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Summary Stalin's collectivisation was a success?
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Success of collectivisation
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Was Collectivisation a successWhy Collectivise?
Mid 1929 less than 5% of peasants were on collective or state farms but in January 1930,
Stalin announced that 25% of grain producing areas were to be collectivised by the end of
the year
Surprising – most party members had assumed that collectivisation would be carried out
voluntary basis and had not anticipated the speed which was going to take place.
What was a collective farm?
The toz, where peasants owned their land but shared machinery and co-operated in
activities like sowing and harvesting
The sovkhoz, which was owned and run by the state. The peasants were paid wages like
factory workers
The kolhoz, where all the land was held in common and run by an elected committee –
formed of 50-100 households. All livestock, land and tools were pooled together but each
household was allowed to keep its own private land
Original aim of collectivisation was to create more sovkhozes, but the kholkhoz with private
plots become the type most favoured by the Communists in the collectivisation process of
the 1930s
Why did the Communists think collectivisation was the solution to the USSR’s agricultural problems?
1. Larger units of land could be farmed more effectively through the use of mechanisation.
Tractors and other machinery would be supplied by the state through huge machine and
tractor (MTS). Experts could help peasants to farm in more modern ways using metal
ploughs and fertiliser – so more food production
2. Mechanised agriculture would require fewer peasants to work the and would release
labour for new industries
3. It would be much easier for the state to produce the grain it needed for the cities and
for export. There would be fewer collection points and each farm would have
communist supporters who would know how much had been produced
4. Collectivisation was the socialist solution for agriculture – could not be a socialist state
when the majority of land was privately owned, and their produce was sold in markets.
Collectivisation would socialise the peasantry and live in ‘socialist agrotowns’
Why was collectivisation carried out so rapidly?
Stalin had visited the Urals and sent officials into the countryside to seize grain after the
poor harvest in 1928. In 1929, even though the harvest was much better, the state was
finding it difficult to seize grain from peasants.
Peasants were resisting government’s policies and were not marketing their food. The
situation was so bad bread had to be rationed.
Cities were starving and Stalin blamed kulaks for hoarding grain and many of them were
arrested and deported to Siberia
, Bukharin and the right wing of the party were worried that Stalin’s methods would lead to
war communism – a cycle of violence and rural unrest, shortages of bread and other foods
and rationing.
Under pressure from the right, Stalin agreed to stop grain seizures in 1928 and tried to raise
prices of grain to encourage peasants to put more on the market.
But with food shortages continuing, the party swung behind the Stalin, and Bukharin and the
rightists were removed from key posts.
Stalin then forced a policy of forced collectivisation to break the peasants’ stranglehold on
the economy.
Therefore, the decision to rapidly collectivise was an emergency decision taken to solve the
procurement crisis of 1928-29 and to crack down on the resistance of the peasants
There was a lack of preparation and planning for the revolution in Soviet agriculture, but
there was not enough tractors, combine harvesters, agricultural experts or supplies of
fertiliser to carry out a high-speed collectivisation programme.
However, Stalin and others in the party wanted to move forward
There was a genuine crisis in urban Russia at the end of the 1920s and the perceived war
scare in 1927 made the need for industrialisation more urgent and that more grain needed
to come from the peasants.
The party did support Stalin that they need to force the pace of industrialisation and solve
the peasant problem
Historians have shown that there was a lot of support for collectivisation among the urban
working class and not only were they angry and hungry they though that there were
deliberate actions of peasants holding back food,
Lots of people saw that socialisation of land was a key part of the revolution and the way out
of poverty towards a greater society.
How was collectivisation carried out?
Force, terror, and propaganda were the main methods employed in carrying through
collectivisation. Stalin returned to the ideological weapon of the ‘class economy’ as the
mechanism to achieve his ends – the Kulaks were the class enemy
In December 1929, he announced the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’. Molotov, one of
Stalin’s leading supporters, said that they would hit the kulaks so hard the so-called ‘middle
peasants’ would ‘snap to attention before us’.
The identification of the kulak as a class enemy was to frighten the middle and poor
peasants into joining the kolkhozes. But villagers were often unavailable to identify kulaks,
who were friends. Even though, the kulaks were not liked as they were a part of a village
community where ties with fellow peasants were much stronger than those to the
Communist state.
In some villages, poorer peasants supported the rich ones, however the richer ones sold
their animals and stopped hiring labourers so that they could become middle peasants.
Many local party officials opposed the policy of forced collectivisation, knowing that it was
unworkable.
They did not want to identify good farmers as kulaks who could increase food production
and they knew collectivisation would tear the country apart
Stalin insisted that an army of 250,000 urban party activists to help revolutionise the
countryside and for two weeks they would oversee collectivisation process backed by local
police, the secret police (OGPU) and the military.
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