The campaign to collectivise agriculture was harsh, often brutal, and evoked strong peasant resistance. Official versions did not deny the fact of resistance but depicted it as part of the class struggle of rich, exploiting kulaks against socialism. Official versions claimed that the vast majority of poor peasants supported the regime and collectivisation. The judgement of most scholars, however, is that resistance was widespread, that there existed a broad peasant solidarity against the regime, and that collectivisation amounted to a general war against the countryside, not just a targeted class war against the kulak class enemy.[3] However one describes the collectivisation drive, it was horrific in its costs. Anyone who resisted collectivisation could be, and usually was, branded a kulak. Police and party officials confiscated the property and livestock of these individuals, arrested them and their families and exiled them to penal colonies, or even executed them as class enemies. In 1930 and 1931, the two most intense years of forced collectivisation and 'de-kulakisation', authorities deported 1.8 million peasants (about 400,000 households) as class enemies who had resisted collectivisation. The great majority of these peasants were deported to penal farms or settlements in remote areas of the country in Siberia, northern Russia and Central Asia. Many others were dispossessed and resettled into special farms in their home districts. By conservative estimates, well over 2 million rural inhabitants were deported by the end of 1933, when the regime ended the policy of forced mass collectivisation, and this does not include the unknown but surely large number of peasants who were executed, killed in outright fighting, or who died of harsh conditions even before they reached their places of exile.
By 1933, the regime had driven nearly 60 per cent of peasant households to join collective farms, although, remarkably, some 40 per cent or so of peasant families had managed to hold out against the wave of collectivisation. Individual peasant farms - edinolichniki - continued to exist legally, despite harsh tax and procurement policies and severe pressure to join collective farms. In 1930 and 1931, in fact, when the regime briefly relaxed coercive measures of collectivisation, peasants streamed out of collectives, reducing the overall proportion to a low of 21 per cent.4 Only by offering lucrative tax and other incentives could the regime begin to reverse the decline in collectivisation, and only by allowing peasants the right to own livestock and to farm their own plots was the regime able, finally, to persuade peasants to return to collectives in large numbers. By 1935, collectives encompassed about 83 per cent of peasant households, although by the end ofthe decade this number had declined to 63 per cent. In the most significant grain-growing areas, in Ukraine and western Siberia, the regime ensured that collectivisation reached nearly 100 per cent.
Agricultural production was severely disrupted as a consequence of the social war in the countryside, and the cost in livestock was also devastating. By 1934, the number of cattle, sheep, horses and pigs in the USSR was approximately half of what it had been in 1929, due in no small part to the peasant slaughter of livestock in protest against state policies. The cost in human lives of collectivisation was appalling, even above and beyond the wrenching costs of the de-kulakisation campaigns. In 1932, a combination of factors - poor harvests, agricultural disruption caused by collectivisation and high state grain procurement quotas - precipitated famine in areas of Ukraine, the North Caucasus and central Russia, which left over 5 million people dead by the time
4 Viola, PeasantRebeh, p. 28, 196
the situation eased in late 1933 and 1934. Although the famine hit Ukraine hard, it was not, as some historians argue, a purposefully genocidal policy against Ukrainians. [4] Stalinist leaders certainly used the famine to break peasant resistance to collectivisation, and very likely to punish the Ukrainian countryside for having long resisted Soviet power. Still, no evidence has surfaced to suggest that the famine was planned, and it affected broad segments of the Russian and other non-Ukrainian populations both in Ukraine and in Russia.
Despite the excesses and costs, the Stalinists achieved their goal - a state-controlled agrarian sector. Beginning in 1930, state grain procurements increased dramatically, almost doubling yearly, despite the decline in harvests during the hard years of 1932 and 1933. In fact, the Soviet government continued to export grain even during the famine, and the regime trumpeted collectivisation as a triumph of socialist modernisation. At first glance, it was. Collectivisation seemed to satisfy the regime's insatiable appetite for grain, and the state's agencies poured out statistics to prove that collectivisation had resulted in a large net transfer of economic and labour resources from agriculture to industry. For all the propaganda, however, the results of collectivisation were mixed. Many economic historians, and other students of Soviet history, argue that the costs of collectivisation, even in economic terms, far exceeded the benefits to the regime. The regime gained control over grain, but was forced to invest far greater amounts of money and supplies in agriculture than it got out of that sector.[5] The administrative costs alone were enormous and remained uncalculated, as did the massive investment needed to maintain police and party surveillance over the rural population. Productivity remained relatively low throughout much of the 1930s, despite the regime's goal to 'trac- torise' the countryside, and many collective farms amounted to no more than paper fronts for traditional household and village farm economies.[6] Still, in all, collectivisation altered the rural life of the country. The regime's harsh measures brought Soviet power, finally, to the countryside, and it did so with a vengeance. Party and police presence became pervasive in rural areas, as did the institutions of Soviet authority. Moreover, along with collectivisation came severe restrictions on peasants' freedom of movement. Rural inhabitants were forbidden to travel without the written permission of local authorities, and collective farm workers were, by and large, excluded from receiving the internal passports necessary to travel and to move from one location or place of work to another. Collectivisation bound peasants once again to the land in a way that many regarded as a second serfdom.
Peasants were not the only segment of the population affected by Stalin's socialist offensive against capitalist revivals. Destruction of the private farm economy went hand in glove with a general assault on private trade and other market remnants of NEP. The regime drove out the private trade networks, at first through increasingly heavy taxation, and then through decrees outlawing any private sale of goods. Police began arresting traders and middlemen - the officially reviled NEPmen of the 1920s. Authorities closed commission resale stores, they even banned local farm markets, and for a time even forbade the resale of personal property between individuals. All trading and any exchange of goods was to be done through state-approved stores, co-operatives, or through state-controlled rationing systems.
3
VP. Danilov et al. (eds.),
4
Robert Conquest,
5
R. W. Davies,
6
Sheila Fitzpatrick,