Collectivization in the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  Soviet collectivization could reduce itself to a single moment. An enforcement brigade found flour hidden beneath a baby's cradle. The mother wept and told them her child would die of hunger without it. The brigade took it anyway. This incident was recorded as one notable instance from the era, but it stands for something vast. Between 1928 and 1940, the Soviet state dismantled individual peasant farming across vast territories and replaced it with collective and state-controlled farms. Peasants who had farmed their own plots found themselves obligated to work toward quotas set in Moscow. The famines, deportations, and mass deaths that followed made collectivization one of the deadliest peacetime programs of the twentieth century. What drove a state to organize starvation on this scale? And how did a plan sold as modernization become a catastrophe that peasants called, simply, a second serfdom?

• 2. Defining the Enemy

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  Robert Conquest observed that the definition of "kulak" varied depending on who was applying it. Under Stalin's first Five Year Plan, peasants with "a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors" could be labeled kulaks. This was the class the Soviet leadership had decided to eliminate. The word kulak translates roughly as "fist," suggesting greed and hoarding. In practice, the category was almost impossible to apply with precision. About 82% of the entire Soviet population were peasants. Only about 1% of those peasants employed hired labourers, which was the core Marxist definition of a capitalist. Lenin had argued that small-scale production "gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Ideological reasoning tied the anti-kulak campaign to that claim.

  Stalin's concerns ran beyond ideology. He needed to feed a growing industrial workforce and to pay for imports of machinery through grain exports. Before the revolution, peasants controlled about 2,100,000 square kilometres of farmland in 16 million holdings. They produced roughly 50% of Russia's food and consumed about 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the holdings grew to 3,140,000 square kilometres across 25 million plots. Producing 85% of the food, the peasants were consuming 80% of what they grew. The large estates that had once supplied urban markets no longer existed. City dwellers were receiving only about half the grain available before the war. The crisis came to a head in 1928, when a 2-million-ton shortfall in grain purchases forced the Politburo to adopt emergency requisitioning measures.

• 3. Dizzy with Success

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  On the 2nd of March 1930, Stalin's article appeared in Pravda calling for a temporary halt to the collectivization drive he had ordered. "Some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision," it read. The article framed overzealous local officials as the problem. Later analysts argued the piece was also a way for Stalin to deflect blame onto subordinates for the consequences of his own orders.

  25,000 "socially conscious" industry workers were sent to the Soviet countryside between 1929 and 1933 to accelerate the campaign. These twenty-five-thousanders were meant to complete collectivization in the North Caucasus and Volga regions by 1931 and across the remaining regions by 1932. The results arrived with extraordinary speed. Between September and December 1929, the share of collectivized households climbed from 7.4% to 15%. Then, in just the first two months of 1930-11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60%. Soviet propaganda presented the American Fordson tractor, which Russians called "Fordzon," as the best argument for collective farming.

  After the Pravda article appeared, peasants began leaving the collectives. By 1930, only 23.6% remained, roughly half the earlier figure. The respite was brief. Decrees issued in March 1931 forbade peasants from leaving collective farms at all. By 1936, roughly 90% of Soviet agriculture had been collectivized. The state had given itself the power to deport resistant peasants as early as 1929, under Article 61 of the criminal code.

• 4. The Weapons of the Weak

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  Rumors spreading through Soviet villages in the late 1920s warned of "disorder, hunger, famine, and the destruction of crops and livestock." Readings and reinterpretations of Soviet newspapers labelled collectivization a second serfdom. The comparison had its own logic. Farmers had no right to leave the collective without the state's permission. The government claimed the majority of their crops at prices it set extremely low. The serfs of the 1860s had been paid nothing, yet the analogy still had force. To peasants who believed the revolution had promised them land and freedom, the collective farm felt like a betrayal.

  In the Russian village of Belovka, a riot saw protesters beating members of the local soviet and setting fire to their homes. Men were held exclusively responsible. Women received sentences intended as warnings only. This asymmetry was not accidental. Soviet officials viewed peasant women as the most backward part of the peasantry. Women exploited that perception deliberately. They physically blocked the entrances to the huts of peasants about to be exiled as kulaks, forcibly reclaimed socialized seed and livestock, and led assaults on officials. Officials sometimes simply ran away and let riots run their course.

