A finalized plan for collectivization was adopted in early 1930, during a special meeting of Central Committee commissions established to work out the details. Commission members—functionaries fully obedient to Stalin—at first expressed a certain hesitance. While they were in principle ready to support Stalin’s push for wholesale collectivization, they urged that it take place over several years. Despite the atmosphere of class-war hysteria in the country, the commissioners tried to ease the fate of millions of kulaks, believing that while they were, of course, enemies of the entire kolkhoz system, they should not be driven into a corner. Repression should be reserved for those who actively resisted. The rest should be accepted into kolkhozes, albeit with certain restrictions. Taking this relatively moderate approach, the commission members made important organizational suggestions—for example, that instead of the total confiscation of property, peasants should be allowed to keep small plots for their own use.
15
The proposals made by the Central Committee commissions were of great practical importance and probably the best that could be achieved given the political realities of 1930. They somewhat appeased party extremists while conceding something meaningful to the peasants. As the subsequent history of the Soviet Union has shown, allowing kolkhoz workers to keep their own personal plots saved the system, the peasants, and the entire country. In essence, the arrangement returned peasants to the status of serfs in pre-emancipation Russia, paying feudal homage to the state through their work on collective farms but able to retain some land for personal use. It allowed them to feed themselves—and much of the country—despite the poor performance of the kolkhozes.
Stalin preferred a different model: his idea was to turn the peasants into slaves of the state, fully dependent on their state jobs. He favored the total expropriation of peasant property and the incorporation of villages into a state economy where market forces would be allowed no influence. He subjected the commissions’ conclusions to harsh criticism and undertook to correct their many errors.
16
By the time he was done, the collectivization plan resembled a military campaign against the traditional peasant way of life. First, Stalin drastically cut the timeline for carrying out collectivization. In several of the most important agricultural regions, the task was to be completed by the fall of 1930, and the tone of his directives made it clear to local functionaries that there was not a moment to lose. Second, he put a quick stop to all talk of integrating kulaks into kolkhozes. Such a step was categorically forbidden. Kulaks and their families were to be exiled to remote areas of the USSR, arrested, placed in camps, or shot. Finally, he put an end to all proposals that kolkhozes coexist with private peasant plots. Provisions for peasants to keep any land whatsoever were adamantly deleted from the draft directives. Ultimately, “communes”—agricultural and social utopias, the brainchild of socialist fanatics—were proclaimed to be the ideal form and goal of collectivization. In the Soviet embodiment of this ideal, peasant property became the property of the community, right down to family chickens and personal items.
These insane and inevitably bloody plans fully reflected Stalin’s ideas and intentions. By pushing the pace of collectivization and annihilating the most prosperous and influential segment of the peasantry, Stalin was pursuing several goals at once. Kulak property would provide land and equipment for the collective farms, and the kolkhozes themselves would serve as conduits through which resources could be rapidly and efficiently pumped out of the countryside and into industry. One factor in Stalin’s calculations was his belief (shared by many party functionaries) that a moneyless form of socialism based on the exchange of goods was right around the corner. Under forced industrialization, money would cease to be an economic regulator—good riddance, thought the party leftists.
Stalin was emboldened to wage this perilous war against the peasantry partly because he believed this population segment, despite being the country’s largest, lacked the strength to pose any serious threat to the state. This assumption was only partly borne out. The peasantry really was no match for the totalitarian state, but it did offer serious resistance to collectivization and caused Stalin a good deal of trouble.
In order to fulfill Stalin’s vision of a massive system of kolkhozes, the party leadership mobilized and empowered tens of thousands of people dispatched from cities, as well as local stalwarts. Spurring competition among the regions, party newspapers (
Pravda
first and foremost) voiced one demand: as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary, drive the peasants into kolkhozes. Despite official optimism, the leadership was under no illusions that collectivization could be achieved voluntarily. One of the main instruments propelling it forward was the arrest and exile of kulaks. Fearing the fate of their repressed fellow villagers, peasants gritted their teeth and joined the despised kolkhozes.
