by Ludo Martens
On October 1, 1927, there were 286,000 peasant families in the kolkhozy. They numbered 1,008,000 on June 1, 1929.
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Davies, op. cit. , p. 109.
During the four months of June through October, the percentage of kolkhoz peasants rose from 4 per cent to 7.5 per cent.
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Viola, op. cit. , p. 27.
During 1929, collectivized agriculture produced 2.2 million tonnes of market wheat, as much as the kulaks did two years previously. Stalin foresaw that during the course of the next year, it would bring 6.6 million tonnes to the cities.
`Now we are able to carry on a determined offensive against the kulaks, to break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class and substitute for their output the output of the collective farms and state farms.'
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Stalin, Problems of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R., p. 163.
A fiery mass movement
Once the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party had called for accelerating the collectization, a spontaneous movement developed, brought to the regions by activists, youth, old soldiers of the Red Army and the local apparatuses of the Party.
Early in October, 7.5 per cent of the peasants had already joined kolkhozy and the movement was growing. The Party, which had given the general direction towards collectivization, became conscious of a mass movement, which it was not organizing:
`The main fact of our social-economic life at the present time ..., is the enormous growth of the collective farm movement.
`Now, the kulaks are being expropriated by the masses of poor and middle peasants themselves, by the masses who are putting solid collectivization into practice.'
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Ibid. , pp. 145, 163.
During the ratification of the First Five-Year Plan, in April, the Party had planned on a collectivization level of 10 per cent by 1932-1933. The kolkhozy and the sovkhozy would then produce 15.5 per cent of the grain. That would suffice to oust the kulaks.
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Davies, op. cit. , p. 112.
But in June, the Party Secretary in North Caucasus, Andreev, affirmed that already 11.8 per cent of families had entered kolkhozy and that a number of 22 per cent could be reached by the end of 1929.
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Ibid. , p. 121.
On January 1, 1930, 18.1 per cent of the peasant families were members of a kolkhoz. A month later, they accounted for 31.7 per cent.
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Ibid.
`Collectivization quickly assumed a dynamic of its own, achieved largely as a result of the initiative of rural cadres. The center was in peril of losing control of the campaign'.
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Viola, op. cit. , p. 91.
The objectives set by the Central Committee in its January 5, 1930 resolution were strongly `corrected' in the upward direction by regional committees. The district committees did the same and set a breath-taking pace. In January 1930, the regions of Ural, Lower Volga and Middle Volga already registered collectivization figures between 39 and 56 per cent. Several regions adopted a plan for complete collectivization within one year, some within a few months.
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Ibid. , pp. 93--94.
A Soviet commentator wrote: `If the centre intended to include 15 per cent of households, the region raised the plan to 25 per cent, the okrug to 40 per cent and the district posed itself the task of reaching 60 per cent'.
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Davies, op. cit. , p. 218.
(The okrug was an administrative entity that disappeared in 1930. There were, at the beginning of that year, 13 regions divided into 207 okrugs, subdivided into 2,811 districts and 71,870 village Soviets.)
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Ibid. , p. xx.
The war against the kulak
This frenetic race towards collectivization was accompanied by a `dekulakization' movement: kulaks were expropriated, sometimes exiled. What was happening was a new step in the fierce battle between poor peasants and rich peasants. For centuries, the poor had been systematically beaten and crushed when, out of sheer desperation, they dared revolt and rebel. But this time, for the first time, the legal force of the State was on their side. A student working in a kolkhoz in 1930 told the U.S. citizen Hindus:
`This was war, and is war. The koolak had to be got out of the way as completely as an enemy at the front. He is the enemy at the front. He is the enemy of the kolkhoz.'
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Ibid. , p. 173.
Preobrazhensky, who had upheld Trotsky to the hilt, now enthusiastically supported the battle for collectivization:
`The working masses in the countryside have been exploited for centuries. Now, after a chain of bloody defeats beginning with the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, their powerful movement for the first time in human history has a chance of victory.'
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Ibid. , p. 274.
It should be said that the radicalism in the countryside was also stimulated by the general mobilization and agitation in the country undergoing industrialization.
