I’ll never forget the little village deep in the forest where we were billeted or the atmosphere of tragedy and anxiety that permeated every word spoken, weighed upon the women drawing water at the well, and made even the children unusually reticent.
(Andrei Sakharov, a Russian physicist who spent some of the war in the countryside)1
When the young physicist (and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) Andrei Sakharov graduated from university in the autumn of 1942 his first war-work assignment was to go out into the countryside to cut wood. In the village where he stayed there were only old women and children left and the atmosphere was polluted by a ‘foreboding that things would get even worse before they got better … the horror of war was always uppermost in people’s minds’.2 The weakest link in the Soviet wartime edifice was undoubtedly agriculture. The struggles of Soviet farmers make the problems faced by farmers in the other major combatant countries pale in comparison. With the nation’s best agricultural land lost to the Germans until 1943, it was not so much a question of carefully balancing production to favour bread grains and maintain a minimum level of fats, fodder and meat, as a desperate struggle to cultivate as much of anything as possible. Throughout the war the Soviet Union struggled to feed its vast army, let alone all its citizens. The battle to produce food in the Soviet Union extracted every ounce of food from the peasantry while reducing both them and the land to a state of exhaustion.
The Soviet Union entered the war with its agricultural sector in a wretched state of disrepair. The politics of the preceding decades had caused endless disruption. The requisitioning of food, men and horses during both the First World War and the ensuing civil war led to hardship in the countryside. This was matched by food shortages in the towns.3 Lenin’s introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 produced a short period of relative recovery. But then, in 1926, in an attempt to release revenue for industry, the government lowered agricultural prices. The peasants reacted by holding back their food from the cities. Rationing, which had only been discontinued in 1921, had to be reintroduced. In the end rationing was in force for more than half the twenty-five years preceding the Second World War.4
Stalin was determined to eradicate market forces from the food economy and in 1929 he set about modernizing the agricultural sector in order to lay the foundation for his planned rejuvenation of Soviet industry.5 He even invited Thomas Campbell, a pioneer of large-scale mechanized wheat farming in the United States, to come to the Soviet Union to give advice on the introduction of new techniques.6 But Stalin’s programme of collectivization was no neutral programme of modernization. It was a scheme designed to impose the deadly will of the state upon the peasantry. The ownership of land as private property was abolished. The kulaks, the so-called rich peasantry, whose wealth often consisted only of one or two cows, were rounded up and deported to the gulags. Between 4 and 5 million were murdered.7 The rest of the peasantry were coerced into working for the new Party-owned farms, the kolkhozy, which, by consolidating peasant landholdings, were supposed to make farming more efficient.
A young Cherkessian peasant who fled the Soviet Union in 1945 expressed the views of the majority of the Soviet peasantry when he denounced collectivization as a ‘slave system’. The peasants were forced to work for the collective farms for a certain number of days per year. In return they were supposed to be paid sufficient food to feed themselves and their families. However, before the collective farm could distribute food to its workers it had to deliver a quota of food to the state. These quotas were frequently set so high that the farms had virtually nothing left to feed their workers. The Cherkessian recalled that, ‘There were years when you worked a whole year and got nothing, everything went to the state … They took the butter … the eggs … the meat … we had to give wool … the food products from [our private] garden … Collective farmers ate worse than workers … the collective farmer worked from dawn to dusk and got nothing.’8 His family survived on one potato and a teaspoon of corn mush a day. ‘Life was horrible, life held on by a bare thread.’9 A Ukrainian from Chernigov explained that the only way to survive was for the peasantry to cultivate the tiny plots of land which they were allowed to keep for their own use. But because ‘socialist work comes first, then your private work’ it was very difficult for the members of the collective to find the time to work on the private plots of land and ‘in actuality, what will often happen is that his children or some grandmother in the family will work in his private lot’.10
In the Ukraine, where resistance to collectivization had been particularly strong, the state ruthlessly requisitioned food to the point where the villages were stripped of food, seed grain and fodder. With nothing left to feed them, the peasants slaughtered their livestock. But once the animals had been eaten there was nothing left for the people to eat either and famine spread.11 In the Ukraine as many as 7 million peasants died of starvation. One survivor recalled how, in 1933, ‘You could go into a village and see the corn standing high in the fields yet there would not be a soul in the entire village. They had planted the corn in the spring, and died during the summer, so that the corn grew untended.’12
The end result of collectivization was to relocate hunger to the villages rather than the towns and cities.13 While the peasants suffered, the food situation gradually improved in the urban areas. By 1936 the government was able to abolish rationing. Emigrants interviewed by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System in the 1950s routinely recalled that in the towns clothing was more of a problem than food just before the outbreak of war. In the countryside collectivization did introduce new and better strains of wheat and the collective farms were mechanized, but the peasants were repressed, disillusioned and demotivated. They had no incentive to work hard on the state farms given that they were unlikely to receive a fair share of the harvest. In terms of productivity the Soviet agricultural sector continued to lag behind industry, and it was unable to provide a solid foundation upon which to build an economy, let alone to fight a war.14
