COLLECTIVIZATION.

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture accompanied rapid industrialization during Joseph Stalin's First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932). Collectivization was meant to create a large-scale socialized agricultural economy based on state and collective farms. While state farms were to replicate nationalized industry with state ownership and the employment of a salaried workforce, collective farms were to be profit-sharing organizations, in which farmers tilled and managed the land collectively. Collectivization was intended to radically transform the rural sector, displacing communal forms of peasant land tenure as well as ridding the countryside of a rural bourgeoisie (the "kulaks"), capitalism, and the market.

The Communist Party viewed collectivization as a solution to agrarian backwardness and the industrial development of the nation. By the late 1920s, when the state turned toward forced industrialization, the peasantry (some 85 percent of the population) had emerged as a key economic resource to be tapped for the capital funding of industrialization by way of taxation, grain levies for export, and labor (voluntary and forced) for industry and the extraction of raw materials. The collective farm was to be a control mechanism for the economic exploitation of the peasantry.

Through collectivization, the state also sought hegemony over the countryside and the eradication of the peasantry as a semiautonomous cultural entity. Collectivization therefore entailed not only the creation of collective farms and the taking of grain, but also the implementation of a series of ancillary policies that aimed to destroy peasant self-government, to curtail and control the peasant market, to suppress religion, and to remove all sources of traditional village leadership and authority by way of the so-called liquidation of the kulaks as a class. Dekulakization, as it was known, was an endeavor to decapitate village authority structures and to remove undesirable elements in order to break down village cohesion and minimize peasant resistance.

Implemented in the midst of the crisis atmosphere of the late 1920s, collectivization was imposed with brute force, largely by workers and urban communists mobilized for work in the countryside. Based on a Marxist-Leninist reading of the rural community, the Communist Party attempted to divide the village by exploiting social tensions and cleavages; it failed, however, to understand the strength and cohesion of what was largely a pre-capitalist, communal peasantry. This ideological misreading, along with counterproductive policies against religion and the kulaks and the use of outside forces to implement collectivization, served to unite the peasantry against the state. In 1930 peasants fought collectivization in a wave of resistance that included close to fourteen thousand mass disturbances (mostly riots) encompassing as many as two million participants and over one thousand murders of and just under six thousand assaults against rural officials and peasant activists. In the end, peasant resistance was no match for the superior forces of the state. Collectivization would be largely completed by the end of the First Five-Year Plan.

DEKULAKIZATION

The policy of dekulakization was auxiliary to collectivization. Local activists employed dekulakization to intimidate peasants into joining collective farms (lest they be subject to the fate of the kulak) and to halt the flight of peasants seeking to escape repression and leave for the cities. In all, in 1930 as many as 337,563 peasant families were subject to some form of dekulakization. Kulaks were divided into three categories. The first category, consisting of supposed "counterrevolutionary kulak activists," was to be quickly liquidated by way of the incarceration of heads of households in concentration camps or, when deemed necessary, execution. Their families were subject to property confiscation and internal exile. The second category was made up of the remaining elements among the "kulak activists," especially the wealthiest kulaks; following property expropriations, they and their families were to be exiled to distant parts of the Soviet Union beyond or within their native regions. Those in the third category were subject to property expropriation and left largely in place, but were not allowed to join collective farms.

Repression in fact was not limited to the largely mythical rural bourgeoisie, but instead struck all manner of peasant and nonpeasant in the village, including poor and middle-class peasants, the families of Red Army soldiers and industrial workers, members of the rural intelligentsia (i.e., teachers, agronomists, doctors), people with ties to the old regime or anticommunist political parties, and, in general, anyone who dared to criticize or object. The total number of kulaks deported in 1930 and 1931 ranges from 356,544 families (1,679,528 people) to 381,026 families (1,803,392 people). These figures do not include those peasants designated as third-category kulaks, nor those who fled the countryside. If one includes the smaller exiles of 1932 and 1933, the total number of people exiled would surpass two million. The major regions of exile were the remote hinterlands of the Urals (128,233 families), Western Siberia (69,950 families), the Northern Region (58,271 families), Kazakhstan (50,879 families), and Eastern Siberia (26,555 families). Once there, deported peasant families built and lived in "special settlements" (spetsposelenie, later trudposelenie) administered by the secret police and gulag. Death rates through the first half of the 1930s were massive, in the hundreds of thousands, as a result of famine and disease. Employed in forestry, mining, fishing, and other industries, the special settlers became forced laborers for the extraction of the Soviet Union's natural resources so crucial for industrialization and hard-currency-earning exports. They were forbidden to return home until 1954 and officially "rehabilitated" only in the early 1990s.

THE AFTERMATH

The short-term consequences of collectivization included a huge influx of peasants into the labor force, massive social fluidity, and the disruption of agriculture on a scale that led to a major famine in 1932 and 1933. The Stalinist state and the collective farm system triumphed in the end, but their triumph did not spell the end of the peasantry. Passive resistance and other weapons of the weak became endemic mechanisms of coping and survival for the peasantry within the collective farm. Agriculture stagnated, becoming the Achilles' heel of the Soviet economy, weakened by low productivity, poor management, massive peasant indifference, and official neglect. Like the peasant commune before it, the collective farm became a bulwark against change, as much a subsistence shelter for peasants as a control mechanism for the state. Over time, the collective farm became the quintessential risk-aversion guarantor that peasants had always sought. Socioeconomic leveling, a basis subsistence, and some degree of cultural independence, demographic isolation, and feminization of the village maintained and even strengthened certain aspects of village culture and tradition. The constant and historic insecurity of peasant life ironically bonded the peasant to the collective farm. State attempts at decollectivization, after the fall of the Soviet Union, were resisted and blocked by a peasantry grown accustomed to the collective farm.

