Collectivisation

12 Key excerpts on "Collectivisation"

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  Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe

  • Jason Sharman(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Soviet collectivization

  The first case study examined is the drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture from the late 1920s to the middle of the 1930s. As part of the ‘great turn’ or ‘revolution from above’, collectivization marked the centrepiece of the regime’s effort to advance from its position of unchallenged political power and the commanding heights of the economy to reshape fundamentally the country’s economic base and social character, in line with Communist ideology, as modified by concrete historical experience in the revolution, civil war and subsequent period of relative liberalization. Not only was collectivization itself composed of many different aspects – forced grain requisitioning, the deportation of the kulaks, the establishment of the new collective farms, peasant resistance and the resulting famine – but it was also closely linked with the ‘cultural revolution’ among urban intellectuals and professionals,1 and the demands of the First Five-Year Plan in the factories. The transformations wrought in the period of collectivization marked the establishment of the Soviet Communist system, later entrenched and exported, which in ossified form was to persist in its essentials until the late 1980s.

  The purpose of this chapter is to show how the struggle between the state and the peasantry was resolved in favour of the former, and also to show how the new order in the Soviet countryside consolidated itself despite its fundamental illegitimacy in the eyes of the peasantry. Above all, the aim is to demonstrate how initial state strategies which destroyed much of the existing socio-cultural and economic fabric of peasant existence, and the structures of the collective farm system, denied vital resources for peasant rebellion. The regime was thus able to change the peasants’ repertoire of contention, generally succeeding in suppressing the preconditions

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  Collectivization of Agriculture in Eastern Europe

  • Irwin T. Sanders, Irwin T. Sanders(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE IN SOVIET STRATEGYby Philip E. Mosely

  COLLECTIVIZED AGRICULTURE, with its profound political, economic, and cultural impact, is an essential part of the Communist system elaborated and applied in the Soviet Union. Now it has been imposed upon the satellite or captive countries of Eastern Europe; it has also been adopted with some modifications in Yugoslavia and in Communist China, which lie within the geographical sphere of the Communist ideology. Under Communist regimes, collectivization provides the basic structure of large-scale, state-controlled agriculture as well as the indispensable underpinning for the development of large-scale industry and of military power. It also confronts the Communist regimes with numerous and continuing vulnerabilities. Both the strengths and weaknesses of collectivized agriculture ought to be analyzed as carefully as possible, despite many gaps in the data available.

  Collectivization of agriculture represents a far-reaching revolution, imposed from above, in the social structure and organization of the countries in which it has been applied. In these areas—for example, in Eastern Europe—the peasantry is the most numerous social class, constituting anywhere from 33 to more than 70 percent of the total population. The peasantry also has the deepest and oldest roots in the land, and the strongest attachment to its national and local cultures and its religious traditions. It is everywhere most feared and most bitterly attacked by the Communist leadership, which has subjected it to this new and oppressive system of control.

  Because the countries they govern are predominantly agrarian, the Communist leaders regard the control of agriculture as essential in buttressing their rule and in carrying out their ambitious programs. Committed to the large-scale development of industry, usually under unfavorable conditions of natural resources, technology, trained manpower, and experienced management, they necessarily turn to collectivized agriculture to provide the materials needed for industrialization. Their second goal, the rapid expansion of military power, also requires large investments in a basically unproductive military industry and the use of peasant manpower to form large armies. To satisfy these political ambitions, the peasantry under collectivized agriculture is forced to release underemployed manpower to industries and armies, to underwrite compulsory investment in industry, and to provide exports to exchange for industrial equipment and military goods. In underindustrialized countries the peasantry has always paid the price for the ambitions of successive regimes, but never has it been exploited so severely as it is today under Communist rule.

