Collectivization was the cornerstone of Stalin’s dictatorship, and all the other features of the Stalinist system can be seen as deriving from it. Wholesale violence against the country’s largest class required a large apparatus of oppression, complete with a system of camps and places of exile. Beyond making it clear that terror was the primary instrument of government, collectivization completely and almost instantly severed countless traditional social connections, accelerated the atomization of society, and made ideological manipulation much easier. The rampant and merciless pumping of material and human resources out of the countryside enabled the pursuit of insanely ambitious economic goals.
Forced collectivization and ineffective industrialization dealt the country a blow from which it never fully recovered. In 1930–1932, hundreds of thousands of “wreckers” and “kulaks” were shot or imprisoned in camps, and more than 2 million kulaks and their family members were sent into exile.26 Many of those exiled were just as doomed as those who were shot. Kulak families were sent to live in barracks not suitable for habitation and sometimes simply dropped off in open fields. Terrible living conditions, backbreaking labor, and hunger brought on mass fatalities, especially among children.27
The situation for peasants who were not arrested or exiled was hardly better. The Soviet village, ravaged by collectivization, was seriously degraded. Agricultural production plummeted, and the livestock sector was hit hard. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses dropped from 32 million to 17 million, heads of cattle fell from 60 million to 33 million and pigs from 22 million to 10 million.28 Despite such declining productivity, the state pumped an ever-growing share of its yield out of the countryside. And yet throughout the Soviet period, the kolkhozes were unable to adequately feed the country. Most Soviet citizens survived on meager rations. Many periods were marked by famine. One of the worst was the famine of 1931–1933, the predictable result of Stalin’s Great Leap.
When the time arrived to announce the results of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin had to be creative. Exercising the privilege of power, he did not cite a single actual figure but simply proclaimed that the emperor was indeed wearing clothes. The Five-Year Plan, he said, had been fulfilled ahead of schedule!29 Of course the investment of vast resources and tons of equipment purchased from the West did yield results. Many modern factories were built, and industrial production did increase significantly. But there was no miracle. The unachievable five-year targets were, predictably, not achieved. The actual production figures were not even close: 6.2 million metric tons of cast iron in 1932 instead of the desired 17 million; 21.4 million tons of petroleum instead of 45 million; 48,900 tractors instead of 170,000; 23,900 automobiles instead of 200,000.30 The state of consumer goods manufacturing was particularly lamentable.
But the main problem with the First Five-Year Plan was that it established a ruinously inefficient approach to industrialization. Vast sums and resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be unusable. The task of arriving at an approximation of these losses rests with historians. Much better known are the statistics from another tragic result of the Great Leap—the toll taken by the Great Famine.
This famine, which reached its peak over the winter of 1932–1933, took the lives of between 5 million and 7 million people.31 Millions more were permanently disabled. In a time of peace and relatively normal weather, agriculturally rich regions were ruined and desolated. Although the famine was a complex phenomenon, posterity has every right to call it the Stalin Famine. The Stalinist policy of the Great Leap was its primary cause; moreover, it was Stalin’s decisions in 1932 and 1933 that, instead of easing the tragedy, made it worse.
The famine was the inevitable result of industrialization and collectivization. From a productivity standpoint, the kolkhozes were a poor substitute for the destroyed farms of those who had been branded “kulaks.” The only advantage of the kolkhozes was that they gave the state a convenient means of channeling resources out of the countryside. The exceptional exploitation of peasants had two effects: agricultural workers were physically weakened by hunger, and they were deprived of any incentive to work, leading to despondency and apathy. They knew in advance that everything they grew would be taken by the state, dooming them, at best, to semi-starvation. Several years of this policy led to a gradual decline in output. In 1932 the crops did not grow well and were also poorly harvested.
The state’s interests and those of the peasants were diametrically opposed. The state was extremely aggressive in taking from the countryside as many resources as possible. The peasants, like famine victims all over the world, used “the weapons of the weak.”32 They sabotaged the fulfillment of their obligations to the state and tried to stash away stores to feed themselves. Stalin was well aware of the hostility of the forcibly collectivized countryside, but he placed the blame fully on the peasants’ shoulders. They had declared war, he proclaimed, against the Soviet government.
The looming crisis was obvious to everyone, including Stalin, long before the famine entered its most critical phase. There were obvious steps that, if they did not prevent the famine altogether, could at least have diminished its impact. The first would have been to establish set norms for grain deliveries to the state—in other words, a move from a system of confiscation to a system of taxes. This step would have given the peasants an incentive to boost production. Stalin, however, rejected this approach.33 He preferred to take as much as possible from the countryside without any constraints. Another step to alleviate the famine might have been to reduce grain exports or even buy grain abroad. Such purchases were made on a limited basis during the spring of 1932, so they were in principle possible.34 But Stalin refused to make further purchases. Any concessions that hinted at the misguidedness of the Great Leap were contrary to his nature and politically dangerous to his dictatorship. To alleviate the pressure on the peasants there would have to be a reduction in the pace of industrial growth. Reluctantly, Stalin did agree to such a reduction in 1933, but his slowness to take action cost millions of lives.
By the autumn of 1932, critical delays, stubbornness, and cruelty had led Stalin himself into a dead end. No good options remained. The harvest produced by the devastated countryside in 1932 was even worse than the poor harvest of 1931. Meanwhile, industrialization continued apace, and the Soviet Union’s foreign debt for purchases of equipment and raw materials reached new heights. Given these circumstances, there was only a little room to maneuver. The government could mobilize all available resources, or dip into reserves, or appeal for international aid, as the Bolsheviks had done during the famine of 1921–1922.35 These measures came with economic and political costs, but they were possible. Stalin probably did not even consider them. Instead, the state intensified pressure on the countryside.
Documents discovered in recent years paint a horrific picture. All food supplies were taken away from the starving peasants—not only grain, but also vegetables, meat, and dairy products. Teams of marauders, made up of local officials and activists from the cities, hunted down hidden supplies—so-called yamas (holes in the ground), where peasants, in accordance with age-old tradition, kept grain as a sort of insurance against famine. Hungry peasants were tortured to reveal these yamas and other food stores, their families’ only safeguard against death. They were beaten, forced out into sub-freezing temperatures without clothing, arrested, or exiled to Siberia. Attempts by peasants dying of hunger to flee to better-off regions were ruthlessly suppressed. Refugees were forced to return to their villages, doomed to slowly perish, or be arrested. By mid-1933 some 2.5 million people were in labor camps, prisons, or exile.36 Many of them fared better than those who starved to death “in freedom.”