  In Crimea, when authorities announced that a collective farm would become a commune and that children would be socialized, women slaughtered the soon-to-be socialized livestock. In North Caucasus, after local activists actually confiscated all the blankets in one village, a rumour gained disturbing credibility. Collectivization, it was now said, would mean men and women sleeping together under a seven-hundred-meter-long blanket. Church closures triggered riots as early as 1929. Priests warned that joining the collective meant accepting "the Devil's mark." Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, later considered the repression of the Orthodox Church a prong of genocide against Ukrainians, in conjunction with the Holodomor famine.

• 5. What Was Lost

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  In 1928, the Soviet Union counted 36.1 million horses. By 1941 that number had fallen to 21.0 million, and by 1950 to 12.7 million. Cows dropped from 33.2 million to 27.8 million by 1941, and to 24.6 million by 1950. Sheep fell from 114.6 million to 91.6 million. Not until the late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin approaching 1928 levels. Much of this collapse was the result of the peasants themselves. In the Central Black Earth Region, 25% of cattle and 40% of chickens disappeared in the first three months of 1930 alone. Sheep and pigs suffered steeper losses: 55% of sheep and 53% of pigs were killed in the same period. Peasants who refused to hand their animals to collective farms chose slaughter over surrender.

  On the 7th of August 1932, the Decree on the Protection of Socialist Property made theft of collective farm property punishable by death. Under extenuating circumstances, the sentence could be reduced to at least ten years of incarceration. Soviet authorities applied this law against an ancient rural practice. Peasants, including children, who gathered grain in collective fields after the harvest was done were arrested for damaging state production. This measure became known informally as the Law of Spikelets.

  The famine of 1932-33 killed an estimated 5.7 to 8.7 million people from starvation. Its center was Ukraine and surrounding regions, including the Don, the Kuban, and the Northern Caucasus. About 40 million people across the Soviet Union were affected by food shortages; in areas near Moscow, mortality rates increased by 50%. In Kharkiv, 120,000 died; in Krasnodar, 40,000; in Stavropol, 20,000. Scholars estimate the total death toll from the entire collectivization program, counting both direct and indirect deaths, reached approximately 12 million. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Winston Churchill asked Joseph Stalin how many had died. Stalin responded with a shrug. Historians have noted that his raised hands showed ten fingers, and some have cited that gesture as a tacit admission that ten million perished. By 1952, Merle Fainsod calculated that collective farm earnings were only one-fourth of what workers on those same farms drew from their small private plots.

• 6. At the Edges of Empire

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  In 1928, Soviet authorities in Kazakhstan launched a campaign they called Little October. Its target was the bai, the wealthier cattle-owning Kazakhs, and it was structured so that Kazakhs confiscated from other Kazakhs. More than 10,000 bais may have been deported. In Kazakhstan, where the economy depended on nomadic herding rather than grain farming, collectivization meant the collapse of a way of life. Livestock fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million, and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. Restrictions on movement proved unenforceable. Half a million people migrated to other regions of Central Asia, and 1.5 million more fled to China. Of those who remained, roughly a million died in the resulting famine. In neighboring Mongolia, a Soviet dependency, attempted collectivization was abandoned in 1932 after the loss of 8 million head of livestock.

  Latvia offered a different trajectory. The Soviet occupation of June 1940 initially left Latvian agriculture largely intact, with authorities repeatedly promising that collectivization would happen voluntarily. Latvian farmers were deeply attached to individual farmsteads, known as viensetas, which had existed even under serfdom. By 1948, just 617 kolkhozes had been established, integrating 12.6% of farmsteads. Moscow's patience ran out. Between the 24th and the 30th of March 1949, approximately 40,000 people were deported and resettled across the Soviet Union. Within two weeks of those deportations, 1,740 new kolkhozes formed. By the end of 1950, about 226,900 Latvian farmsteads belonged to collectives, and just 4.5% remained outside the system.

  Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, saw an opportunity during World War II. In February 1942, he issued an Agrarian Law annulling all Soviet farming legislation and promising private land to those who collaborated with the occupiers. But wartime food demands overrode ideology. Hermann Goring demanded that the kolkhozes be retained, whatever their name. Hitler called the redistribution of land "stupid." By 1943, German occupation authorities had converted 30% of the kolkhozes into what they called "agricultural cooperatives," but had made no conversions to private farms. The collective farm that Soviet planners had imposed turned out to be a structure that even its wartime occupiers could not bring themselves to dismantle.