The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the years from 1928 to 1940 caused human misery on an unprecedented scale. It brought with it the worst excesses of Communist social engineering. Millions would lose their lives because of it; virtually no one in the country escaped its effects. The experiences of 84-year-old Masha Alekseevna are typical of a whole generation:
Oh yes, dear. It happened1 in 1930, when I was four years old. In Tambov. Well! They just started to take everything away from us – the grain, the horses, the cows … They took everything away to their collective farm. And even those who went to work in the collective farm, they still took everything away from them! It was the authorities, you know … My mother had a big trunk, where she hid some bits and pieces of food. She sat me on the trunk to try and hide it from them. But they even found those things in the trunk and took them away, too. Everything – even down to a tiny bit of soap …
Collectivisation was perhaps the most divisive and destructive of all the utopian experiments imposed on Russian society in its long history of authoritarian government. But Stalin’s announcement of the new policy, at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, makes it all sound so sensible:
The solution to our problems lies2 in making agriculture large-scale … The socialist way is to unite the small peasant farms into large collective farms, sharing machinery and employing scientific farming methods … We can either go back to capitalism, or forward to socialism; there can be no third way … The collective farms are the principal basis for remoulding the peasant, for changing his whole mentality in the spirit of socialism.
One of the key pledges that helped sweep the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 was that the land would be given to the peasants. It was, almost certainly, the measure that did the most to garner support for the new regime. But the party’s long-term plans never envisaged the survival of private farming. Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which ran from 1921 to 1928, allowed those who cultivated the land to sell part of their produce for personal profit, but it was widely regarded in Communist circles as a temporary measure designed to combat the acute food shortages in the years following the civil war. To the hardliners in the Bolshevik leadership, the NEP smacked of a concession to capitalism, and when Stalin felt his grip on power was strong enough, he ditched it. Now, he told the country, the drive for real Communism would be launched in earnest:
We are turning the main mass3 of the peasantry away from the old, capitalist path … to the new, socialist path, kicking out the rich, the capitalists. We are re-equipping the middle and poor peasants with tractors and machinery for the collective cultivation of the land … Is it not obvious that the peasants would jump for joy at this assistance and join the collective-farm movement en masse!
By late 1929, two years of disappointing harvests had seen crop yields plummet. A 2 million-ton shortfall in grain supplies to the state had been met with requisitioning and punitive measures against those who resisted. The Central Committee concluded in November that a radical acceleration of the pace of collectivisation was the only solution, with the forced reorganisation of peasant communities into gigantic collective farms, or kolkhozy, and state farms, sovkhozy. Stalin made the announcement sound like a story of fabulous success, rather than a desperate response to a desperate situation:
The peasants are joining the collective farms4 by whole villages, districts and regions! Even the blind can see that if there is any serious dissatisfaction among the main mass of the peasantry, it is not because of the collective-farm policy of the Soviet government … The peasants are abandoning en masse the lauded banner of ‘private property’ and are going over to the lines of collectivism, of socialism. The last hope for the restoration of capitalism is collapsing. We know that by the spring of the coming year, 1930, we shall have over 60,000 tractors in the fields, a year later we shall have over 100,000 tractors, and two years after that, over 250,000 tractors … Despite the desperate resistance of retrograde forces of every kind … we are now able to accomplish and even to exceed what was considered ‘fantasy’ several years ago. And that is why the middle peasant has turned towards Communism.
Collectivisation was the regime’s flagship policy, crucial to the creation of the New Soviet Man moulded in the ways of socialism, and Stalin couldn’t afford to see it fail. The new system was welcomed by the poorest peasants – they literally had nothing to lose, and the shiny new tractors appearing on the state farms were a big draw. But Stalin’s confident announcement of victory was premature. The ‘retrograde forces’ he identifies as opposing collectivisation were growing in strength, and far from being capitalist lackeys, they were actually composed of millions of ordinary peasants, men and women who’d made a success of their farming. People like Grandma Masha and her family simply did not want to hand over their worldly goods to the collective.
Many peasants viewed collectivisation as a return to serfdom. As well as having to give up their land and property, they lost their right to sell their produce for personal gain. Now they were forced to sell the vast bulk of the food they produced to the state, at artificially low prices set by the state itself. In an echo of the policies of tsars dating back to Boris Godunov, the peasants were tied to the land by a system of ‘internal passports’, which prohibited the movement of agricultural workers from the countryside to the towns. In many ways, collectivisation meant swapping the yoke of the tsarist private landlords for the new yoke of the Communist state.