Brandishing the threat of “dekulakization” and arrest, the authorities quickly achieved stunning collectivization results—at least on paper. While 7.5 percent of the country’s peasant households belonged to kolkhozes as of 1 October 1929, by 20 February 1930 that percentage had reached 52.7.
17
Underlying this statistic was a horrific and tragic reality. People sent from the city or mobilized from the local population to carry out collectivization behaved like conquering hordes toward a defeated enemy. Anyone who refused to enter the kolkhoz was arrested and beaten. The plundering of “dekulakized” property and the raping of women were standard. Churches were closed and clergy members arrested. “Fervent” members of the Komsomol—the Communist Youth League—desecrated churches and pranced about in church vestments.
This abuse and humiliation drove the usually docile countryside to rebellion. A wave of peasant militancy swept across the country. In all of 1926–1927, the authorities identified just 63 incidents of large-scale anti-government unrest in rural areas. In 1929 there were more than 1,300 such incidents, involving 244,000 participants. In January–February 1930 alone, there were approximately 1,500 incidents with 324,000 participants.
18
Stalin, though undoubtedly informed of the growing unrest, did not immediately respond. He was probably confident that the wave of rebellion was simply the inevitable resistance of an “obsolete class.” By late February, however, he began to think again.
19
First came a report on 26 February from Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine, containing news of unrest in the Shepetovka District, near the border with Poland. Crowds of peasants were demanding the reopening of churches and the abolition of the kolkhozes. Party activists were beaten. Other reports reaching Moscow around the same time described similar incidents in Kazakhstan, Voronezh, and even near the capital. Unrest broke out on 21 February in the Pitelinsky area of Riazan District outside Moscow. Peasants removed their livestock and family stores from kolkhozes and returned property to kulaks. Church bells were rung and delegations sent to neighboring villages to rally others to the cause. Peasants armed with stakes tried to prevent the arrests of kulaks. A policeman was killed and eight activists were wounded. OGPU agents responded with firearms, as a result of which three peasants were wounded and six killed, according to official reports.
20
The escalating disturbances and the threat that the spring sowing could be disrupted forced the authorities to pull back. On 28 February 1930 the Politburo adopted a resolution calling on Stalin to address collectivization in the press.
21
The famous article “Dizzy with Success” was published on 2 March. It contained an optimistic assessment of the “huge strides” made in collectivization and proclaimed “the countryside’s radical turn toward socialism.” At the same time, Stalin condemned individual “anti-Leninist inclinations”—the spread of communes; the expropriation of all peasant property for communal use; violations of “the principle of voluntarism and accounting for local circumstances”; and the removal of church bells—placing the blame for these excesses at the feet of local officials. On 10 March, secret Central Committee directives were sent out demanding the return of some expropriated property to peasants (poultry, livestock, the lands immediately adjacent to their homes), the correction of “mistakes” made during dekulakization, and a halt to the creation of communes and the closing of churches.
22
This was a temporary retreat intended to calm the peasants and allow them to plant their crops.
Stalin’s article and the Central Committee directives did little to calm tempers. Both failed to provide what was most sought: an explanation of what would be done with the kolkhozes that already existed. The peasants took this problem into their own hands. They forcibly destroyed the collective farms, took away confiscated property and seeds, and restored abolished property lines. The contradictory signals from Moscow only fanned the flames of anti-kolkhoz sentiment and provoked further disturbances by peasants, leaving local activists unsure of how to proceed. March 1930 marked the apex of the war in the countryside: there were more than 6,500 instances of mass unrest, almost half the total for the entire year. In all, approximately 3.4 million peasants took part in acts of rebellion in 1930.
23
Based on that number, it can be presumed that 1.5–2 million revolted in March. The higher figure is more likely since the political police had an incentive to underestimate participation in anti-government unrest. Some incidents were well organized; the peasants formed detachments and took over significant territory.
