City life meant intense privation, even for the youthful enthusiasts at shock construction sites. These hardships were nothing compared to the disasters of collectivization. At the beginning the party was not even clear what the new collective farm was to look like: was it to be some sort of association of peasant households for common planting and harvesting, or was it to be a total commune with farmers living in communal housing and eating together, as well as farming all the land together? And how fast was it to proceed, and how? In any case, it was in the autumn of 1929 when Stalin decided to go for as much collectivization as he could get. To prepare the ground the leadership decided on the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and the GPU set out to round up and deport the kulaks. Several thousand were executed, but nearly two million were deported to the north, the Urals and Siberia, where they were put in “special settlements” to cut timber or sometimes to work in the mines or on construction. They arrived in remote areas where they had to build their own houses, often in the dead of winter without any facilities, medical care, or established food supplies. Thousands escaped and thousands died, until in 1931 the GPU took over the special settlements, the first large group to come under the auspices of the GULAG. For the time being, the special settlers vastly outnumbered the prisoners in actual concentration camps.
With the kulaks out of the way, collectivization went on at top speed. Under intense pressure from rural party officials as well as emissaries sent from the cities, the peasants were convinced to abandon their strips of land and combine them, in theory at least, into one huge farm to be worked together. To make matters worse, the authorities in some areas tried to push the peasants not just into collective farms but even into communes, the super-collectivized units with communal living and eating arrangements. By early 1930, almost half of the peasants had agreed to join a collective, but they also slaughtered their livestock, not wanting to waste them in the new order. There was as yet no equipment to work the farms beyond the old plows and horses, whose numbers were rapidly decreasing. Opposition was rife, with thousands of “incidents,” ranging from real rebellions to minor objections blown up into anti-Soviet demonstrations by the GPU. Early in 1930 Stalin realized that he had to pull back. The economic results of forcing the peasants into collective farms were becoming serious, and he published an article in Pravda under the title, “Dizzy with Success.” Local party members were getting too enthusiastic, he wrote, and were pursuing target numbers for their own sake, not paying enough attention to local circumstances and the mood of the peasantry. After the article, the number of collective farms fell rapidly and the communes were abandoned, but the process did not stop, it only paused and then resumed at a slower pace. In the meantime, disaster struck.
As collectivization continued, with all the disruptions that it caused, the weather played a cruel trick. In 1931 and 1932 bad weather struck – cold in some areas and drought in others – in the Ukraine and southern Russia, the main grain producing areas. By the summer of 1932 this meant famine that spanned a wide belt running from the Polish border into Siberia. The authorities reacted slowly, keeping up their collections of grains at the amount fixed in better years. Only toward the end of the year did they begin to ease off, but it was already too late, and famine had spread taking with it some five to seven million peasants throughout the southern regions of the USSR, about half of these in the Ukraine. The casualties of the famine, not the kulaks, turned out to be the principal victims of collectivization. The drought hit the peasants when the numbers of livestock had fallen, on average, by half and they had no reserves of grain; all of this was the result of the chaos of collectivization and the relentless collection of grain for the cities. The famine disturbed the authorities, but they did very little about it. Stalin did not take any extraordinary methods against the famine, which crushed opposition to collectivization. Not until better weather in 1933 produced a better harvest did the famine come to an end.
By the middle of the 1930s the basic outlines of the Soviet collective farm, the kolhoz, were in place, for the notion of setting up communes had been abandoned. The Russian village had always been a community, with houses clustered in the village surrounded by the fields. What was new was that the fields were now under the control of the kolhoz (actual property rights were still vested in the state). The kolhoz had a chairman and a governing board that set the farming tasks, which the peasants carried out together, plowing and sowing, harvesting and taking care of the livestock. For their work on the farm the peasants received payment, not in money but in the form of part of the harvest calculated by a system known as “labor-days.” The bulk of the harvest went to the state at a fixed price, one that favored the state and the cities over the kolhoz.
The kolhoz rarely owned its own machinery. As the new tractor factories came on line, the tractors went to a new institution, the Machine-Tractor Station, some eight thousand of them by the end of the decade. These were state operations, and they rented out the tractors and other machinery with the drivers and workers, providing the essential equipment for the kolhoz as well as assuring state control over the collective farms. If the machinery put the state into farming directly, the market did not disappear entirely in the countryside. Unlike the cities, where all retail trade was in state hands by the early 1930s, the peasantry was explicitly granted the right to farm small private plots alongside their houses. They used them primarily for vegetables and smaller livestock and took the produce to the peasant markets that reappeared in all Soviet cities. Though the private plots were only about four percent of the kolhoz land, they produced forty percent of vegetables and potatoes and over sixty-six percent of the meat coming from the collective farms. Their products were sold at prices much above those fixed in the stories and factory cafeterias, but at least they were available.
From 1933 to about 1936 the tension and upheaval in Soviet society lessened considerably. The rightists in the party had capitulated and publicly recanted their errors as had the Trotskyists, and Bukharin became the editor of Izvestiia. In 1932 the government abolished the Supreme Economic Council, replacing it with a series of People’s Commissariats for different branches of industry. The most important was the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, headed by Ordzhonikidze. It seemed that a more rational style of economic management had triumphed, for Ordzhonikidze took with him to the new organization many of the former Left Oppositionists and even many “bourgeois specialists” like those whom he had harassed in 1926–1929. New methods of increasing productivity in the work force emerged. In 1935 the Donbass miner Aleksei Stakhanov managed to produce fourteen times his norm of coal and was proclaimed a national hero. Other workers tried to imitate the simple reorganization of work methods that he used to achieve the goal, and were rewarded as Stakhanovites. Work gangs and shops within factories announced “socialist competition” contests to over fulfill the plan, earning brief fame as well as more concrete benefits. In themselves these campaigns, heavily sponsored by the party, achieved little, but labor productivity managed to grow anyway. The extreme shortages of food and consumer goods began to abate and in 1935 the rationing of food and other consumer goods ended. Nevertheless, many basic commodities would be periodically or permanently in deficit. Elaborate systems of informal supply among the population formed to deal with these shortages, ranging from crude black market operations (strictly illegal and widely punished) to relatively harmless exchanges of goods among families and friends. The population was learning to cope. Unemployment had disappeared, to be replaced with a permanent labor shortage, though real wages were well below those of the late 1920s for the great majority of workers.