— Ch. 1 · Origins And Ideology —
Collectivization in the Soviet Union.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
In October 1929, approximately 7.5% of peasant households in the Soviet Union belonged to collective farms. By February 1930, that figure had surged to 52.7%. This rapid transformation marked the end of the New Economic Policy and began a nationwide program designed to integrate individual landholdings into state-controlled entities known as kolkhozes and sovkhozes. The leadership believed this shift would immediately increase food supplies for urban populations and provide raw materials for processing industries. Planners expected that replacing small private farms with large collectives would solve the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed since 1927. The problem worsened as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, requiring more food to feed a growing workforce. Joseph Stalin viewed peasants as a major threat to socialism and sought to extract larger surpluses from agriculture to fund imports of machinery. Lenin had previously claimed that small-scale production gave birth to capitalism daily and hourly. The Communist Party saw collectivization as the only remedy for private agriculture, despite the fact that only about 1% of farmland was collectivized by 1928.
The Great Famine
During the famine of 1932, 33, an estimated 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet countryside. The center of the disaster lay in Ukraine and surrounding regions including the Don, the Kuban, the Northern Caucasus, and Kazakhstan where one million people perished. About 40 million people were affected by food shortages, including areas near Moscow where mortality rates increased by 50%. In Kharkiv alone, 120,000 people died during this period. Historians R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft used official archival statistics showing 2,577,065 registered deaths in Ukraine to extrapolate an excess mortality figure of 1,544,840 between 1932 and 1933. Some sources claim at least four million deaths occurred, characterizing the event as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. Stalin denied the existence of any famine and prohibited journalists from visiting collective farms. He blamed prosperous peasants known as kulaks for hoarding grain and sabotaging collection efforts. The government responded by cutting off food rations to opposing areas and fining peasants five times their quota if they failed to meet demands. Those who continued defiance faced deportation or exile.