Collectivization

Collectivization, the merger of private plots of land into collective farms in Communist regimes. The process began in earnest in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1929 and was completed within five years. Later, China and Cambodia turned collective farms into communes that attempted, though only briefly, to supersede the family as well as private farming.

There were three chief attractions of collectivization for Communist regimes. The first was efficiency: the prospect of applying industrial methods to farming, thus liberating spare agricultural labour to work in new factories. The second was related to industrialization: it was the key to what the Communist theorist Yevgeny Preobrazhensky called “primitive socialist accumulation”, that is, the transfer of resources from agriculture to the drive for industrialization. The third was political: assuring domination over the peasantry, who constituted the majority of the population.

The 15th Party Congress in December 1927 launched collectivization as official Bolshevik policy, but without any mention of coercion. A grain supply crisis, however, erupted almost immediately and Joseph Stalin, who was in the process of consolidating his control of the Communist Party, then exploited this to argue that it revealed the “natural” political inclinations of the peasants, or at any rate the rich ones (kulaks). For over a year the party was in crisis, manipulated by Stalin to defeat his opponents. He claimed that the majority of poor and middle peasants were enthusiastic, attracted by the promises of tractors, combine harvesters, electricity, and other features of modern agriculture. Furthermore, the state needed to prevent the kulaks from holding the regime to ransom.

In April 1929 the 16th Party Congress launched the country on industrialization under the First Five-Year Plan. As Stalin’s 50th birthday in December approached, thousands of volunteers, mostly young factory workers, fanned out across the country, fomenting class struggle. No-one could specify exactly who kulaks were—conditions varied from one region to another—but quotas were set for each region. The leadership in Moscow demanded that they and their associates be unmasked, dispossessed, and deported to Siberia or the Far North or to prison camps.

This provoked an orgy of violence for the next three years. Peasants killed their animals rather than lose them to the collectives. Nomadic tribes were forced to settle on fixed areas of land without any preparation and consequently starved, especially in Kazakhstan. The Red Army put down peasant uprisings. It had to collect grain to feed the growing cities and to maintain exports, so as to pay for the import of vital machinery and technology. Shortfalls in one region led to increased targets for others. Starvation came to the countryside. There were even reports of cannibalism in Ukraine, the richest agricultural region in the USSR. The historian Robert Conquest estimated that 14.5 million people died as a result of the policy of “dekulakization” and the ensuing famine, but exact figures remain uncertain. Official statistics for livestock losses are more reliable. Between 1929 and 1934 almost 150 million animals were slaughtered. The Communist regime came close to collapse, but it survived.

Afterwards Communist regimes accepted the Stalinist orthodoxy that collectivization was an essential stage on the road to socialism, though some have since argued that it was more appropriate for grain than for rice cultivation. Always it was imposed by force, though China at least studied the Soviet experience so as to reduce the disruption. Following Stalin’s death in 1953 Poland decollectivized after 1956, and other regimes in Eastern Europe experimented with ways to overcome its grosser irrationalities. China dissolved its communes in the early 1980s, thereby generating the stimulus that led to the country’s extraordinary growth over the next 20 years. In Russia, however, those left on the land were reluctant to take it back. This was Stalin’s “achievement”. The Russian parliament, the Duma, finally passed a law allowing private ownership of land in 2002.