourers within a few years, they were still forbidden to move out of the region to which they had been deported and could not return to their native villages.)

The collective farms had to deliver set amounts of grain and technical crops to the state, with payment divided among the kolkhoz members according to their work contribution. Only the produce of the peasants' small private plots was still individually marketed, and this concession was not formalized until a few years after the original collectivization drive. For the general kolkhoz produce, delivery quotas were very high-up to 40 per cent of the crops, or two to three times the percentage that the peasants had previously marketed-and prices were low. The peasants used all their repertoire of passive resistance and evasion, but the regime stuck to its guns and took everything it could find, including food and seed grain. The result was that the major grain-producing areas of the country-Ukraine, Central Volga, Kazakhstan, and Northern Caucasus-were plunged into famine in the winter of 1932-3. The famine left a legacy of enormous bitterness: according to rumours collected in the Central Volga region, peasants saw it as a punishment intentionally visited on them by the regime because of their resistance to collectivization. Recent calculations based on Soviet archival data put famine deaths in 1933 at three to four million.21

One of the immediate consequences of the famine was that in December 1932 the regime reintroduced internal passports, issuing them automatically to the urban population but not to the rural one: for the duration of the crisis, every effort was made to keep starving peasants from leaving the countryside and seeking refuge and rations in the towns. This undoubtedly reinforced peasants' belief that collectivization was a second serfdom; and it also left some Western observers with the impression that one of the purposes of collectivization was to keep peasants locked up on the farm. The regime had no such intention (except in the special circumstances created by the famine), since its main objective during the 1930s was rapid industrialization, which meant a rapidly expanding urban labour force. It had long been an accepted truth that Russia's countryside was greatly overpopulated, and the Soviet leaders expected that collectivization and mechanization would rationalize agricultural production and thus further reduce the number of working hands that agriculture required. In functional terms, the relationship between collectivization and the Soviet industrialization drive had much in common with that between the enclosure movement and Britain's industrial revolution more than a century earlier.

Of course this was not an analogy that Soviet leaders were likely to draw: Marx, after all, had emphasized the suffering caused by enclosures and peasant uprooting in Britain, even though the same process rescued peasants from `the idiocy of rural life' and raised them to a higher level of social existence in the long term by transforming them into urban proletarians. Soviet Communists may have felt some similar ambivalence about collectivization and the accompanying peasant out-migration, which was a bewildering mixture of voluntary departure to the newly created jobs in industry, flight from the kolkhoz and involuntary departure via deportation. But they also clearly felt defensive and embarrassed about the disasters associated with collectivization, and tried to hide the whole subject in a smokescreen of evasions, implausible assertions, and false optimism. Thus in 1931, a year in which two and a half million peasants migrated permanently to the towns, Stalin made the incredible statement that the kolkhoz had proved so attractive to peasants that they no longer felt the traditional urge to flee from the miseries of rural life.22 But this was only by way of preamble to his main point-that organized recruitment of labour from the kolkhoz should replace spontaneous and unpredictable peasant departures.