It is difficult to tell whether these statistics, drawn from Soviet sources, tell the real story. It is true that the decline in the birth rate can possibly be attributed in part to a long-term trend. But the fact that the government took drastic measures to halt and reverse the decline suggests that it possessed even more alarming figures. An improvement in living standards, although attempted, was not easy to achieve at the end of the 1930s, given the increase in arms production. Greater emphasis was placed on such draconian measures as criminalizing abortion (27 June 1936), which were largely ineffective and far from enlightened. Neither crude pro-birth policies – the image of the ‘heroic mother’ (an honorary title and medal bestowed on mothers for bearing ten children and a source of many jokes) – nor the butchery of women condemned to back-street abortions can account for the small improvement officially claimed for 1937 (at the height of the purges). It was followed by a new decline in 1939, back down to the 1935 level. By now, of course, an additional factor was at work: the mobilization of men into the army.
6
THE IMPACT OF COLLECTIVIZATION
Had it consisted only in breakneck industrialization, the policy launched by the new leadership under Stalin’s firm control in 1928–9 would have been unprecedented. But this huge economic effort occurred at a time when grain procurement was becoming increasingly problematic. And industrialization was perceived as being in danger unless an equally radical restructuring was undertaken in agriculture. As in the industrial sphere, this was conceived as a great leap forward, with the application of industrial methods to agriculture. Such industrialization seemed to be the quickest way of revolutionizing the agrarian economy. Once machines had replaced ploughs (the swing plough in some instances), spectacular results were bound to follow fast.
By the end of 1939, kolkhoz members (kolkhozniki) numbered 29 million, or 46.1 per cent of the working population. To these we must add 1,760,000 people employed in sovkhozy (state-owned agricultural factories) and similar agricultural enterprises, and the 530,000 employees of the Machine Tractor Stations (MTS).[1] But whereas in industry workers entered a pre-existing system of factories and jobs, the social and productive system in agriculture was very different. ‘Reconstructing’ it by coercive bureaucratic fiat, without seeking the producers’ consent, amounted to expropriation of a huge mass of peasants. The unanticipated consequences of this policy were to weigh upon Soviet agriculture, as well as the Soviet state, until the very end.
A leading article in an agricultural journal indicates a key syndrome. In it, comrade Krivtsov, secretary of the Matveevo-Kurgansky MTS in the Rostov oblast, was criticized for not having done adequate political work among the tractor brigades. Without such work, they would never meet with success in the harvest campaign. It turns out that tractor-drivers do not read the newspapers addressed to them, are oblivious to government decrees, and are unaware that they are entitled to double pay during the first fifteen to twenty days of harvesting, on condition that they fulfil the norms.
The journal sought to publicize the warning Central Committee Secretary Andreev had issued in his speech to the Eighteenth Party Congress, where he attacked those who believed that agriculture could get along fine by its own devices. Andreev was right: ‘nationalized’ agriculture was incapable of functioning properly without massive political intervention, which did not just mean agitprop. For him, politics included a readiness to apply strong pressure to the producers. And agriculture now had to be managed by the local government and party agencies in exactly the same way as a ministry ran its branch, issuing orders to be executed. This meant pressure by the Agriculture Commissariat at every level, often down to the individual kolkhoz or sovkhoz, as well as state and party pressure on the commissariat and, via the party, police and local administration, directly on producers.
This involved constructing detailed plans for every stage of agricultural production for each district, which were prepared or approved by the centre. As often as was necessary, a swarm of emissaries would descend like locusts on the district and its kolkhozes to oversee the seasonal work, which was regarded as a state-run campaign. Particular attention was paid to the threshing: during this crucial stage, state officials, and specially mobilized squads, were dispatched to collect the grain quota due to the state, even before any had reached the peasants. Even more perfidious was the behaviour of a pyramid of special commissions created to assess the expected crop, which often resorted to statistical manipulation to ‘decree’ the size of the future harvest in advance and tax the peasants in accordance with these inflated estimates. The accumulated pressure was a disincentive to working the land honestly and helped to weaken, even eradicate, the peasant’s natural attachment to the land and agricultural work. Peasants now tended to reserve most of their effort for their household plots. Without the latter, not only the peasants but the whole country would have been starving. Despite their ridiculously small size, these plots played a crucial role in feeding the countryside and also the towns. They were all that remained to the peasants for preserving themselves as a class and their villages as viable communities.
Years later, in the post-Stalinist period, and notwithstanding numerous improvements and reforms aimed at revitalizing agricultural production, the legacy of this voluntaristic agrarian policy was still exacting a humiliating price: while the ‘collectives’ were equipped with vast fields and fleets of tractors, and the rural population remained sizeable, the country was obliged to import grain from the USA.
The case of Soviet agriculture is an especially dramatic example of modernization running out of control. The state saddled itself with the task of managing the whole of agriculture from above. The bulk of the nation – the peasantry – now performed its productive tasks sluggishly. And even this could be obtained only under the pressure of an imposing mechanism combining control, incentives and repression. The kolkhoz system was a hybrid structure containing incompatible principles: the kolkhoz, the MTS and the private plot were forced to coexist uneasily, without ever becoming either a cooperative, a factory, or a private farm. The term ‘collective’ was wholly inappropriate.
‘Collectivization’ – about which there was nothing collective – also had a profound influence on the state system. As we have said, dictatorships come in different shapes and sizes. In the case of the USSR, the regime now had to equip itself with the vast coercive apparatus required to compel the bulk of the population to do work it had hitherto done of its own accord.
Yet whatever the fate of Soviet agriculture as a mode of production, the processes that led to the historic transformation of Russia’s social landscape were accelerated by the new farming methods. Although ongoing, the transition from the millennial rural past to a new era was now in full swing. The industrial-urban component was advancing at full tilt, while the rural component, despite stagnation and upheavals, remained a massive presence. In other words, the transition was characterized by an explosive mixture of large-scale modern technical-administrative structures and a rural society which, sociologically and culturally, still lived a traditional existence with its own horizons and rhythms.
Tsarist Russia had experienced a comparable contradiction. Intense waves of capitalist development had swept over a deeply rural country dominated by an absolutist state, bringing in their wake all sorts of imbalances and crises. In the Soviet case, however, the waves of industrialization were even more intense and, in contrast to what happened in Tsarist Russia, the activity was directly steered by a reinvigorated, determined state, prone to repression and ruled by a tight leadership group very conscious of its power. Failure to take on board the collision between a developing industrial society and the reaction – or lack of reaction – of the peasantry, as well as the impact of this complex mix on the political regime, renders the course of Russian and Soviet history in the twentieth century – 1917, Leninism, Stalinism, and the final downfall – unintelligible.