During the formation and development of the Soviet state, the beginning of the history of which was marked by the victory of the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution, there were many large-scale economic projects, the implementation of which was carried out by harsh coercive measures. One of them is the complete collectivization of agriculture, the goals, essence, results and methods of which became the topic of this article.
What is collectivization and what is its purpose?
The complete collectivization of agriculture can be briefly defined as the ubiquitous process of merging small individual farms into large collective associations, collectively referred to as collective farms. In 1927, the regular XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) took place , at which the course was taken to implement this program, which was then implemented in the main part of the country by 1933.
Complete collectivization, according to the party leadership, was supposed to allow the country to solve the acute food problem at that time by reorganizing the small farms belonging to the middle peasants and the poor into large collective agrarian complexes. At the same time, the total elimination of the rural kulaks, declared an enemy of socialist transformations, was supposed.
Reasons for collectivization
The initiators of collectivization saw the main problem of agriculture in its fragmentation. Numerous small producers, deprived of the opportunity to purchase modern equipment, mostly used ineffective and low-productivity manual labor on the fields, which did not allow them to get high yields. The consequence of this was an ever-increasing shortage of food and industrial raw materials.
To solve this vital problem, a complete collectivization of agriculture was launched. The date of the beginning of its implementation, and it is considered to be December 19, 1927, the day the work of the XV Congress of the CPSU (b) was completed, was a turning point in the life of the village. Forced breaking up of the old, centuries-old established way of life began.
Do it - I don't know what
Unlike the agrarian reforms that were previously carried out in Russia, such as the one carried out in 1861 by Alexander II and in 1906 Stolypin, the collectivization carried out by the Communists did not have a clearly developed program or any concrete ways to implement it.
The party congress gave an indication of a radical change in agricultural policy, and then local leaders themselves were obliged, at their own peril and risk, to carry it out. Even their attempts to contact the central authorities for clarification were suppressed.
Process started
Nevertheless, the process, which was initiated by the party congress, has begun and already the next year has covered a significant part of the country. Despite the fact that officially joining the collective farms was declared voluntary, in most cases their creation was carried out by administrative-coercive measures.
Already in the spring of 1929, agro-commissioners appeared in the USSR — officials who traveled to places and, as representatives of the highest state power, exercised control over the course of collectivization. Numerous Komsomol detachments, also mobilized to rebuild the life of the village, were given help to them.
Stalin about the “great turning point” in the life of peasants
On the day of the next 12th anniversary of the revolution - November 7, 1928, the newspaper Pravda published an article by Stalin in which he declared that a "great turning point" had come in the life of the village. According to him, the country managed to make a historic transition from small-scale agricultural production to advanced agriculture, put on a collective basis.
It also cited many specific indicators (mostly exaggerated), indicating that continuous collectivization everywhere brought a tangible economic effect. From that day forward, the editorials of most Soviet newspapers were filled with praises of the "victorious tread of collectivization."
Peasants' reaction to forced collectivization
The real picture was fundamentally different from the one that the propaganda bodies tried to imagine. The forcible seizure of grain from peasants, accompanied by widespread arrests and ruin of farms, in fact, plunged the country into a state of a new civil war. At the time when Stalin spoke of the victory of the socialist reconstruction of the village, peasant uprisings were blazing in many parts of the country, by the end of 1929, in the hundreds.
At the same time, the real production of agricultural products, contrary to the statements of the party leadership, did not increase, but fell catastrophically. This was due to the fact that many peasants, fearing to be ranked as fists, not wanting to give their property to the collective farm, deliberately reduced crops and slaughtered cattle. Thus, complete collectivization is, first of all, a painful process, rejected by the majority of rural residents, but carried out by methods of administrative coercion.
Attempts to speed up the process
Then, in November 1929, it was decided to intensify the process of agricultural reorganization that had begun, to send 25 thousand of the most conscious and active workers to the villages to guide the collective farms created there. This episode went down in the history of the country as the movement of “twenty five thousandths”. Subsequently, when collectivization took on an even larger scale, the number of urban messengers increased almost threefold.
