The way Stalin looked at it, as he made clear at a party conference in April 1929, was that the kulaks were fomenting opposition to collectivization. This ad hoc ‘theory’ of the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ henceforth guided party policy as if it were a universal truth. Over the ensuing months, the party sought to accelerate the formation of collective farms. By June, one million—out of some 25 million—peasant households had enrolled in 57,000 collectives. Obviously, though, the vast majority still held back. Regional party appa-ratchiki, spurred on by directives and plenipotentiaries from the centre, pleaded with and cajoled village assemblies. ‘Tell me, you wretched people, what hope is there for you if you remain on individual pieces of land?’ an agitator shouted at the peasants in Hindus’s village. ‘You will have to work in your own old way and stew in your old misery. Don’t you see that under the present system there is nothing ahead of you but ruin and starvation?’ ‘We never starved before you wise men of the party appeared here,’ was the reply.
The rhythm of collectivization, like much else during the First Five-Year Plan, proceeded in fits and starts. During the summer and autumn of 1929, the rate accelerated largely due to two initiatives: the enactment by local officials of ‘wholescale’ (sploshnaia) collectivization in certain grain-growing areas of the North Caucasus and lower Volga; and the establishment of giant collectives absorbing whole groups of villages. Most were of the relatively loose kind (i.e. tozy rather than arteli or kommuny), whereby households retained ownership of seed, machinery, and draught animals. Meanwhile, the administrative infrastructure for collective farming began to take shape with the formation of an all-Union Kolkhoztsentr for channelling credits and equipment, and a Traktortsentr (Tractor Centre) for overseeing the establishment of machine tractor stations (MTS).
The most intense phase occurred during the winter of 1929/30. The signal was Stalin’s article in Pravda, published on the thirteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Entitled ‘The Great Turn’, it claimed that the ‘middle peasant’—that 80 per cent mass of the village—‘is joining the collective’. On the basis of recommendations produced by a special Politburo commission under A. Iakovlev, the Commissar of Agriculture, the party’s Central Committee issued its fateful decree, ‘On the Tempo of Collectivization’, on 5 January 1930. The decree called for collectivizing not merely the 20 per cent of arable land envisioned by the First Five-Year Plan, but ‘the huge majority of peasant farms’ in the most important grain regions by the autumn of 1930. It also rejected the toz in favour of the more ‘advanced’ arteli.
The question of what to do with the kulaks was finally resolved in a Central Committee decree of February 1930. They were to be expropriated—‘liquidated as a class’—and subjected to one of three fates: (1) resettled on inferior land outside the kolkhoz; (2) deported and resettled on land in other districts; or (3) arrested and sent to prisons or labour camps in remote parts of the country. By 1933 approximately 1.5 million people had been subjected to the second form of dekulakization and 850,000–900,000 to the third. That almost any peasant who agitated against collectivization could be labelled a kulak (or ‘subkulak’ a kulak sympathizer) was the key point: ‘dekulakization’ was as much a weapon of intimidation against non-kulaks as it was a sledge-hammer against the well-to-do peasants.
By March 1930 an estimated 55 per cent of peasant households at least nominally had enrolled in collective farms. At this point, however, Stalin decried the excesses of local officials, claiming that they were ‘dizzy with success’. This admonition let loose the floodgates holding peasants within the kolkhoz and, as recently declassified archival documents testify, caused acute consternation among provincial agents of collectivization who feared ‘re-kulakization’. By June only 23 per cent of households remained within collective farms. The reversal was short-lived, however. Fines and compulsory sales of property for peasants unable (or unwilling) to meet delivery quotas drove many back into the kolkhoz system; by July 1931 the proportion of households had risen to 53 per cent, and a year later to 61.5 per cent. This included the pastoral Kazakhs who were subjected to ‘denomadization’, a process that virtually wiped out their sheep herds and, in conjunction with a typhus epidemic, led to the death of approximately 40 per cent of the population between 1931 and 1933. Throughout the Soviet Union, the losses of livestock due to slaughter and neglect were enormous: by 1933 the numbers of cattle, pigs, and sheep were less than half what they had been in 1928.
The peasants’ traditional strategies in this war of survival—prevarication, dissimulation, and other ‘weapons of the weak’—were of limited utility. They also resorted to more direct forms of resistance—theft of kolkhoz property, the slaughter of livestock, women’s riots, and murder of collective farm officials (including workers dispatched to the countryside as ‘Twenty-Five Thou-sanders’ to assist in the collectivization drive). All this suggests the scale of peasant desperation. As if calculated to intensify the apocalyptic mood, the authorities intensified anti-religious campaigns, including pogroms against priests and church property. Thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques were closed or converted into meeting-halls, cinemas, cowsheds, and the like. The exact number of peasants executed, killed in skirmishes, or dead from malnutrition and overwork in the labour camps defies precise determination, but undoubtedly ran into millions.
Peasant resistance to collectivization also spawned opposition, if less dramatic, in the party itself. Some who had supported Stalin against Bukharin and the ‘Right Opposition’ began to have second thoughts in the wake of the collectivization drive. By late 1930 several prominent party members of the RSFSR and Trans-caucasian governments expressed misgivings that Stalin construed as factionalism and opposition (‘the Syrtsov–Lominadze Right-Left Bloc’). Retribution did not prevent the formation of other groups in 1932, most notably the conspiratorial circle of M. N. Riutin and the group of A. P. Smirnov, G. G. Tolmachev, and N. B. Eismont. Even loyal Stalinists such as S. V. Kosior, I. M. Vareikis, K. Ia. Bauman, and M. A. Skrypnyk began to question the growing centrism of power as well as Stalin’s pro-Russian nationality policy.
In sum, the state won only a partial victory over the peasantry. True, it did bring the peasants under its administrative control and, through the machine tractor stations, made them technologically dependent. The kulaks and the clergy, rival élites in the village, had been annihilated. But peasant resistance extracted certain concessions, such as the legalization of private plots and the exclusion of domestic animals from the collective. In the longer term, a combination of administrative incompetence, underinvestment, and peasant alienation led to extremely low levels of productivity and thus an agricultural sector that, rather than providing resources and capital investment for industrial development, became a net drain on economic growth.
A Nation on the Move
Not unlike the enclosures at the dawn of the English Industrial Revolution, collectivization ‘freed’ peasants to work and live else where. Of course, there was nothing new about peasant seasonal out-migration (otkhod), particularly from villages in the ‘landhungry’ provinces of central Russia. But during the First Five-Year Plan, the number of peasant departures increased dramatically, in 1931–2 reaching an all-time high. Between 1928 and 1932, according to a recent estimate, at least ten million peasants joined the urban work-force as wage or salary earners.