The essential rфle of the most oppressed masses
Numerous anti-Communist books tell us that the collectivization was `imposed' by the leadership of the Party and by Stalin and implemented with terror. This is a lie. The essential impulse during the violent episodes of collectivization came from the most oppressed of the peasant masses. A peasant from the Black-Earth region declared:
`I have lived my whole life among the batraks (agricultural workers). The October revolution gave me land, I got credit from year to year, I got a poor horse, I can't work the land, my children are ragged and hungry, I simply can't manage to improve my farm in spite of the help of the Soviet authorities. I think there's only one way out: join a tractor column, back it up and get it going.'
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Ibid. , p. 160.
Lynne Viola wrote:
`Although centrally initiated and endorsed, collectivization became, to a great extent, a series of ad hoc policy responses to the unbridled initiatives of regional and district rural party and government organs. Collectivization and collective farming were shaped less by Stalin and the central authorities than by the undisciplined and irresponsible activity of rural officials, the experimentation of collective farm leaders left to fend for themselves, and the realities of a backward countryside.'
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Viola, op. cit. , pp. 215--216.
Viola correctly emphasizes the base's internal dynamic. But her interpretation of the facts is one-sided. She misses the mass line consistently followed by Stalin and the Bolshevik Party. The Party set the general direction, and, on this basis, the base and the intermediate cadres were allowed to experiment. The results from the base would then serve for the elaboration of new directives, corrections and rectifications.
Viola continued:
`The state ruled by circular, it ruled by decree, but it had neither the organizational infrastructure nor the manpower to enforce its voice or to ensure correct implementation of its policy in the administration of the countryside .... The roots of the Stalin system in the countryside do not lie in the expansion of state controls but in the very absence of such controls and of an orderly system of administration, which, in turn, resulted as the primary instrument of rule in the countryside.'
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Ibid. , p. 216.
This conclusion, drawn from a careful observation of the real progress of collectivization, requires two comments.
The thesis of `Communist totalitarianism' exercised by an `omnipresent Party bureaucracy' has no real bearing with the actual Soviet power under Stalin. It is a slogan showing the bourgeoisie's hatred of real socialism. In 1929--1933, the Soviet State did not have the technical means, the required qualified personnel, nor the sufficient Communist leadership to direct collectivization in a planned and orderly manner: to describe it as an all-powerful and totalitarian State is absurd.
In the countryside, the essential urge for collectivization came from the most oppressed peasants. The Party prepared and initiated
the collectivization, and Communists from the cities gave it leadership, but this gigantic upheaval of peasant habits and traditions could not have succeeded if the poorest peasants had not been convinced of its necessity. Viola's judgment according to which `repression became the principal instrument of power' does not correspond to reality. The primary instrument was mobilization, consciousness raising, education and organization of the masses of peasants. This constructive work, of course, required `repression', i.e. it took place and could not have taken place except through bitter class struggle against the men and the habits of the old rйgime.
Be they fascists or Trotskyists, all anti-Communists affirm that Stalin was the representative of an all-powerful bureaucracy that suffocated the base. This is the opposite of the truth. To apply its revolutionary line, the Bolshevik leadership often called on the revolutionary forces at the base to short-circuit parts of the bureaucratic apparatus.
`The revolution was not implemented through regular administrative channels; instead the state appealed directly to the party rank and file and key sectors of the working class in order to circumvent rural officialdom. The mass recruitments of workers and other urban cadres and the circumvention of the bureaucracy served as a breakthrough policy in order to lay the foundations of a new system.'
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Ibid. , p. 215.
The organizational line on collectivization
How did Stalin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party react to the spontaneous and violent collectivization and `dekulakization' tide?
They basically tried to lead, discipline and rectify the existing movement, both politically and practically.
The Party leadership did everything in its power to ensure that the great collectivization revolution could take place in optimal conditions and at the least cost. But it could not prevent deep antagonisms from bursting or `blowing up', given the countryside's backward state.
The Party apparatus in the countryside
To understand the Bolshevik Party's line during the collectivization, it is important to keep in mind that on the eve of 1930, the State and Party apparatus in the countryside was extremely weak --- the exact opposite of the `terrible totalitarian machine' imagined by anti-Communists. The weakness of the Communist apparatus was one of the conditions that allowed the kulaks to throw all their forces into a vicious battle against the new society.
On January 1, 1930, there were 339,000 Communists among a rural population of about 120 million people! Twenty-eight Communists for a region of 10,000 inhabitants.