An additional impetus to the process of socializing peasant farms was given by a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of January 5, 1930. It indicated specific dates in which continuous collectivization was to be completed in the main arable territories of the country. The directive prescribed their final transfer to the collective form of management by the autumn of 1932.
Despite the categorical nature of the resolution, it, as before, did not give any concrete explanations about the methods of involving the peasant masses in collective farms and did not even give an exact definition of what the collective farm should have been in the end. As a result, each local boss was guided by his own idea of ​​this, unprecedented, form of organization of work and life.
Self-government of local authorities
This state of affairs has caused numerous facts of local self-government. Siberia is one of such examples, where local officials instead of collective farms began to create certain communes with the socialization of not only livestock, equipment and arable land, but also of all property, including personal belongings.
At the same time, local leaders, competing among themselves to achieve the highest percentages of collectivization, did not hesitate to apply cruel repressive measures against those who tried to evade participation in the process that had begun. This caused a new explosion of discontent, which in many areas took the form of open rebellion.
Hunger resulting from a new agrarian policy
Nevertheless, each individual district received a specific plan for the collection of agricultural products intended both for the domestic market and for export, for the implementation of which the local leadership was personally responsible. Each short delivery was considered a manifestation of sabotage and could have tragic consequences.
For this reason, there was a situation in which the heads of the districts, fearing responsibility, forced the collective farmers to surrender to the state all the available grain, including the sowing fund. The same picture was observed in animal husbandry, where all breeding cattle were sent for slaughter for reporting. The difficulties and extreme incompetence of the leaders of collective farms, who for the most part came to the village on a party call and had no idea about agriculture, exacerbated the difficulties.
As a result, the continuous collectivization of agriculture carried out in this way led to interruptions in the supply of food to cities and, in villages, to widespread hunger. He was especially destructive in the winter of 1932 and in the spring of 1933. At the same time, despite the obvious miscalculations of the leadership, the official bodies blamed what was happening on some enemies trying to hinder the development of the national economy.
The liquidation of the best part of the peasantry
The elimination of the so-called class of kulaks — prosperous peasants who managed to create strong farms and produced a significant part of all agricultural products during the NEP period — played a significant role in the actual failure of the current policy. Naturally, it did not make sense for them to join collective farms and voluntarily lose property acquired by their labor.
Since such an example did not fit into the general concept of arranging village life, and they themselves, in the opinion of the party leadership of the country, prevented the poor and middle peasants from becoming involved in collective farms, a course was taken to eliminate them.
The corresponding directive was immediately issued, on the basis of which kulak farms were liquidated, all property was transferred to the ownership of collective farms, and they themselves were forcibly evicted to areas of the Far North and the Far East. Thus, complete collectivization in the grain regions of the USSR occurred in an atmosphere of total terror against the most successful representatives of the peasantry, who constituted the country's main labor potential.
Subsequently, a number of measures taken to get out of this situation made it possible to partially normalize the situation in the villages and significantly increase the production of agricultural products. This allowed Stalin at the party plenum held in January 1933 to declare the complete victory of socialist relations in the collective farm sector. It is generally believed that this is where the complete collectivization of agriculture ended.
What did collectivization eventually turn into?
The most eloquent evidence of this is the statistics released during the years of perestroika. They amaze even taking into account the fact that they are, apparently, incomplete. It follows from them that the complete collectivization of agriculture ended with the following results: over its period more than 2 million peasants were deported, and the peak of this process was in 1930–1931. when about 1 million 800 thousand rural residents underwent forced relocation. They were not fists, but for one reason or another they turned out to be objectionable in their native land. In addition, 6 million people became victims of famine in the villages.
As mentioned above, the policy of forced socialization of households led to mass protests among rural residents. According to information preserved in the archives of the OGPU, only in March 1930 there were about 6,500 uprisings, and to suppress 800 of them, the authorities used weapons.
In general, it is known that in that year in the country more than 14 thousand popular actions were recorded, in which about 2 million peasants took part. In this regard, one often hears the opinion that the continuous collectivization carried out in this way can be equated with the genocide of one’s own people.