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  Russia in the Twentieth Century

  The quest for stability

  • David R. Marples(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Particular attention was paid to alleged speculators, whose lands were confiscated: 75 percent were retained by the state, and the rest distributed among the poorer peasantry. By the fall of 1929, collectivization of farms was again under way, but progress was slow. Most of the new farms were Associations for the Joint Cultivation of Land (TOZ), which permitted the peasants to retain their draught livestock and agricultural implements. A much greater transformation, however, was on the horizon: the enforced mass collectivization of agriculture that has been described by some scholars as the second Soviet revolution. It was not literally a revolution since the goal was to consolidate rather than change the existing government; but it did represent a huge change, and an end to the working alliance with the peasantry that had permitted economic recovery during the 1920s. In Stalin’s view, the new class war had to subordinate the peasant to the worker – the key goal was to ensure that the party controlled the countryside. In order to achieve this aim, the regime had to entice the middle peasants to join collective farms. Hitherto the farms had been weak affairs since they were comprised of the poorest strata of the population, precisely those who had nothing to lose by joining. Many of them had no land or livestock, and since the government was not in a position to provide machinery to the collective farms it made little economic sense to establish them. Again it is worth emphasizing Stalin’s priorities – collectivization was undertaken in order to support and maintain the great industrialization drive, which in turn was to transform the country from a backward agricultural nation to an advanced industrial one. Stalin believed that the USSR was ten years behind the advanced nations of the West in industrial development. Not only did it have to bridge this gap, but it also had to achieve economic self-sufficiency. The atmosphere created in the country was one of a state of war – enemies were everywhere and being uncovered anew by the secret police. The new directions in economic policy would eradicate these enemies and strengthen the country.

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  Beyond The Plan

  Social Change In A Hungarian Village

  • Ildiko Vasary(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part 2 Agricultural Collectivization Passage contains an image

  3 Agrarian Policies in the 1950s

  The campaigns of collectivization started in 1948 took about a decade to be completed countrywide and another two decades for collectives to be irreversibly integrated into the country's economic and social system. It is beyond doubt that even this pace proved too fast and very difficult for the peasantry.

  One of the crucial questions in the course of collectivization was how far the peasantry were prepared to cooperate. Despite the power the State could bring to bear upon them, the peasants could exert some indirect influence upon the course of agrarian programmes – for example by delaying and hampering collective production directing their labour into certain sectors and withholding from others. The initial collectivization drive in 1948 to 1953 undoubtedly employed coercive methods and did not significantly achieve the effect it was designed to produce: to convince the peasants of the superiority of collective production over individual peasant farming.

  Collectivization began in Hungary in the very unfavourable period of political transition in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

  The newly-nationalized heavy industry was set on a course of forced development, in line with socialist policy which required a strong industry and a broad worker stratum. Agriculture, based on traditional peasant farming, was still recovering from war damage when the burden of supporting this industrialization was laid on it.

  Agriculture was subjected to State intervention and centralized control through three main means: control over production and marketing; liquidation of the wealthy peasant stratum; and collectivization. This three-pronged approach went a long way towards fundamentally changing the relationship of the peasantry to the land and towards altering the rural socio-economic structure. However, during the first ten years, which may be considered as a first phase, the establishment of a socialist mode of production as the dominant form was not entirely successful.

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  The New Russia

  A Handbook of Economic and Political Developments

  • Ian Jeffries(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Six Agriculture

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315029450-7

  The Soviet Era

  All land in the Soviet Union belonged to the state, although other bodies were allowed use of it. The main agricultural production unit in the early system was not the state farm (sovkhoz), but the collective farm (kolkhoz). Collectivization during the 1930s was forced, bloody and brutal. Only a nominally independent co-operative, the kolkhoz was subject to state plans and delivery quotas at state-determined prices which sometimes bordered on the confiscatory. In 1936 the compulsory procurement price for wheat, plus handling costs, was fifteen roubles a tonne; this wheat was sold to state milling enterprises at 107 roubles per tonne, the turnover tax thus amounting to ninety-two roubles (Nove 1961 : 99). During the 1930s the compulsory procurement price for potatoes of 3.6 roubles a tonne contrasted with free market prices varying between thirty-seven and 200 roubles a tonne.

  Peasant income for work on the collective farm was residual in nature, constituting that remaining from gross revenue after deduction of all other costs, including social security and equipment. The workday (trudoden) was not literally a calendar day, but each particular piece of work was valued at so many workdays. Its value was not known until the end of the year, the residual being divided by the total number of workdays earned. This uncertainty, the infrequency and low levels of remuneration (in kind as well as in money), the negligible impact of individual effort on total farm income, and the fact that the burden of a poor harvest was placed on the shoulders of the peasants (there was even a man-made famine in areas such as the Ukraine) had a disastrous effect on incentives. Peasants devoted so much time to their private plots that a minimum number of days of collective work had to be introduced. Although severely restricted in terms of size and livestock holdings, these plots were a vital source of peasant cash income and of supply of such products as fruit and vegetables, dairy products and meat, which were either consumed in the household or sold on the free market. Private plots contributed 25 per cent of total agricultural output even in the late Soviet period. ‘We are dealing with a sector which … still contributes over 25 per cent of total agricultural production and is still vitally important as a producer of potatoes, vegetables, eggs, fruit, meat and daily produce … The little plots … (most often 0.25 ha) receive a disproportionate amount of care and attention … [this] helps explain the … fact that 3 per cent of the sown area produces 25 per cent or more of the produce’ (Nove 1977

