As Stalin’s opponents had warned, these measures yielded immediate but unsustainable results. The confiscations took away the peasants’ economic incentive and led to a drop in production. Each harvest was worse than the one before, leading the grain collectors to resort to increasingly ruthless methods. This vicious cycle of extraordinary measures was fraught with political crises, including mass unrest among peasants that spilled over into the army. Those dealing with these problems on the ground looked to Stalin, who had by then taken a leading position within the Politburo, for a way out of this cycle.
Stalin’s options were limited, however, by the various ultra-leftist policies he had advocated during his political battles against the rightists. He chose what for him personally was the simplest and safest path, however ruinous it might be for the country. The fight against kulaks and the expropriation of peasant property were taken to their logical conclusion: lands were confiscated and the peasants were transformed into workers in agrarian enterprises managed by the state. The method by which these changes were achieved, labeled “collectivization,” involved the large-scale forcible movement of peasants to collective farms—kolkhozes. Nullifying the party’s previous decision to make such a transition gradually, in November 1929 Stalin proclaimed that collectivization would be universal and immediate. In December came his call to destroy the kulaks as a class.
In essence, the victorious vozhd was intentionally provoking a new and deadly wave of revolution in the countryside. By brandishing slogans about the urgent need to crush the kulaks, he gave local stalwarts a free hand. A fevered and violent collectivization effort gripped the countryside even before the new kolkhoz project could receive serious discussion or be embodied in specific directives. In a signature Stalinist move, the party was confronted with a fait accompli. Collectivization supposedly began “from below,” leaving no alternative but to support and expand the kolkhoz movement, whatever monstrous forms it might be taking. Many party careerists and radicals, sensing Stalin’s strength and decisiveness, responded enthusiastically to his call. Reports of collectivization’s successes poured into Moscow.
A finalized plan for collectivization was adopted in early 1930, during a special meeting of Central Committee commissions established to work out the details. Commission members—functionaries fully obedient to Stalin—at first expressed a certain hesitance. While they were in principle ready to support Stalin’s push for wholesale collectivization, they urged that it take place over several years. Despite the atmosphere of class-war hysteria in the country, the commissioners tried to ease the fate of millions of kulaks, believing that while they were, of course, enemies of the entire kolkhoz system, they should not be driven into a corner. Repression should be reserved for those who actively resisted. The rest should be accepted into kolkhozes, albeit with certain restrictions. Taking this relatively moderate approach, the commission members made important organizational suggestions—for example, that instead of the total confiscation of property, peasants should be allowed to keep small plots for their own use.15
The proposals made by the Central Committee commissions were of great practical importance and probably the best that could be achieved given the political realities of 1930. They somewhat appeased party extremists while conceding something meaningful to the peasants. As the subsequent history of the Soviet Union has shown, allowing kolkhoz workers to keep their own personal plots saved the system, the peasants, and the entire country. In essence, the arrangement returned peasants to the status of serfs in pre-emancipation Russia, paying feudal homage to the state through their work on collective farms but able to retain some land for personal use. It allowed them to feed themselves—and much of the country—despite the poor performance of the kolkhozes.
Stalin preferred a different modeclass="underline" his idea was to turn the peasants into slaves of the state, fully dependent on their state jobs. He favored the total expropriation of peasant property and the incorporation of villages into a state economy where market forces would be allowed no influence. He subjected the commissions’ conclusions to harsh criticism and undertook to correct their many errors.16 By the time he was done, the collectivization plan resembled a military campaign against the traditional peasant way of life. First, Stalin drastically cut the timeline for carrying out collectivization. In several of the most important agricultural regions, the task was to be completed by the fall of 1930, and the tone of his directives made it clear to local functionaries that there was not a moment to lose. Second, he put a quick stop to all talk of integrating kulaks into kolkhozes. Such a step was categorically forbidden. Kulaks and their families were to be exiled to remote areas of the USSR, arrested, placed in camps, or shot. Finally, he put an end to all proposals that kolkhozes coexist with private peasant plots. Provisions for peasants to keep any land whatsoever were adamantly deleted from the draft directives. Ultimately, “communes”—agricultural and social utopias, the brainchild of socialist fanatics—were proclaimed to be the ideal form and goal of collectivization. In the Soviet embodiment of this ideal, peasant property became the property of the community, right down to family chickens and personal items.
These insane and inevitably bloody plans fully reflected Stalin’s ideas and intentions. By pushing the pace of collectivization and annihilating the most prosperous and influential segment of the peasantry, Stalin was pursuing several goals at once. Kulak property would provide land and equipment for the collective farms, and the kolkhozes themselves would serve as conduits through which resources could be rapidly and efficiently pumped out of the countryside and into industry. One factor in Stalin’s calculations was his belief (shared by many party functionaries) that a moneyless form of socialism based on the exchange of goods was right around the corner. Under forced industrialization, money would cease to be an economic regulator—good riddance, thought the party leftists.
Stalin was emboldened to wage this perilous war against the peasantry partly because he believed this population segment, despite being the country’s largest, lacked the strength to pose any serious threat to the state. This assumption was only partly borne out. The peasantry really was no match for the totalitarian state, but it did offer serious resistance to collectivization and caused Stalin a good deal of trouble.
In order to fulfill Stalin’s vision of a massive system of kolkhozes, the party leadership mobilized and empowered tens of thousands of people dispatched from cities, as well as local stalwarts. Spurring competition among the regions, party newspapers (Pravda first and foremost) voiced one demand: as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary, drive the peasants into kolkhozes. Despite official optimism, the leadership was under no illusions that collectivization could be achieved voluntarily. One of the main instruments propelling it forward was the arrest and exile of kulaks. Fearing the fate of their repressed fellow villagers, peasants gritted their teeth and joined the despised kolkhozes.