In the 1920s, the agricultural picture was indeed mixed. Old-fashioned, low-technology farming continued to persist among most small producers; in 1925, one-third of the spring sowing and half of the grain harvest was still being gathered by hand.25 Nevertheless, a no longer wholly backward Russian countryside restored grain production to its pre-1914 level by 1926. In 1927, the total land area sown in grain increased slightly, but adverse climatic conditions produced a harvest 6 per cent lower than the previous year's bumper crop.26 Agricultural recovery was fairly steady - but given the Russian Empire's always unpredictable climatic fluctuations - as precarious as ever.
Breaking the peasant communes (ii): forced collectivisation and the liquidation of the kulaks as a class
Who will direct the development of the economy, the kulaks or the socialist
state? (M. I. Kalinin, 1929)
Although the revival ofthe economy's agricultural sector hadbeen a key Soviet priority ever since the Bolshevik seizure of power, the recovery of the agricultural population was met with some ambivalence. Changes that would have
23 Kalinin, quotedinHiroshi Okuda, 'The Final Stage ofthe Russian Peasant Commune: Its Improvement and the Strategy of Collectivisation', in Roger Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia (New York: St Martins Press; Basingstoke: University of London, 1990), p. 257.
24 Okuda, 'Final Stage', pp. 259-62. 25 Atkinson, End, p. 259.
26 Ibid., p. 250. On subsequent revisions ofthe data, see S. G. Wheatcroft, 'The Reliability ofRussian Prewar Grain Statistics', Soviet Studies 26, 2 (1974): 157-80.
been joyfully welcomed in other developing societies - increased grain deliveries to urban centres, rising consumer demand and revitalised community institutions - appeared somehow ominous in the Soviet context. The spectre of a resurgent peasantry aroused fears that a primitive, consumption-hungry rural populace might dictate its own terms in the disposal of agricultural output.[35] If peasants possessed a significant measure of autonomy, would they proceed to reject state directives that set price levels far below what the market could provide? By the late 1920s, manifestations of peasant autonomy were becoming intolerable to a party bureaucracy and Soviet that wished to use peasants as a reservoir to supply the needs of more strategically and politically desirable social groups, and to assert the claims to unlimited power and control characteristic of'high Stalinism'.
In 1927, V M. Molotov warned against the dangerously rapid growth of kulaks, contending that as many as 5 per cent of the peasantry fell into this category.[36] However, the term 'kulak' was never legally defined, and official data failed to demonstrate that kulak numbers were increasing - the government's own figures indicated instead that the peasant 'upper strata' remained negligible in comparison with the 15 per cent level of the pre-1917 era. During the late 1920s, kulaks were accordingly charged with quite contradictory failings. Evidence of heavy involvement in marketing grain was taken as proof that they were capitalist enemies of socialism, but evidence that they marketed less grain - were guilty of hoarding - inspired identical accusations.[37] Images of a Janus-like peasant enemy - in one guise, a cunning and crafty investor of capital (the kulak) and in another, a hopeless primitive - were deployed to justify abandonment of the New Economic Policy. Reports on commune-based innovation disappeared from press publications after 1929,30 as Stalinists vanquished critics like Bukharin and Chaianov (as well as alleged 'communophiles' like N. N. Sukhanov and A. Suchkov).[38] A Gosplan recommendation that
esther kingston-mann
communes be considered one of the institutional variants that could facilitate a transition to collectivisation was ignored.[39]
Claiming that the survival of socialism was at stake, the party demanded a drastic upward revision of the state's grain procurement quotas; grain allocation requirements for the cities and the army were increased by 50 per cent in i930. When - unsurprisingly - state demands were not met, the shortfall was attributed to a 'kulak grain strike'.33 However, since the state's own data suggested (and Stalin himself admitted) that current shortages were due to escalating government demands for grain,34 it seems fair to say that the crisis that triggered the 'Great Turn' was more political than economic. In a series of wildly unrealistic pronouncements, party leaders allotted one and a half years for the wholesale collectivisation of the rural population.35
Forced collectivisation was to replace an 'Asiatic' peasant agriculture with modern, scientific, large-scale farming.36 Peasant land, livestock and tools became the property of collective or state farms. Tasks traditionally the responsibility ofpeasants-ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting-became state activities, planned and regulated accordingto a variety of'scientific' quotas and indicators. Peasants were to work a minimum number of labour days (trudodni) under the supervision of managers who ensured fulfilment of state directives. To counter peasant resistance, the Soviet state deployed the tactics of all-out war, complete with the murder of suspected kulaks, mass killings and deportations to forced labour camps. The RSFSR Criminal Code was cited to justify the bombardment of peasant villages judged guilty either of 'failure to offer goods for sale on the market' or unwillingness to meet state-assigned grain quotas.
To many peasants, the government-directed onslaught of the 1930s represented the coming of the anti-Christ. Proclamations 'from the Lord God' prohibiting peasants from entering collective farms mysteriously appeared in one part of Siberia; in European Russia, a peasant proclamation declared, 'God has created people to be free on the land, but the brutality of communism has put on all labourers a yoke from which the entire mir is groaning'.[40] Yet within this apocalyptic discourse of opposition lay a complex challenge to a
Soviet state that repeatedly forced peasants to choose between compliance or obliteration. For their part, Soviet leaders remained ideologically blind to the wide array ofcollectivist economic and non-economic practices characteristic ofpre-1917 peasant village life, and to the similarities between the labour principles enshrined in the collective farm statutes of the 1930s and the traditions of the pre-revolutionary village.
Peasant resistance thus represented more than the familiar conflict between collectivism and the individual. It reflected as well a refusal to accept (1) the loss of hard-won individual, household and commune-based autonomy, (2) the state's appropriation of the material basis of peasants' livelihood, and (3) the government's savage effort to annihilate everything that peasant families and communities had built up over many generations.[41] Official promises of a brilliant future were cold comfort to peasants whose lives were quite devoid of material security.
In regions distant from Moscow, forced collectivisation was not always imposed with equal brutality. In Tajikistan, new collective farms drew on traditional kinship networks, while in Georgia, collectivisation frequently replicated traditional settlement patterns and distributions of wealth.39 But in areas where change was most inflexibly imposed, many peasants not only denied to the Soviet state the fruits of their labour but attempted as well to avoid the dread designation of 'kulak' by destroying massive quantities of grain and slaughtering their livestock. In Kazakhstan, where collectivisation entailed the forcible settlement of a nomadic population, the populace responded by destroying 80 per cent of their herds.[42] By the end of the 1930s, acts of 'self- de-kulakisation' erupted from Siberia to European Russia and resulted in a 45 per cent decline in the number of livestock.[43] Although Soviet officials downplayed all evidence of peasant solidarity, collective resistance seems to have been a significant feature of rural opposition.
35
See Esther Kingston-Mann,
36
V M. Molotov,
37
Atkinson,
38
See esp., N. Sukhanov, 'Obshchinavsovetskom agrarnomzakonodatel'stve',
40
However, as Viola notes, much of the discourse of peasant opposition was quite secular, and couched in political and economic terms. See Lynne Viola,
41
Caroline Humphrey 'The Domestic Mode of Production in Post-Soviet Siberia',
42
M. B. Olcott,
43
Caroline Humphrey,