Stalin was acutely aware of the growing resistance to his policies, and to combat it he resorted to his usual mixture of inducements and repression. The problems of collectivisation were blamed on the kulaks, ‘grasping fists’ allegedly determined to sabotage the will of the Soviet state. The kulaks were Stalin’s scapegoat, just as they had been Lenin’s (see here). They could be hounded and repressed. Ordinary, ‘good’ peasants could observe the fate of the kulaks with the schadenfreude of seeing their rich neighbours done down. But they also knew that anyone who opposed collectivisation, or anyone who so much as complained about it, could be swiftly reclassified as a kulak himself. In January 1930, Stalin famously pledged to ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’, in rhetoric similar to that of Lenin a decade earlier:
The collective-farm movement is5 a mighty and growing avalanche sweeping the kulak resistance from its path, shattering the kulak class, paving the way for socialism in the countryside … We must smash the kulaks and eliminate them as a class … We must strike so hard they will never rise to their feet again. That is what we Bolsheviks call a real offensive … We must break the kulaks’ resistance … and replace their output by the output of the collective farms … They must be smashed in open battle and deprived of the means to exist – use of the land, instruments of production and the right to hire labour. That is the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.
Soviet culture presented the ‘kulak smashing’ in rosy hues. Paintings, poetry, songs and movies overflowed with burgeoning wheat-fields and happy peasants on their new collectivised tractors. A 1930s musical called The Rich Bride, for instance, is a sort of Ukrainian Oklahoma!, in which muscular young men sing about their tractors as great steel horses and rhapsodise about the glory of cultivating the virgin lands. Brigades of women from the communal farm march through fields, flying flags and shouldering farm implements like weapons. The Rich Bride is a joyous celebration of a socialist rural idyll every bit as fictional as its schmaltzy romantic plot.
The reality was different. Three-quarters of Soviet territory was eventually collectivised, but the fearsome rhetoric of Stalin’s call to ‘liquidate the kulaks’ gave rise to abuse and suffering on a massive scale. Because there was no clear definition of who exactly was a kulak, the term came to denote any successful farmer, any peasant who opposed collectivisation or – in many cases – any person the local authorities didn’t like. Tens of thousands were executed, and millions shipped off to labour settlements in barren areas of Siberia and Central Asia, where they perished in huge numbers. The exact number6 of peasants who died as the direct result of collectivisation is impossible to define, but recent Western scholarship puts the number at somewhere between 4 and 10 million.
The Bolsheviks had never had much support in the countryside. The peasants didn’t trust them and they didn’t trust the peasants, an uncomfortable position for a revolution supposedly based on the will of the people. The regime saw the deeply religious, conservative peasants as the last bastion of the old order, hankering for their ‘Little Father’, the tsar, and unmoved by the appeals of the revolution. So imposing centralised control on the countryside was almost as important as securing the grain supply. Collectivisation was tantamount to war on the recalcitrant peasantry. By the winter of 1930, the problems of Soviet agriculture had deepened. The collectivisation effort had made only limited progress, with a mere 15 per cent of peasant households incorporated into the new system. With socialism’s fate hanging on the result of efforts to secure food for the urban workforce, Stalin launched a concerted campaign to bring the countryside to heel.
Israel Chernitsky was one of 25,000 shock troops – class-conscious urban workers, former soldiers and young Communists – sent by Moscow to wage war on the kulaks and enforce collectivisation:
We went into the house7, and the secretary of the party organisation announced, ‘According to the decision of our meeting, your family is to be de-kulakised. Put all your valuables on the table. I warn you no hysterics – I’ve got strong nerves. We’ll stand firm.’ A woman burst into tears and cursed the authorities.
The Bolshevik Central Committee decreed that the ‘Twenty-Five Thousanders’, as they became known, should be selected on the basis of their organisational and political experience. They were given rudimentary training and dispatched to rural areas to strengthen work discipline, production and distribution on the kolkhozy.
The Twenty-Five Thousanders were celebrated as heroes. Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote poems in their honour, and the bestselling novel of the early 1930s was Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned, with its Twenty-Five Thousander hero Semyon Davydov, who overcomes stubborn resistance and kulak sabotage to create a model collective farm, before perishing heroically in the final chapter. One real-life Twenty-Five Thousander, Lev Kopelev, writing with the benefit of hindsight, recalled the ideals that motivated him:
Stalin had said, ‘The struggle for grain8 is the struggle for socialism.’ I was convinced that we were warriors on an invisible front, waging war on kulak sabotage for the sake of grain that the nation needed for the Five Year Plan (see here, see here). For grain above all, but also for the souls of the peasants whose attitudes were bogged down in ignorance and low political consciousness, and who succumbed to enemy propaganda, not grasping the great truth of Communism.