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  The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union

  • Martin Mccauley(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Japanese Prime Minister, in 1927, had given notice of his country’s inevitable clash with the Soviet Union. Japan was a resource-poor country and needed to secure raw materials to build up its power. As a country with ambitions to expand its territory it needed to ensure that the Soviet Union and China were not in a position to block it. In 1927, the Red Army could not have coped with the Japanese army. Then there was the point that every Bolshevik activist wanted rapid industrialisation and the expansion of the industrial working class. If Stalin and his supporters dallied, Trotsky and the Left Opposition might make a comeback.

  Was Collectivisation inevitable? Was a war against the private peasantry always on the Marxist agenda? There are two main schools of thought. Until the 1970s the received wisdom in the West and the Soviet Union was that coercive Collectivisation was inevitable. The Soviet state wished to industrialise rapidly and build up the defences of the country. It needed to secure a food base before it began massive industrialisation. The Red Army had to be fed.

  Stalin and the leadership decided that their only option was to confiscate grain surpluses. Private peasants would be corralled into collective farms and effectively become state labourers. They would produce all the grain and food that was needed by the state. Marxists do not accept that the market is efficient. Small peasant plots are also inefficient. Consolidating many smallholdings into large collective farms would permit the use of machinery. This was a rational economic policy. Communists believed that the larger the unit of production the more efficient it should be. The industrialisation of agriculture would end rural backwardness. The peasant labourers would be paid according to what they produced. Payment would come after the harvest was in. If the harvest was poor they could end up with little or nothing. This was a good deal for the state since it paid low prices to the farms. The state would have the produce and could sell it at a handsome profit in the towns and could export the surplus. The capital for industrialisation would mainly come from the work of rural labourers. Once Stalin and the leadership had decided on rapid industrialisation the above scenario was the only possible one. Since living standards in the countryside would be miserably low, the more ambitious peasants would move into the towns and building sites and provide the necessary labour for industrialisation. The level of coercion to be used would depend on the peasant labourer. If he proved recalcitrant, he would be forced to work. It permitted the government to control the peasants to an extent never before achieved.

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  The Soviet Union at War, 1941–1945

  • David Stone(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  The Industrialization of Soviet Russia. I, The Socialist Offensive, The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, MA, 1980), xii.

  7

  In this chapter we will speak generally of the kolkhoz (collective farm) as it, rather than the sovkhoz (state farm) was the dominant form of farming until the Khrushchev period. The differences between them lie in their work organization and their size and specialization. Both types of farm relied on the complete socialization of land and agricultural tools, but the kolkhoz system allowed the use of a private plot of up to half a hectare for registered households. The system of pay was state-regulated in the sovkhoz , with fixed norms and regular wages, while the kolkhoz relied on a cooperative-style system of redistribution of agricultural produce once compulsory state deliveries were paid. This could considerably reduce what was left to kolkhoz members at the end of the agricultural year. The kolkhoz was, for the most part, built on the foundations of a pre-revolutionary village and remained rather small until 1950. In general terms, only a newly formed sovkhoz , especially in the southern regions of the Ukrainian and Russian republics, contained a large number of households (more than a hundred) and a sown area of more than 500 hectares. For instance, in 1941 the average Soviet kolkhoz had 150 able-bodied farmers while the average sovkhoz numbered 820 workers. From the party-state standpoint, the sovkhoz was an ideologically more advanced form of farming since its agricultural labourers were closer in spirit and practice to industrial workers by virtue of their regular duties and wages.

  8

  Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994), 82.