INTERPRETATIONS

The classic Soviet historiographical view proclaimed collectivization to be a "revolution from above with support from below." This view derived largely from Stalin's own pronouncements concerning collectivization in official party histories. This view was first challenged within the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev years (1953–1964), when a series of historians suggested that Stalin committed "mistakes" both in the implementation of collectivization and in the assumption that the peasantry welcomed the new policy; the mistakes resulted in widespread violence and peasant suffering. These views were largely muted during the Brezhnev years (1964–1982), only to resurface during Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika (1985–1991) and after. At that time, the historians of the Khrushchev years returned to a critical analysis of collectivization, for the first time discussing the famine of 1932 and 1933 and its victims as well as the deportation of the kulaks.

Western historians were far more skeptical of Stalinist claims regarding collectivization. The earliest Western studies tended to view collectivization as "necessary" to industrialization: the collective farms facilitated the state's access to peasant grain, thereby providing a source of capital for industrialization through grain exports. This viewpoint was challenged in the late 1960s and 1970s by scholars who argued that collectivization in fact made a negative contribution to industrialization as capital flowed not from countryside to town, but in the reverse direction. The construction and modernization of a new agricultural system proved costly to the state, and the damage wrought by collectivization reduced agricultural output.

In the 1970s Western historians explored the social history of collectivization, challenging in no uncertain terms Stalinist arguments about class war in the village and advanced social stratification. Historians were divided, however, on ways of seeing the village. Some have implicitly viewed the countryside through a Marxist-Leninist lens, while arguing that social stratification was minimal and class war a reality only in the Stalinist imagination. Others have explicitly rejected Marxist-Leninist conceptions of the village, turning instead to an understanding of the Russian village as an overwhelmingly precapitalist, communal peasantry made up of small family productive units. In both cases, scholars agree that social support for collectivization within the village was minimal and class war all but nonexistent. In the 1980s Western historians continued their explorations of the social basis of collectivization, suggesting that the regime relied on urban sources of support to implement collectivization; others investigated the massive social fluidity caused by collectivization as millions of peasants headed for the cities.

From the late 1980s, the study of collectivization has benefited from the partial opening of Soviet archives and the declassification of key documentation. This has allowed both Western and Russian historians to explore in depth Stalin's role in decision-making and the evolution of state policy, the scope and dynamics of peasant resistance, the famine of 1932 and 1933, and the expropriation and deportation of the kulaks. The opening of the archives has revealed the extent to which collectivization was formative to the rise of the Stalinist police state. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class represented the first mass deportation and use of forced labor of the Stalin era, setting the precedent for and marking the beginning of the rise of the Soviet secret police as a vast economic empire and a state within a state.

Collectivization was the Soviet state's first major project in social engineering on a massive scale. In its goals of transforming peasants into collective farmers and eradicating peasant culture, collectivization represented what James C. Scott has called the "imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order," so characteristic of the twentieth century. At the same time, dekulakization was an early model of the murderous, excisionary population politics aimed against supposed enemy or alien segments of the population so characteristic of the worst of the excesses of twentieth-century European dictatorships. Yet, while collectivization and dekulakization can be seen as sharing features in common with the most repressive aspects of twentieth-century European modernity, it is also important to recognize that the overwhelmingly agrarian nature of the early Soviet Union, its vast geography, and its underdeveloped provincial governmental structures set it apart from Western European polities. The result was a unique Soviet modernity characterized by modernist intentions carried out in the context of rather unmodern conditions and by a state that relied on repression as a substitute for rule by routine administrative and legal institutions.

See alsoFive-Year Plan; New Economic Policy (NEP); Purges; Soviet Union; Stalin, Joseph.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davies, R. W. The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930. Vol. 1 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Mass., 1980. Authoritative and thorough study of the collectivization campaign.

Davies, R. W., and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, eds. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. Vol. 5 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia. New York, 2003. Treatment of the famine, making use of newly declassified archival documents.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York, 1994. A survey of the collectivized village.

Lewin, M. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization. Translated by Irene Nove. Evanston, Ill., 1968. Reprint, New York, 1975. Classic study of the peasantry and the state in the years leading to collectivization.

Millar, James R., and Alec Nove. "A Debate on Collectivization: Was Stalin Really Necessary?" Problems of Communism 25, no. 4 (1976): 49–62. An introduction to the debate on collectivization's contribution to industrialization.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, Conn., 1998. A pioneering study of the modern state's attempts to transform society in conditions of what Scott calls "high modernism."

Shanin, Teodor. The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society; Russia, 1910–1925. Oxford, U.K., 1972. Classic study and critique of sociology of the Russian village.

Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York, 1996. Outline and analysis of peasant resistance during collectivization, making use of newly declassified archival documentation.

Ward, Chris. Stalin's Russia. 2nd ed. London, 1999. Includes an excellent discussion of the historiography on collectivization.

Lynne Viola