5 - Regions under pressure

Summary

A sense of isolation continued to pervade the sub-national party structure as it entered the 1930s. Beside the clear evidence of popular enthusiasm for many of the policies of the ‘revolution from above’ and the effect of substantial upward social mobility in stimulating commitment to the regime, there were also immediate and unmistakable signs of popular hostility. The most marked instances of this occurred in the countryside where wide sections of the peasantry vigorously opposed agricultural collectivisation. Armed resistance was mounted in some areas while a more passive type of resistance in the form of destruction of crops, livestock and implements was widespread throughout the country. Once in the collectives, resentment continued to smoulder as the peasants found themselves pushed into new and unfamiliar work settings in which their capacity to exercise initiative independent from the authorities was much more restricted than hitherto. This was perhaps best symbolised by the decision in 1932 not to grant internal passports to the peasants, a move which imposed a substantial barrier to peasant geographical mobility. The use of famine to break peasant resistance can only have deepened the opposition of those who experienced it. In the towns, too, there was an undercurrent of discontent. Many displaced peasants, pushed into the urban slums and forced to submit to the unfamiliar rigours of industrial discipline resented their dramatic change in circumstances and were willing to vent their feelings through strikes and other forms of industrial action; high levels of labour mobility and absenteeism were common.