  9

  The issue of the 1932–33 famine in southern Russia and Ukraine still unfortunately bears a political weight which complicates scholarly discussion. This has especially been the case since Ukrainian independence in 1991, when the famine became an anti-Russian political weapon. This problem had, however, existed well before the end of the Soviet Union, especially in the works of Robert Conquest and James Mace, as well as in those of Ukrainian émigré scholars. It became indelicate to challenge the Ukrainian nationalist interpretation of a state-engineered genocide directed against the Ukrainian peasantry, the guardian of nationhood. Conquest’s theory of the ‘terror-famine’ is based upon the connections he made between what he saw as Marxism’s congenital denial of the nation, Lenin’s utilitarian national policies, the mostly rural Ukrainian national movement and Stalin’s repressive policies. He built up a Ukraine-centred causal explanation of the famine in the Ukraine, even though he did admit that the tragedy did not affect Ukraine alone. Some direct references to the Jewish Holocaust, intensive use of contradictory memoir material and a reductive history of Ukrainian nationalism weaken the scholarly value of his work. Nevertheless, the influence of this interpretation goes far beyond the Western academic world. See for instance, James Mace, ‘Famine and Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine’, Problems of Communism (March–June 1984), 36–50; Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine

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  Policies and Plans for Rural People (Routledge Revivals)

  An International Perspective

  • Paul Cloke(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 The USSR JUDITH PALLOT The historical context of rural policy The most important event to affect the character of rural life in the USSR after the 1917 revolution was the collectivization of agriculture which took place between 1929 and 1933. During this period millions of independent peasant farmers were forced to join large-scale farm units, kolkhozi, bringing with them their land, livestock and capital. Henceforth, they had to work together in the fields, selling their produce to state purchasing organizations and distributing the income made among themselves. Collectivization transformed rural society and rural politics, replacing rich peasants, priests and village elders by a new generation of leaders, represented by Communist party cadres, collective farm managers and ‘brigadiers’. Villages, hamlets and dispersed farmsteads were incorporated into the territory of collective farms, and in the east nomads were forced to adopt a sedentary life. The economic purpose of these transformations was to reorganize agriculture in such a way as to provide for the transfer of resources from the countryside to the towns. For the next few decades agriculture was ‘squeezed’ for the sake of heavy industry. Rural living standards suffered accordingly; agricultural workers became second-class citizens denied many of the legal rights of town dwellers, and they were poorly remunerated for their work in the collectives. In more recent decades agriculture has received large injections of capital, and wage reforms have meant that the standard of living of the rural population has been able to rise. Other reforms have removed many of the restrictions that formerly existed on the mobility of the rural population

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  The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia

  The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921-39

  • Elizabeth White(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  43 Now they felt that the fate of the dictatorship hung on Collectivisation’s success, on ending the economic and political independence of the peasantry and ensuring the resources for industrialisation. It was an enormous gamble for Stalin. The SRs saw Collectivisation as the result of Bolshevik hatred of the peasantry. Stalinskii reiterated yet again the genesis and forms this had taken throughout Lenin’s political life and beyond. The peasantry had always been alien to the Marxists and their predominance in Russia had been used to justify the dictatorship:

  From the moment of their accession, the Bolsheviks, due to their doctrine and the nature of their power, have carried on an interminable war with the peasantry, accompanied by retreats and attacking ‘manoeuvres’, but always pursuing one unchangeable strategic task – the mastery of the peasant ‘citadel’, in accordance with the well-known Leninist formula.44

  With Collectivisation, ‘the battle of the Bolshevik dictatorship with the peasantry has entered its sharpest phase’.45 The Bolsheviks wanted to control agriculture, and to do this they had to destroy the village and the commune, the source of its independence. Collectivisation was not based on a genuine belief in the socialist potential of the peasantry, as evident from the regime’s priorities:

  Covering themselves with the smokescreen of the ‘socialist’ reconstruction of the village, the authorities do not even think about introducing ‘socialist’ order into the collective farms. They are currently concerned with only one task – ‘the proper organisation of labour’: piece work, norms, tariffs, the abolition of the division of the harvest ‘by souls’, and organising the collective farm workers for permanent or seasonal work.46

  The collective farms had nothing in common with the cooperative principles supported by the SRs. Representatives of the state managed them and norms and targets were set from above, in the interests of the state. The SRs eventually characterised them as similar to domestic capitalist industry or serfdom. The peasant had been reduced to the level of a prisoner, or at the very best, a hired labourer.47

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  Peasants And Power

  State Autonomy And The Collectivization Of Agriculture In Eastern Europe

  • Joan Sokolovsky(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Implementation of Collectivization in Poland

  In Poland, the policy of forced collectivization was initiated belatedly and implemented reluctantly. Even after a purge of the party leadership resulted in the creation of a new central committee publicly committed to the program, the regime never imposed as harsh or as consistent measures against the rural population as did the other countries of Eastern Europe. Because of the late start and relatively mild prosecution that characterized Poland's collectivization drive, the policy was less affected by the New Course here than in other nations. However the program was brought to an end during the political crisis of 1956 when over 90 percent of all existing cooperatives dissolved.