Uprisings were especially widespread in Ukraine, the site of almost half of the March disturbances. The authorities were particularly alarmed by rebellions in border regions. As of 16 March, fifteen out of Tulchin District’s seventeen administrative areas were in a state of revolt. Representatives of the Soviet government were driven out of fifty villages and replaced with
starostas,
traditional village elders. Kolkhozes were abolished in most of the district’s villages. Rebels beat members of the Communist Party and Komsomol and banished them from villages. In some places, armed rebels engaged in gun battles with OGPU punitive detachments.
For Moscow, the unrest along Ukraine’s western border raised the specter of Polish intervention. On 19 March, Stalin gave Ukrainian State Political Directorate (GPU) chief Vsevolod Balitsky a dressing down, demanding that he stop “making speeches and act more decisively.” The wounded Balitsky replied that he was personally traveling to “the sectors under threat” and was not just overseeing the fight “from a train car.”
24
But he did carry out Stalin’s orders. Ordzhonikidze, who traveled to Ukraine for an inspection, wrote that the disorders in border areas were being put down with “armed forces using machine guns and in some places cannons. There are 100 killed and shot and a few hundred wounded.”
25
Having very little weaponry, the peasants could not withstand well-armed OGPU detachments and mobilized Communists. Their isolated attempts to join forces—by sending messengers and delegations to neighboring villages or sounding the alarm using church bells—were ineffective. The uprisings remained fractured and uncoordinated. Such weaknesses made the task of mobile punitive detachments easier and permitted them to control large areas at once. Mass arrests of the uprisings’ ringleaders, kulaks, and the rural intelligentsia, along with the demonstrative brutality of government forces, undermined the resistance. Furthermore, the peasants’ behavior was much more civilized than the government’s. They generally did not kill their tormentors but merely drove them out of their villages. As a result, the government forces suffered few casualties, partly due to false promises. Another important factor in the diminishing disturbances was the spring sowing. The peasants had little time for rebellion when there were crops to be planted. The fall harvest—on which life itself depended—would not come unless they dropped what they were doing and headed to the fields. By the time the 1930 harvest came, ruthless collectivization had resumed, and the majority of peasants had been forced into kolkhozes.
Collectivization was the cornerstone of Stalin’s dictatorship, and all the other features of the Stalinist system can be seen as deriving from it. Wholesale violence against the country’s largest class required a large apparatus of oppression, complete with a system of camps and places of exile. Beyond making it clear that terror was the primary instrument of government, collectivization completely and almost instantly severed countless traditional social connections, accelerated the atomization of society, and made ideological manipulation much easier. The rampant and merciless pumping of material and human resources out of the countryside enabled the pursuit of insanely ambitious economic goals.
Forced collectivization and ineffective industrialization dealt the country a blow from which it never fully recovered. In 1930–1932, hundreds of thousands of “wreckers” and “kulaks” were shot or imprisoned in camps, and more than 2 million kulaks and their family members were sent into exile.
26
Many of those exiled were just as doomed as those who were shot. Kulak families were sent to live in barracks not suitable for habitation and sometimes simply dropped off in open fields. Terrible living conditions, backbreaking labor, and hunger brought on mass fatalities, especially among children.
27
The situation for peasants who were not arrested or exiled was hardly better. The Soviet village, ravaged by collectivization, was seriously degraded. Agricultural production plummeted, and the livestock sector was hit hard. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses dropped from 32 million to 17 million, heads of cattle fell from 60 million to 33 million and pigs from 22 million to 10 million.
28
Despite such declining productivity, the state pumped an ever-growing share of its yield out of the countryside. And yet throughout the Soviet period, the kolkhozes were unable to adequately feed the country. Most Soviet citizens survived on meager rations. Many periods were marked by famine. One of the worst was the famine of 1931–1933, the predictable result of Stalin’s Great Leap.