When the German attack on Russia was announced, a disgruntled peasant in Archangel province was reported to have remarked, ‘Our government fed the Germans for two years, it would have been better to have saved food for our army and for the people, but now all of us expect hunger.’15 He was right in thinking that the Soviet people were going to go hungry. The country was living so close to its food margins that almost no surplus existed from which to create food reserves.16 The Soviet Union lost the central black soil area, the Ukraine, parts of the Crimea and the Caucasus to German occupation. The Germans came into possession of just under half the Soviet Union’s crop regions and land for beef and dairy cattle, more than half the Union’s pigs and virtually all the sugar-producing land.17 Grain and sugar beet now had to be grown in the less fertile north and east. Great efforts succeeded in expanding the cultivated area but yields were driven down by lack of technical expertise and the unsuitable climate in these areas, let alone all the usual wartime difficulties of insufficient manpower, lack of machines (or fuel to run them) and draught animals, as well as shortages of fertilizer and seed.18
The redirection of all energies towards maintaining the fighting at the front dealt agriculture a fundamental blow.19 Nineteen million able-bodied peasants were called up, more than half of the male rural workforce. The tractor drivers were the first to go, leaving the collective farms without workers trained to use the machinery.20 In 1942 the peasants were reduced to sowing and harvesting 79 per cent of the grain by hand.21 It was not uncommon for the peasant women to resort to yoking themselves to the plough in place of draught animals. Almost the entire burden of providing food for the Soviet Union fell on women, children, the elderly and the infirm. By 1945 women made up 92 per cent of the agricultural workforce.22 Victor Kravchenko and his fellow army recruits, walking across snowbound Tataria as they were evacuated east in November 1941, were ‘amazed to see great fields of wheat, unharvested, under the snow and now and then even sheaves of harvested grain. Later a peasant gave us the explanation: “with all able-bodied men taken for the army and horses commandeered for the fronts, only women, children and cows” remained to do the harvesting and immense quantities of produce could not be carried off.’23
The collective farms were pushed into a vicious cycle of over-extraction, falling yields and demotivation. Decline could possibly have been reversed if the collective farms had been dismantled and the newly independent peasants motivated to increase production by high prices for agricultural produce. But this would have required large capital investment to inject much-needed equipment and livestock into the countryside. The Soviet Union in 1941 did not have the economic wherewithal to do this. Industry was overwhelmed and stretched to its limit simply trying to produce enough armaments to keep the men at the front fighting. There was absolutely no question of producing tractors or agricultural equipment. Besides, the benefits would have been felt only in the long term.
Collectivization served the government well in that it gave it a level of control over the countryside which the German occupiers across the front line would have envied. While the peasants on the collectives in the Ukraine were inadequately supervised and often able to evade and deceive their German masters, in the Soviet Union farms were treated as part of the front line. The peasants’ working day was lengthened and the number of workdays they were obliged to contribute to the collective increased. Punishments for absenteeism were as harsh as they were for soldiers and industrial workers. Through the collectives the government exercised a level of control over the harvest that no other combatant government was able to achieve. Compared to the First World War, when the Russian government had to extract food from millions of landlords and small peasant producers and the food supply to the towns had dried up, the Soviets now had 200,000 collective and state farms, and an efficient working system in place for collecting the farm produce.24 The procurements extracted during the war were ruthless. The requisition quota for each farm was calculated according to a theoretical biological yield rather than the actual yield. Before the war this resulted in unfair demands, during the war it became almost absurd. In Kazakhstan in 1940 the difference between the biological and actual yields was 33 per cent but by 1942 and 1943 it had risen to 100 per cent.25 Any protest was regarded as an attempt to ‘sabotage grain procurements’ and carried the risk of imprisonment or hard labour.26
When official procurements did not yield enough food, the government would return with orders for the collectives to contribute to the Defence Fund or the Red Army Fund. Milk was requisitioned for the Fund for the Health of the Defenders of the Motherland. In this way yet more work and food were squeezed out of the collective farmers. Despite declining agricultural yields the percentage of the collective grain harvest allocated to the military increased. By 1942 the military were consuming 24 per cent of the total grain harvest, as opposed to 9 per cent in 1940. Thus the military were fed at the expense of both the peasantry and the urban population, who received a diminished share of a smaller harvest.27 If the peasants on the Soviet side of the eastern front were spared the murderous attentions of the Einsatzgruppen, the Red Army, like the Wehrmacht, also organized its own independent system of requisitioning, above and beyond the official quotas. In 1942 this was officially acknowledged when each unit was allocated 30 kilometres behind the front line from which they were allowed to requisition food directly.28 When Lev Mischenko’s volunteer regiment was sent into the fighting in defence of Moscow he was told to supply his regiment directly from the collective farms near the front, but the farmers had virtually nothing to give. They had no meat or milk and made ‘bread’ from potatoes rather than grain. ‘Everything had been delivered to the state. It was a stark contrast to all the propaganda we had been fed about happy peasants on flourishing collective farms.’29 He simply took whatever he could find to feed the soldiers, although his conscience troubled him.