The peasants were set in their ways, mistrustful of outsiders. So the arrival of strangers ordering them to break up their farms and hand over their possessions was met with fury. Thousands of towns and villages rose up in protest, and one of the fiercest rebellions was in the Pitelinksy district 250 miles southeast of Moscow. I drove to the village of Veryaevo, where the revolt was centred. Nowadays it is a quiet, ramshackle community of painted wooden houses and barns with zinc roofs, clustered around a ruined brick church with weeds growing from its bell tower. But in February 1930 its streets were full of angry, raucous peasants. The collectivisation brigades had begun to seize cattle and confiscate grain. Families designated as kulaks had been expelled from their homes. Government patrols raided the locals’ houses during the night, insulting the men and abusing the women. Rumours were circulating that all wives and children were to be declared state property and shipped off to Moscow.
Soon the peasants were speaking of Soviet power as the agent of the devil, and alarming, caustic folk rhymes began to do the rounds:
Akh, brethren9! Akh, sisters!
Don’t go to the kolkhoz,
For the anti-Christ is there.
Thrice upon you will he put his mark,
On your hand,
Your forehead for all to see,
And deep within your breast …
Prophecies appeared, with warnings about what awaited people in the dreaded kolkhoz:
In the kolkhoz they will10 brand you with a branding iron. The churches will be closed down and praying will be forbidden. The christening of children will be forbidden. The dead will be cremated. The old and sick will be killed. Marriage will be abolished and all men and women made to sleep together under one long blanket.
On 22 February, Veryaevo took up arms. The rebels had machine guns and hand grenades, left over from the fighting in the civil war, and they were preparing to use them. Peasant elders rang the church bells to summon reinforcements from neighbouring villages, which were also in revolt. Hundreds came on horses and sleighs, or skied over the frozen ground. A detachment of Red Army men attempting to restore calm was surrounded by an angry mob. When a policeman was seized and badly beaten, the violence began.
Official accounts speak of 3,000 rebels led by a redoubtable woman warrior called Alyona. Two government officials were beaten to death. When Alyona taunted the troops by baring her breasts to them, she was shot down in a volley of gunfire that sparked a full-scale battle.
The mob chased the government forces out of town and set up barricades on all roads in and out. Sensing victory, they stormed the collective farm, killing the chairman and taking back their grain and cattle. Those peasants who had been evicted as kulaks were returned to their homes and the village priests, who had been thrown into jail, were released. Slogans appeared on walls and fences proclaiming ‘Down with the Soviet commune11! Down with Soviet power! Down with the robbers and pillagers! Up with the tsar! Bring back the old ways!’ It took several weeks before the authorities regained control, and repression followed. Hundreds of those involved in the uprising were arrested, but resentment and resistance bubbled on for months.
Veryaevo was far from an isolated incident. Peasants all over the Soviet Union rebelled against collectivisation. Many elected to slaughter their12 livestock rather than hand it over to the commune, and, in the first half of 1930, millions of cattle, horses, pigs and sheep were lost – something like a quarter of the nation’s total. Peasants refused to plant crops and often sabotaged the machinery of the hated collective farms, smashing tractors and pouring grit into the diesel fuel. The impact on Soviet agriculture was so great that it didn’t fully recover for 20 years. The immediate result was appalling – widespread famine. Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the few Western journalists courageous enough to travel to the affected areas and report the truth:
It was the big story13. This was in thirty-two, thirty-three, and I went down to the Ukraine and the Caucasus and my pieces appeared in the Manchester Guardian. It was a scene of horror I had never seen before – villages with no one in them, peasants at a railway station being hoofed off. People starving; people swollen. And it was awful, not least because it was manmade.
Between 2 and 414 million people died in the Holodomor, the great famine that swept through Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. At the very time Soviet cinema was turning out films about singing peasants dancing through golden wheat-fields, cases of cannibalism were being reported throughout the republic. Moscow suppressed all information about the famine for 50 years, but the British diplomat Gareth Jones bore witness to the misery and death it inflicted:
This ruin I saw15 in its grim reality. I tramped through villages in the snow of March. I saw children with swollen bellies. I slept in peasants’ huts, and I talked to every peasant I met … I walked alone through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread; we are dying.’ This cry came to me from every part of Russia. In a train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung into the spittoon a crust of bread I had been eating. A peasant fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw orange peel into the spittoon. The peasant again grabbed and devoured it. The Communist subsided.
