The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition
Collectivization refers to the wholesale and drastic reorganization of the agricultural sector of Soviet society carried out principally by Stalin shortly after the death of Lenin, at the Communist Party conference of 1923, though much of it was not achieved until he launched his series of five-year plans in 1929. How to organize agriculture in the new, supposedly communist, Soviet state had always been a difficult problem for two related reasons. First, according to Marx, the revolution was not supposed to happen until a country was thoroughly industrialized and would therefore have a rather small and dependent peasantry. Consequently the peasantry, as a category, fits badly into the class analysis of Marxism, which posits two, and only two, mutually opposed classes. Secondly, in order to achieve the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin had had to lean heavily on the support of the peasantry, in the absence of a large industrial proletariat, yet peasants in Russia, as is almost a universal truth of sociology, were extremely conservative. Their only interest in the revolution had been to gain legal control of the land they had often farmed as tenants, or to gain land from redistribution of large semi-feudal estates. This tendency had been exacerbated by the relaxation of communist economic rules that Lenin had been forced into in the New Economic Policy, which had considerably increased the size of the class known as Kulaks, rich peasants with considerable land holdings. Because of the general inadequacy of the industrial base there was not enough money to buy for the urban proletariat the foodstuffs hoarded by the agricultural sector. In any case, the large-scale ownership of private property, and the straightforward profit motivation of the peasantry, were embarrassing in a newly-created communist society.
Stalin’s answer was to create vast collective farms, on which the agricultural workers would be employed in much the same way as industrial workers were employed in the state-controlled and centrally-planned factories of the industrial sphere.
Other benefits were expected from increasing returns to scale, as high levels of mechanization were seen as economically more suitable than on small-scale private farms. The peasantry in general, and the Kulaks most of all, resented and opposed this appropriation of ‘their’ land, and the forced change of status from individual owners (and often employers) to mere wage labourers, but Stalin and the party, helped by the Red Army, used all necessary violence to overcome the objections. Massive deportations to other parts of the Union, and the murder of, in some estimates as many as six million, Kulaks and peasants produced an entirely transformed agriculture.
There can be no doubt that the overall results of this policy were catastrophic; agricultural yields fell, despite later efforts by Khrushchev to humanize and moderate the system. The Soviet Union, in most recent years, depended on Western agricultural surpluses for as much as 40% of its grain requirements. Some steps were taken to reintroduce a private incentive, by allowing peasants on collective farms to control small plots of land themselves and sell their produce on a free market, but no immediate solution to the agricultural problems became apparent even after the period of perestroika and the fundamental reorganization of what used to be the Soviet Union. It should be noted, however, that part of the agricultural problem has always been one of distribution rather than production: in any year a large proportion of production rots in the fields because it cannot be harvested, or in storehouses because it cannot be distributed. Furthermore, the problem of matching agricultural production with both the needs of consumers and the livelihood of farmers is endemic to all economies, and is shown especially in the wasteful subsidies paid to farmers in both the USA and European Union. Historically, collectivization is one of the two great sins attributable to the Stalinist period, the other being the great purges. While the policy was clearly brutal and inhumane, it has to be seen against the pressing need rapidly to industrialize a desperately backward country. In total utilitarian terms it remains to be proven that the experience of the Russian agricultural sector has ever been anything but appalling, and it is certainly not proved that collectivization as a purely technical answer to mass food production is any less sensible than most other methods.
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