  Thus, in the case of Poland, we must explain why collectivization efforts were not successful. After a brief overview of conditions in Poland at the onset of the collectivization campaign, we must evaluate which model most correctly delimits the way in which the policy was carried out. This section will focus on the Stalinist period from 1949 to 1953. Secondly, the three facets of state-building will be analyzed in terms of their ability to explain why the movement fell apart in 1956. Emphasis will be on the conjuncture of forces and events that led to the dissolution of the collectives at the end of that year. Attention will also be given to the agricultural policy that replaced the collectivization movement starting in 1957. Because of the interrelationship of these elements of the state-building process, it is quite possible that one aim might have been primary in explaining the state's actions in implementing the policy while another had a greater impact on the results.

  In each case a distinction must be made between the regime's stated intentions (although this is certainly important evidence) and the steps that it actually took to implement its policies. Although there is considerable overlap in the data relevant to each element in the state-building process, as far as possible an attempt will be made to separate the theoretical strands from an intertwined reality.

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  Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

  • Stephen K. Wegren(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The roots of collectivization lie in the nature of land relations in 1917. As Tsarist power collapsed in 1917, followed by the ineffective rule of the Provisional Government which eschewed genuine land reform, peasants took matters into their own hands and seized land. Out of this rural instability flowed communist land reform. In April 1917, the Bolsheviks became the only political party that backed forcible land expropriation when they adopted a resolution that supported the seizure of landlords' land by peasants. 2 Following the Bolshevik adoption of the Social Revolutionary Party's land program in August 1917, once the Bolsheviks assumed power their 'Decree on Land' of 26 October 1917 abolished all private property and placed all land held by landlords, the state, and the church under the jurisdiction of rural district land committees and county Soviets of Peasants' Deputies until the convening of the Constituent Assembly. 3 As Bolshevik agrarian policies became more anti-peasant during the period of War Communism, whatever gains from the Stolypin reforms had survived the war were undermined. After the break between the Social Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, the policies of War Communism moved against enclosed peasant holdings during 1918-1920. During War Communism and the Civil War, Committees of Poor Peasants were formed to enforce grain requisitions in order to feed the Red Army. In reality grain requisitions deprived the peasantry of any surplus, as both Reds and Whites took whatever they could

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  The Yugoslav Economic System (Routledge Revivals)

  The First Labor-Managed Economy in the Making

  • Branko Horvat(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 Since police methods were not acceptable, a new solution had to be sought.

  In this period, a book appeared that synthesized the basic attitudes toward collectivization in etatist construction Yugoslav style. This was Ekonomika agrara FNRJ [Agrarian Economics of the Peoples’ Republic of Yugoslavia], by Professor Mijo Mirković. The conceptions and experiences of the succeeding period were reflected in the books of his student, V. Stipetić [1 ; 2 ].

  11. COOPERATION: IDEAS AND IMPLEMENTATION

  Discussion Themes

  The bad experiences and final failure of collectivization of course prompted reflection and reexamination of earlier attitudes. The first reaction was a return to renewed examination of the Marxist texts. As early as 1950, Bakarić, in a study of land rent in the transitional stage, considered Soviet theory and practice in the light of the positions of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Bakarić concluded that the Soviet nationalization of the land in 1917 “is the result of peasant striving for the creation of a small-scale peasant farm, and not the transition of agriculture from capitalism to socialism. In this form, differential rent also…belongs to the producer” [58 , p. 125]. This nationalization “gave land to small producers, and later cooperatives, for perpetual use. It exempted land from commerce …but precisely greater commerce in land, greater opportunity of obtaining it, is the main sense of land nationalization …” [p. 96]. In studying the texts, Bakarić happened upon Engels’s statement that handing over land rent to the state is equal to the elimination of individual private ownership [62 , p. 575], but he still did not confront completely the far-reaching economic policy consequences of this fact.10

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