Collectivization in The Soviet Union - The All-out Drive, Winter 1929-30

The All-out Drive, Winter 1929-30

The situation changed incredibly quickly in the fall of 1929 and winter of 1930. Between September and December 1929, collectivization increased from 7.4% to 15%, but in the first two months of 1930, 11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60% almost overnight.

To assist collectivization, the Party decided to send 25,000 "socially conscious" industry workers to the countryside. This was accomplished during 1929–1933, and these workers have become known as twenty-five-thousanders ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Shock brigades were used to force reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms and remove those who were declared kulaks and their "agents".

Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. It was often claimed that an American Fordson tractor (called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favor of collectivization. The Communist Party, which adopted the plan in 1929, predicted an increase of 330% in industrial production, and an increase of 50% in agricultural production.

The means of production (land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "socialized", i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. Not even any private household garden plots were allowed for.

Agricultural work was envisioned on a mass scale. Huge glamorous columns of machines were to work the fields, in total contrast to peasant small-scale work.

The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community. By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting.

The new kolkhozy were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities. Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as gigantomania. They were typically "divided into 'economies (ekonomikii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a 'fully depersonalized optimum land area'..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized 'agrotowns' offering modern amenities.

In the prevailing socio-economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes. The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear. The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages.