Collectivization in The Soviet Union - Background

Background

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of about half of the land they had previously cultivated, and began to ask for the redistribution of all land. The Stolypin agricultural reforms between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I. The Russian Provisional Government accomplished little during the difficult wartime months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, which together with the traditional peasant communes became a powerful force of opposition. When Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, he promised the people "Peace and Land," the latter appearing as a promise to the peasants for the redistribution of confiscated land.

During the period of war communism, however, the policy of Prodrazvyorstka meant peasantry were obligated to surrender the surpluses of almost any kind of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and specifically, the policy of prodnalog or "food tax." This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, and lead to increased production, while as a progressive tax, those with more money paid more.

Until this time, the Bolsheviks allowed the peasants to take the land and farm it privately. In the 1920s, however, they began to lean toward the idea of collective agriculture. Memories of World War I were that soldiers from the Green cadres (Yugoslavia) maintained ties with the Red Guards (Russia) and helped them with food, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. and they transferred their experience with the organization of agricultural cooperatives of the former Military Frontier, when the Red Army began to conquer Tomsk in Siberia. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the wealthy kulaks. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist), and 80% of the country's population were peasants.

The equal land shares among the peasants gave rise to food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates who had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced goods, the peasants chose to eat their produce rather than sell it, so city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total).

The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise which would produce higher returns for the State and could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.