Shamefully, there was no shortage of Western luminaries willing to swallow Moscow’s propaganda that the garden was rosy and that any suggestions to the contrary were anti-Soviet slander. Jones, whose reports were ridiculed as lies and falsification, was furious that Western visitors to Russia allowed themselves to be taken in by the Soviet PR campaign:
After Stalin, the most hated man in Russia16 is Bernard Shaw. To many of those who can read and have read his descriptions of plentiful food in their starving land, the future is blacker than the present. There is insufficient seed. Many of the peasants are too weak to work the land. In short, the Government’s policy of collectivisation and the peasants’ resistance to it have brought Russia to the worst catastrophe since the famine of 1921 swept away the population of whole districts … Today the famine is everywhere …
As well as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Beatrice Webb and Walter Duranty of the New York Times accepted and propagated the Kremlin’s lies. Gareth Jones was murdered in Mongolia two years later, in circumstances that have never been properly explained.
Even more chillingly, it appears that Stalin deliberately worsened the famine by withholding vital supplies from allegedly anti-Soviet areas in Ukraine. In the centre of Kiev in a prominent position beside St Michael’s Monastery, a display of 6-foot billboards catches the eye of visitors and passers-by. Erected in 2006 during the presidency of the nationalist president Viktor Yushchenko, they bear a text in Ukrainian and English headed ‘Holodomor – Genocide against the Ukrainian people’. Disturbing photographs of skeletal children and corpses lying in rows outside Ukrainian peasant huts are accompanied by a commentary that leaves little doubt about whom the Ukrainian nationalists hold responsible for the famine. Recent scholarship has suggested the accusations against Stalin and his colleagues do have some truth to them. It is, for instance, undeniable that Ukrainian Communists had warned Stalin that famine was looming. Roman Terekhov, the party secretary in Kharkiv, wrote to the Soviet leader to ask for urgent measures to be taken, but Stalin replied:
I see you are a good17 storyteller. You seem to have invented this tale about a famine to try to frighten us. But I tell you, it won’t work!
In 1932, Mikhail Khataevich18, first secretary of the province of Dniepropetrovsk, warned Vyacheslav Molotov, the politburo member in charge of collectivisation, that ‘the minimum needs of the peasantry must be met, or there will be no one left to sow and produce’. Molotov passed his remarks on to the other Bolshevik leaders, but the decision was taken to carry on requisitioning grain even in the worst-affected areas. Demands for concessions to alleviate the hunger of the population, said Molotov, were ‘unBolshevik’: ‘Such a view is incorrect because we cannot put the needs of the state – needs which have been precisely defined in party resolutions – in tenth, or even in second place.’ As a result, the party continued to requisition the peasants’ grain. At one point, 8 million tons of it – enough to feed 5 million people for a year – was sold abroad, while Ukrainians and Russians starved at home.
As well as the decision to continue exporting vitally needed grain, measures were taken to prevent peasants leaving the famine-afflicted areas of Ukraine. Explanations that this was necessary to prevent the spread of disease are not credible. By banning travel, the regime was in effect condemning large numbers of people to death.
At the same time, Moscow took the attitude that those suffering in the famine had somehow brought it on themselves. They were referred to as ‘idlers’, ‘thieves’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’, and Nikita Khrushchev later remarked that ‘for Stalin, the peasants19 were scum’. Some parts of Stalin’s correspondence hint that he deliberately encouraged terror-starvation as a means to punish an unreliable population:
Unless we begin to straighten20 out the situation, we may lose Ukraine. Keep in mind that [enemy] agents in Ukraine are many times stronger than [ours]. The Ukrainian Communist Party, with its 500,000 members – ha, ha, ha! – includes quite a lot – yes, quite a lot! – of rotten elements, conscious and unconscious …
From being a campaign of class hatred against the kulaks, grain requisitioning and the starvation it induced now appeared in Stalin’s mind as a tool to be used against the Ukrainians, a way to break nationalist resistance to rule from Moscow. By the early 1930s, Stalin had begun to doubt the loyalty of the non-Russian nationalities and suspected foreign influences were at work, stirring up anti-Soviet sentiment. His suspicions would grow until they ripened into the bloody purges that would leave their mark on the rest of the decade.