In the mid-1920s, the Soviet leadership took a confident course towards industrialization. But a lot of money was needed for the mass construction of industrial facilities. They decided to take them in the village. So began collectivization.
How it all began
The Bolsheviks accepted attempts to force the peasants to cultivate the land together during the Civil War. But the people were reluctant to enter the communes. The peasantry was drawn to its own land and did not understand why to transfer the property acquired by great labor to the “common boiler”. Therefore, the poor found themselves in the communes mainly, and even that one went without much hunting.
With the beginning of the NEP, collectivization in the USSR slowed down. But already in the second half of the 1920s, when the next party congress decided to carry out industrialization, it became clear that a lot of money was needed for it. Nobody was going to take loans abroad - after all, sooner or later they would have to give them back. Therefore, we decided to get the necessary funds from exports, including grain. It was possible to transfer such resources from agriculture only by forcing the peasants to work for the state. And the massive construction of plants and factories provided that the labor force to be fed to the cities that needed to be fed. Therefore, collectivization in the USSR was inevitable.
In the winter of 1927-1928 a grain procurement crisis erupted . The peasants, like a few years before, were in no hurry to hand over grain for cheap prices. But now the authorities decided to rob them of their crops by force. The party directive adopted in January 1928 demanded the punishment of peasants selling grain at high prices. Mass confiscations of bread and arrests of “speculators” began.
The authorities did not stop there. In the spring of the same year, a law was adopted on a single agricultural tax. Collective farms were exempted from this collection, well-to-do peasants had to pay a decent amount. A heavy burden was the cultural gathering, self-imposition, and compulsory subscription to various loans. In fact, this was already the beginning of collectivization: they were forced into collective farms by economic methods. Soon, prosperous peasants also lost the right to take loans, use wage labor and buy agricultural equipment.
Compulsion
However, all these methods did not lead to an increase in the number of collective farms. Despite the fact that preferential conditions were created for the new farms, the peasants were in no hurry to go to them. In November 1929, when I. Stalin argued that the “great turning point” had begun in collectivization, and the people were dropping into collective farms in droves, in reality they comprised only 6–7% of households. Moreover, tax pressure led to mass demonstrations by peasants, sometimes spilling over into spontaneous uprisings.
After Stalin’s announcement of a “turning point”, collectivization in the USSR accelerated. The party leadership of the republics was set clear deadlines by which all peasants in the region were to be united into collective farms. Massive confiscations and evictions of “kulaks” have gained enormous proportions: thousands of people who recently were successful owners went to the Urals and Siberia. However, not only prosperous peasants fell under dispossession: in many regions, it turned into a banal robbery. There were frequent cases when local activists even pulled furniture from rural huts, and those who simply did not want to go to the collective farm were declared fists or podkulakami. In this situation, rural residents began to flee to the cities, selling their property for nothing to survive at least somehow.
The result of this policy was an increase in the number of peasant uprisings. The country was on the brink of civil war. Only the disorganization and weak arming of the peasants allowed the Bolsheviks to avoid a new serious confrontation. And it could well shake their power, because the main pillar of their regime - the army - was mostly from the countryside. In March 1930, they decided to reduce the pressure on the peasants. The new party decree, like the article published earlier by I. Stalin “Dizziness from success,” condemned coercion upon joining the collective farm. The peasants began to leave the farms that they hated. But there was no turning back. Those who left the collective farm were taxed with such taxes that it was simply unrealistic to run a household plots.
Collectivization Results
By 1932, collectivization in the USSR was virtually completed. Most peasants worked on collective farm fields. That's just for their work, they received an insignificant part of the harvest. The rest was exported. The result was massive theft of bread in the fields, for which the new legislation provided for 10 years or execution. Grain regions of the USSR were struck by mass famine. In Ukraine, for example, entire villages died out. Not the best situation was in the Kazakh steppes, where forced meat harvesting was carried out.
In essence, the goals of collectivization have been achieved. Intimidated by the repressions and hunger, the peasantry dutifully worked on collective farms, receiving scanty in-kind payment for this - the so-called workdays. The state has received the necessary resources from the village. But the collective farms themselves did not become efficient farms; on the contrary, they turned into one of the causes of the crisis in the Soviet economy.