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The Decision to Collectivize Agriculture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Herbert J . Ellison
Herbert J . Ellison*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
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Extract

Few major decisions of Soviet history can be ranked in importance with the decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress of December, 1927, to collectivize agriculture. Not only did it have tremendous consequences for the Soviet peasantry (and ultimately the peasantry of other Communist states), forcing them to leave individual for collective farming in a struggle that cost millions of lives, but it also created a form of agricultural organization which has become an unchallengeable element of Communist organizational orthodoxy. Only Yugoslavia amongst Communist states has dared to reject this orthodoxy, though there is abundant evidence that most of the peasants of Communist countries would reject it if they could.

In view of the immense importance of the decision to collectivize, it is indeed surprising that so little critical examination of its background has been undertaken by non-Soviet scholars, and that the Stalinist rationalization of the decision, doubtful though its validity is, is widely employed in Western scholarly studies.

Type
Articles
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1961 , pp. 189 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1961

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References

1 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (New York, 1939), pp. 291-92.

2 Ibid, p. 292.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., p. 293.

5 Pankratova, A. M., ed., Istorija SSSR (Moscow, 1946), III, 324.Google Scholar

6 Ibid.

7 Stenograficheskij otchet XV s”ezda VKP(b), p. 56. As quoted in Pankratova, op. cit., p. 325. Italics mine.

8 Kim, M. P., ed., Istorija SSSR, Epokha Socializma (Moscow, 1958). See particularly pp. 360–67.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 363.

10 Ibid.

11 Baykov, Alexander, The Development of the Soviet Economic System (New York, 1947), pp. 138-39, 189-93.Google Scholar Dobb, Maurice, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (New York, 1948), pp. 215‒23.Google Scholar

12 Edward Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia. Socialism in One Country: 1924-26, Vol. I, Chap. V (London, 1958).

13 For an example of this approach see Schwartz, Harry, Russia's Soviet Economy (New York, 1954), p. 113 Google Scholar. Schwartz offers three factors which“merged in determining the final outcome of this struggle”: (1) the rising need for grain for more rapid industrialization, (2) the tendency of kulak farming to restrict the grain supply, and (3) the fact that the government had long been committed to the objective of socialized agriculture.

14 Bowden, W., Karpovich, M., and Usher, A. P., An Economic History of Europe since 1750 (New York, 1937), p. 770 Google Scholar. Karpovich was commenting on the adoption of the First • Five-Year Plan as a whole, though in the context of the comment the decision to socialize 1 agriculture was the main object of attention.

15 Schwartz, op. cit., p. 113.

16 Dinerstein, Herbert S., Communism and the Russian Peasant (Glencoe, Illinois, 1955), p. 19.Google Scholar

17 For a variety of forms of this particular emphasis see: Treadgold, Donald W., Twentieth Century Russia (Chicago, 1959), pp. 225–28;Google Scholar Rauch, Georg von, A History of Soviet Russia (New York, 1957), pp. 178–81;Google Scholar Mitrany, David, Marx against the Peasant (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1951), pp. 70–73.Google Scholar

18 Harcave, Sidney, Russia: A History (4th ed.; New York, 1959), pp. 576–79.Google Scholar Dinerstein, op. cit., p. 19; Schwartz, op. cit., pp. 112-13; Georg von Rauch, op. cit., pp. 180–81. Both Dinerstein and Rauch are critical of these concepts but both employ them in their analysis, even if in inverted commas. There are, of course, many other examples which could be given, especially of the borrowing of the work of Soviet specialists by those who are not specialists.

19 The question is examined from several points of view in Lawton, Lancelot, An Economic History of Soviet Russia (London, 1932), II, 355–58.Google Scholar It has also been examined more recently (and more systematically) by Donald W. Treadgold, op. cit., pp. 267-69.

20 Jasny, Naum, The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR (Stanford, 1949), p. 223 Google Scholar. Many of the criticisms of the Soviet economic rationalization are taken from Jasny and Lawton. It is indeed surprising how the more significant conclusions of both of these scholars concerning Soviet economic life in the 1920's have been ignored, even by specialists in Soviet economic development.

21 Ibid., pp. 223-27. An exception amongst government leaders was Bukharin (see below) who did not insist on what he styled the hoarding“fairy tale.”

22 On the migration schemes of the 1920's see Carr, op. cit., pp. 520-29. Plainly the large-scale colonization of the pre-World War I era had been replaced by a colonization program which produced maximum plans and minimum results.

23 The Bolshevik impact upon the co-operative movement was far removed in reality from the promising transformation which Lenin predicted would occur (and later claimed had occurred) with the placing of the “bourgeois” system in a “proletarian” environment. The main historian of co-operation in the early years of Bolshevik power writes: “The Soviet power succeeded in utilizing the co-operative apparatus, but having transformed it into ‘Sovietized’ machinery of state, co-operation was deprived of the spirit of initiative and thus it became a typical bureaucratic mechanism. After it under-went all the changes demanded by the government, it became a ‘living corpse’; the body still remained but the spirit was gone.” Blanc, Elsie T., Co-operative Movement in Russia (New York, 1924), pp. 197–98.Google Scholar

24 Yugoff, A., Economic Trends in Soviet Russia (London, 1930), p. 347.Google Scholar

25 These problems are very interestingly discussed in Jasny, op cit., pp. 213-31.

26 Dobb, op. cit., p. 222.

27 Ibid.

28 Carr, op. cit., pp. 245-46, 260.

29 Dinerstein, op. cit., p. 18.

30 Stalin, V., “O pravoj opasnosti v VKP (b),” Sochinenija (Moscow, 1949), 225.Google Scholar

31 albid.

32 Ibid., p. 228.

33 Ibid., p. 227.

34 Ibid.

35 Rykov's views on the important question of the relative emphasis of light and heavy industry are discussed in Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman, Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party (New York, 1959), pp. 84–85.Google Scholar

36 N. I. Bukharin,“Zametki ekonomista. (K nachalu novogo khozjajstvennogo goda),” Pravda, September 30, 1928. Quotation taken from the translation in Wolfe, B. D., Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost (New York, 1957), p. 302.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., p. 305.

38 Ibid., p. 309.

39 Ibid., p. 303.

40 Ibid., p. 308.

41 Ibid., pp. 308-9.

42 Though his approach is different from my own, this viewpoint is shared by A. Av-torkhanov when he writes of Stalin:“Those whom he attacked as rightists did not differ from Stalin regarding the need of moving toward socialism, or the need of promoting industrialization, or the need of socializing agriculture, but on the manner and means of doing these things.” (Avtorkhanov, op. cit., p. 84.)

43 This view was expounded in detail in Trotskii, Lev, The Real Situation in Russia (New York, 1928).Google Scholar