The world of the Russian peasantry was turned upside down by a concerted attempt to reorganise peasant land tenure, not (as in 1906-11) to create individual enclosed farms but to realise a vision of collectivised agriculture. Those who framed the collectivisation project shared with Stolypin's surveyors and agronomists a firm belief in the need for a more rational organisation of the land and in the inability of peasants to bring about real change on their own initiative. In 1929 the order was given to collectivise peasant farms. After a short interruption following Stalin's famous speech, 'Dizziness from success' (March 1930), the process recommenced. 'Kulaks' (demonisedas 'peasant barons') were dispossessed and deprived of the opportunity to enter the new farms. Nomadic groups (such as Roma, and the 'small peoples of the North') were compulsorily settled in collectives, in order to create the basis for a new 'proletariat'. Soviet official propaganda treated collectivisation as a progressive measure (Dovzhenko's film Earth (Zemlia, 1930), gave it a more subtle and aesthetic treatment). Stalin and his entourage accused peasants of 'sabotage' and of starving workers and soldiers, and expressed concern about the 'counter-revolutionary chauvinism' of Ukrainian peasants. The outcome was uncompromising state violence. Out of a total of 25 million peasant households, around one million were identified as kulaks and deported, many of them to Central Asia, where they were exposed to infectious disease and a shortened life expectancy.
Land reorganisation was accompanied by a far more concerted attempt to extract grain from producers. The government overcame widespread peasant opposition by a combination of repression (theft of 'socialist property', including grain, became a capital offence on 7 August 1932) and reform (the legalisation of trade by peasant households in May i932 and the creation of a legal framework for the kolkhoz). In another echo of the Stolypin reforms, some peasants welcomed the new dispensation as an opportunity to get ahead. In the short term, however, the outlook was entirely bleak. The famine of 1933, following disastrous harvests in 1931 and 1932, devastated large parts of Ukraine, the Volga region and the North Caucasus. Stalin has been accused of preventing shipments of grain from reaching areas of starvation, leading some scholars to argue that collectivisation-induced famine represented a deliberate programme of'genocide'. Others are unconvinced, citing the overall decline in food production and the limited room for government manoeuvre.[8] In purely economic terms collectivisation resulted in the devastation of livestock herds (nowhere more so than in Kazakhstan) and the decline of animate power. It took a generation for the agricultural sector to recover. Only on the very eve of war did the total stock of power (animate and inanimate) finally exceed pre-collectivisation levels.
Gerschenkron famously pinpointed continuities between the 'Witte system' and Stalinism. According to this interpretation, Stalin exploited the 'advantages of backwardness' to press the claims of heavy industry for investment, which were secured on the basis of a sharp curtailment of overall consumption.[9] Certainly, for ordinary people, this turbulent economic transformation imposed severe strain. Day-to-day survival required the adoption of imaginative strategies: sufficient goods could be secured only by recourse to the legal and illegal markets, in order to supplement organised (planned) distribution. Workers' families traded output from domestic food production and artisanal activity. Peasants relied upon sales of produce from their private plots; their income from the kolkhoz, calculated as 'labour-day payment', was neither reliable (it was treated as a residual claim on the farm's product) nor adequate.[10]Other than the prison-camp population, those of pensionable age were hardest hit (peasants counted as self-employed and were not entitled to a pension).
The Stalinist economic transformation promoted upward social mobility. Some peasants escaped the kolkhoz, making use of well-established village networks and institutions in order to seek a more secure future than could be obtained in the uncertain world of the collective farm. Many worked as seasonal labourers, as their parents' generation had done in pre-revolutionary times. Between 1926 and 1939 around 23 million people flocked to Soviet cities, including 2 million to the Moscow conurbation. This mass influx owed very little to organised recruitment. Indeed the government sought to restrict the movement ofpeasants, by denying them an entitlement to the internal passport that was reintroduced in 1932. But this discriminatory measure had little effect on overall geographical mobility, because peasants could enter the urban economy by various means, for example as domestic servants employed by the emerging Soviet elite so bitterly denounced by Trotsky.
Notwithstanding these pressures, or perhaps because of them, Stalinist industrialisation supported a growing ethos of consumption, particularly after the abolition of rationing in 1935-6. Soviet advice literature emphasised the need to maintain standards, at least by members of the new elite, in the preparation of food and the provision of one's apartment with furniture and books. In general, housing left a great deal to be desired - throughout the i930s the majority of the population had to make do with communal arrangements, in shared apartments, workers' hostels or barracks. Pervasive shortages of consumer goods and accommodation gave rise to a variety of practices, at all levels of Soviet society, to smooth access to goods and services by circumventing the official system of distribution. The Soviet lexicon designated these informal reciprocal practices as blat. They long outlived Stalin.
Impressive resources were devoted to education and cultural improvement. The Stalin revolution entailed the construction of schools and universities, public parks and squares, theatres, cinemas and sports arenas and department stores. Campaigns to improve school attendance and to extend adult learning opportunities resulted in significant gains in literacy. Particular importance was attached to vocational training for the new generation of engineers and managers. These projects were accompanied by injunctions to self-improvement, supported by advice literature that related this to the construction of a new, socialist society and a duty to one's fellow citizens. By i939 the total numbers employed in social and cultural projects, as well as health, housing and economic administration, exceeded 8 million, compared with fewer than 2 million in i926.
The demographic consequences of Stalinism were related to this profound economic transformation, and to the terror that accompanied it. Collectivisation prompted a mass exodus of peasants in 1931-2, and as a result the government closed the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban' in January 1933. But the state also directly engineered population displacement. Thus 'de- kulakisation' resulted in the deportation of peasants (of all nationalities) to 'special settlements'; by 1933 these housed around 1.1 million men, women and children. Other forced labour was concentrated in prisons, in labour camps, and in labour colonies. All of these - a combined population of 2.52 million in 1933, rising to 3.35 million by 1941 - provided an important source of labour for the Stalinist economy. Ostensibly, the Gulag had impressive 'achievements' to its credit. Construction of mines, roads, railways and urban transport systems (such as the Moscow metro), canals and waterways (for example, the White Sea Canal), and new industrial towns, such as Magnitogorsk and Komsomol'sk- na-Amure, depended upon the labour of dispossessed kulaks and other forced labour, celebrated by Maxim Gorky as a demonstration of the potential to rehabilitate the criminal 'element'. The NKVD also used forced labour to produce non-ferrous metals and for the felling of timber. But the Gulag imposed a heavy burden, because productive workers were wrenched from the occupations for which they had been trained and because immense resources were tied up in monitoring the work of prisoners.
8
For a summary of the arguments see R. W Davies, M. B. Tauger and S. G. Wheatcroft, 'Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the Famine of 1932-33',
9
This is not to say that the investment programme was sacrosanct: in 1933 and 1938 the Politburo ordered cuts in investment, in order to improve the supply of consumer goods.