In most countries the rural areas were better off in wartime than the urban areas. The Soviet Union was an exception. The Soviet farms were stripped of food; often the collectives had absolutely nothing to distribute to their workers, and even seed stock was taken, endangering the sowing of a new crop for the next year.30 The principle introduced by collectivization, that the brunt of hunger should be borne by the countryside, was maintained throughout the war.
Soviet farms were simply unable to grow enough food. Figures citing the number of tons of a particular crop produced often convey little information about the amounts of food actually available, but a comparison of the Soviet production figures for 1940 and 1942 clearly demonstrates the immensity of the food crisis the Soviet Union faced. From a grain harvest of 95.6 million tons in 1940 the figure fell to 26.7 million in 1942. Potatoes fell from 76.1 million to 23.8 million tons, sugar beet from 18 million to 2.2 million tons, meats and fats from 4.7 million to 1.8 million tons.31 The number of people entitled to rations was 61 million, rising to over 80 million in 1945.32 Translated into the amount of food available for ordinary people these figures meant that in 1942 the official food ration could provide only about half the amount of food that had been available to Soviets in 1940 when the population was already heavily dependent on bread and potatoes and only 28 per cent of workers had felt that the food supply was adequate.33
In 1940 only 3 per cent of the peasantry had felt that the food supply was adequate.34 By 1942 if they had attempted to live solely on the food they received in payment from the collective farms they would certainly have starved to death. Fortunately, Soviet peasants were accustomed to looking starvation in the face and had had years of experience of living on the edge. They knew which wild grasses were edible and how to make acorns palatable. In the forests of northern Russia the farm families supplemented their protein and vitamin intake by collecting berries, edible mushrooms and nuts, while they fed their cattle ‘twig fodder’, and acorns to their pigs.35 They also stole from the collectives. A Ukrainian student who worked on a kolkhoz near Novosibirsk recalled that sometimes a peasant would ‘go out into the field at night with a pair of scissors and snip off the ears of corn’. This was an extremely dangerous activity. ‘When this was discovered, the man who did this would get eight or ten years in jail, whether he had stolen one ear or a hundred.’36 It was even an offence to scavenge the ears of wheat missed during the harvest. Bread became a luxury and potatoes, grown in their private plots, became the peasants’ staple food. They fried and boiled potatoes and made potato cakes and potato soup. During the miserable spring of 1943 the family of Andrei Sakharov’s future wife used ‘the rather complicated “technology”’ developed by generations of starving peasants to transform ‘frozen, half-rotten’ potatoes into edible pancakes.37 If they were lucky they ate some salted cucumber or pickled cabbage and drank a little milk with their potatoes.38
If the peasants’ private plots kept them alive, they were also an important source of nutrition for the rest of the population. Throughout the war the government allowed the collective farm markets to revive, and here the peasants sold their surplus produce. In many towns and cities the farm markets were the only source of fresh vegetables and dairy products.39 J. A. Alexander, an Australian diplomat in Russia during the war, described the ‘dilapidated and dirty’ market in Moscow where ‘rows of peasants in greasy cotton padded jackets’ ladled out the most repulsive-looking milk from grubby cans.40 Although half of all food sales made during the war occurred at these markets, the overall drop in food availability meant that the quantity of food on offer declined considerably. Often thousands of potential buyers would be disappointed to find only a couple of farmers with a few sacks of potatoes.41
Although Soviet industry teetered on the brink of collapse in 1941–42, the industrial system eventually adapted and found inventive ways of overcoming problems. Agriculture also went to the brink of collapse, but it remained there. While the rest of the economy showed signs of recovery, in 1943 Soviet agriculture fell further into crisis and the grain harvest dropped again by a further 6 million tons.42 The recapture of German-occupied territory made matters worse by increasing the number of mouths to feed without the compensation of regaining productive farmland. The Germans had scorched the earth as they retreated and as the Soviets retook the Ukraine they found ‘no evidence of the existence of any mechanical farm machinery, work animals, or dairy herds’.43
If the communist government had been more enlightened in its treatment of the peasantry and in its approach to agriculture in the 1930s it might have created a healthier agricultural sector which would have been better equipped to feed the population in wartime. However, it was the loss of the most fertile agricultural regions to the Germans that made the agricultural crisis so acute. Under these circumstances, collectivization was probably what saved the Soviet Union from spiralling into an unsustainable food crisis. Collectivization enabled the government to extract virtually every crumb of food from the farms and to just about feed its army and industrial workers, although they did still go very hungry. If the peasants had been able to retreat into self-sufficiency the situation in the Soviet Union’s cities would surely have become untenable. Nevertheless, agriculture remained a dangerously weak area of the Soviet economy throughout the entire war, and it was fortunate that the climate remained fairly favourable during the period 1941 to 1945. If the drought that hit the Soviet Union in 1946 had occurred a few years earlier it seems very likely that the malnourished and demotivated peasants would have toppled over the edge into famine, with a devastating impact on the Soviet war effort.44