By all accounts, women played a leading role in the resistance to forced collectivisation; in 1930 alone, 3,712 mass disturbances (total 13,754) were almost exclusively women; in the other cases, women constituted either a majority or a significant proportion of the participants. A contemporary Soviet report noted that 'in all kulak disturbances the extraordinary activity of women is evident'.[44] As
Pravda explained it, women's 'petty bourgeois instincts' were regrettable manifestations of the 'individualistic female spirit'.[45] However, it is useful to recall that women were also frequently in the forefront of opposition to Stolypin's privatisation reforms. In 1930 as in 1906, they resisted appropriation of the household garden plot upon which a significant measure of their security and household status depended. Together with the men of their households, women fought to secure the survival of their families.
Peasants were unable to block the government's onslaught. However, rural resistance - above all, by women - won an extraordinary and rare concession from the Stalinist state. In 1935, a Model Collective Farm Code legitimised peasant claims to a measure of personal and household autonomy in the form of'private' household allotments of land and farm animals. These plots of land were not freehold property in the Western sense ofthe term. Households did not purchase their plots, and could neither sell nor lease them. Collectives provided seeds, farm implements and hay from the common meadow and granted pre-1917 commune-style household rights to pasture animals on common land. Nevertheless, the 'private' plots introduced - on however minimal a level - a traditional peasant notion of mixed economy into the brutally dichotomised, 'all or nothing' strategies of the Soviet state. As in the days of the commune, women bore primary responsibility for labour on the 'new' private plots, cared for livestock and marketed their produce. Then and later, Soviet officials downplayed both the magnitude ofthe state's capitulation and the women's agency that triggered it. Stalin himself took care to trivialise the conflict as 'a little misunderstanding with collective farm women. This business was about cows.'44
Although the household plots were categorised by the state as 'temporary', subsidiary (podsobnoe) property, they acquired immense significance at a time when collective farm wages were paid only after the state appropriated its share - in 1937, 15,000 collective farms paid no salaries at all to their peasant labourers. In addition, the cruel dislocations of collectivisation-exacerbatedby the dismal climatic conditions that defeated Russian and Soviet expectations in both more and less repressive times - produced millions of famine dead in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan.[46] In this precarious context, private plots became a relatively secure source of material support. As peasants fled their villages at a rate of 3 million per year, the state responded by imposing an internal passport system to prevent unauthorised departures. Additional millions were deported as kulaks, as were peasants arrested for the theft of collective farm property or failure to meet minimum work norms. Sent to forced labour camps in the north and east, peasant deportees built much- needed roads and canals, and were largely responsible for the construction of new cities like Magnitogorsk.
Lacking representatives of their own or legal rights to organise in defence of their interests, peasants assiduously cared for their 'private' plots. The slow agricultural recovery that began in the second half of the 1930s was disproportionately fuelled by these 'subsidiary' holdings. By 1938, 45 per cent of Soviet agriculture's total farm output was being produced on 3.9 per cent of the sown (private) land (approximately 0.49 hectares per household).[47] On this predominantly women's 'turf, women turned out to be the most productive and efficient - but by far the least acclaimed - economic actors in the Soviet countryside.[48]
The 'private' plots prospered within a radically transformed agricultural sector. By 1940, collective and state farms were cogs in the machinery of a vast, Moscow-based bureaucracy (Gosplan SSSR) whose officials decided what each republic, region, province, district and even state and collective farm should produce; farm managers were then obliged to supply agricultural products for sale to the government at Gosplan-determined prices.[49] The 'false' egalitarianism of the peasant commune gave way to the inequalities of socialism, with each person rewarded for personal contributions to the collective effort. Rural Stakhanovites like Pasha Angelina - the first woman tractor driver in the Soviet Union - were rewarded for over-fulfilment of plan quotas.49 But since quotas were typically set at levels far beyond the capacity of the farms to fulfil, the new system accelerated the growth of a vast informal network of insider negotiations, nepotism and other forms of favouritism, and massive corruption all along the bureaucratic chain of command.
The brutal decade of the 1930s was framed by an official discourse that demonised opponents and evokedpublic fear that devious internal and external enemies were joined in a conspiracy to weaken the Soviet Union and leave it
esther kingston-mann
vulnerable to foreign attack. Evoking memories of the First World War and its devastating aftermath, Stalin justified the brutalities of the 1930s as a necessary modernising strategy. In his words:
those who fall behind get beaten. One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind . . . She was beaten because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. Either we perish, or we overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.50
Stalin thus invited the public to join in targeting 'enemies of the people' who undermined the Soviet Union's heroic struggle to become so powerful that no outsider would ever again dare to invade 'with impunity'.
Stalin's gift for manipulating popular fears served him well in the years to come, when the Nazi invasion provided a nightmare confirmation of his paranoid vision of the outside world. Between 1941 and 1945, the genocidal invaders of the Soviet Union set themselves the task of exterminating twenty million, and they massively over-fulfilled their quotas.
The Second World War and its aftermath
In 1941, European Russia was overrun by Nazi forces (aided by enthusiasts from the Baltic states appropriated by the Soviets in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939). In areas like Ukraine, hatreds engendered by the brutalities of collectivisation overshadowed - at least initially - the Nazi threat to exterminate all Slavic populations. However, in the course of the war, the brutal Nazi treatment of 'subhuman Slavic races' convinced many opponents of forced collectivisation that genocide was far worse. Also important in engineering a public opinion shift was a Soviet defence strategy framed in surprisingly patriotic, religious and 'peasant-friendly' terms - complete with posters that featured 'Mother Russia' as an attractive middle-aged woman in a red peasant dress, with her arm raised in summoning gesture, and the caption: 'The Motherland is Calling!'51 Under the pressures of war, state planning gave way to ad hoc measures intended to meet the requirements of the front. Private plots were expanded, and the war mobilisation of adult males enabled women to enter occupations from which they had previously been excluded. Many became heads of households, and some even became collective farm managers. Although few women were able to emulate Pasha Angelina's exemplary achievements in the 1930s, by 1943, they comprised 50 per cent of Soviet tractor drivers.[50] In the absence of men, and despite the long-term German occupation of the best agricultural land and worsening shortages of agricultural machinery, peasant women, children and older people were able - against all odds - to supply the cities and the army with a significant measure of their food requirements.
48
S. Bridger,
49
Caroline Humphrey, 'Introduction',
Joseph Stalin, 'The Breakneck Speed of Industrialisation', quoted in M. McCauley (ed.),