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Ibid. , p. 29.
Party cells only existed in 23,458 of 70,849 village Soviets and, according to the Central Volga Regional Secretary, Khataevich, some village Soviets were `a direct agency of the kulaks'.
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Davies, op. cit. , p. 226.
The old kulaks and the old Tsarist civil servants, who better understood how public life took place, had done their best to infiltrate the Party. The Party nucleus was composed of young peasants who had fought in the Red Army during the Civil War. This political experience had fixed their way of seeing and acting. They had the habit of commanding and hardly knew what political education and mobilization meant.
`The rural administrative structure was burdensome, the line of command confused, and the demarcation of responsibility and function blurred and poorly defined. Consequently, rural policy implementation often tended either to the extreme of inertia or, as in the civil war days, to campaign-style polities.'
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Viola, op. cit. , p. 29.
It was with this apparatus, which often sabotaged or distorted the instructions of the Central Committee, that the battle against the kulaks and the old society had to take place. Kaganovich pointed out that `if we formulate it sharply and strongly, in essence we have to create a party organization in the countryside, capable of managing the great movement for collectivization'.
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Davies, op. cit. , pp. 225--226.
Extraordinary organizational measures
Faced with the base's radicalism, with a violent wave of anarchistic collectivization, the Party leadership first tried to get a firm grasp of what exactly was happening.
Given the weaknesses and the untrustworthiness of the Party apparatus in the countryside, the Central Committee took several extraordinary organizational measures.
First at the central level.
Starting mid-February 1930, three members of the Central Committee, Ordzhonikidze, Kaganovich and Yakovlev, were sent to the countryside to conduct inquiries.
Then, three important national assemblies were called, under the leadership of the Central Committee, to focus the accumulated experience. The February 11 assembly dealt with problems of collectivization in regions with national minorities. The February 21 assembly dealt with regions with a deficit of wheat. Finally, the February 24 assembly analyzed the errors and excesses that took place during collectivization.
Then, at the base level, in the countryside.
Two hundred and fifty thousand Communists were mobilized in the cities to go to the countryside and help out with collectivization.
These militants worked under the leadership of the `headquarters' of collectivization, specially created at the okrug and district levels. The `headquarters' were in turn advised by officials sent by the Regional Committee or the Central Committee.
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Ibid. , p. 205.
For example, in the Tambov okrug, militants would participate in conferences and short courses at the okrug level, then at the district level, before entering the field. According to their instructions, militants had to follow `methods of mass work': first convince local activists, village Soviets and meetings of poor peasants, then small mixed groups of poor and middle peasants and, finally, organize a general meeting of the village, excluding, of course, the kulaks. A firm warning was given that `administrative compulsion must not be used to get the middle peasants to join the kolhoz'.
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Ibid. , p. 206.
In the same Tambov okrug, during the winter of 1929--30, conferences and courses lasting from 2 to 10 days were organized for 10,000 peasants, kolkhozian women, poor peasants and Presidents of Soviets.
During the first few weeks of 1930, Ukraine organized 3,977 short courses for 275,000 peasants. In the fall of 1929, thirty thousand activists were trained on Sundays, during their time off, by the Red Army, which took on another contingent of 100,000 people during the first months of 1930. Furthermore, the Red Army trained a large number of tractor drivers, agricultural specialists and cinema and radio operators.
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Ibid. , pp. 206--207.
Most of the people coming from the towns worked for a few months in the countryside. Hence, in February 1930, the mobilization of 7,200 urban Soviet members was decreed, to work at least one year in the countryside. But men in the Red Army and industrial workers were permanently transferred to the kolkhozes.
It was in November 1929 that the most famous campaign, the `25,000', was launched.
The 25,000
The Central Committee called on 25,000 experienced industrial workers from the large factories to go to the countryside and to help out with collectivization. More than 70,000 presented themselves and 28,000 were selected: political militants, youth who had fought in the Civil War, Party and Komsomol members.
These workers were conscious of the leading rфle of the working class in the socialist transformations in the countryside. Viola writes:
`(They) looked to the Stalin revolution for the final victory of socialism after years of war, hardship, and deprivation .... They saw the revolution as a solution to backwardness, seemingly endemic food shortages, and capitalist encirclement.'
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Viola, op. cit. , p. 211.
Before leaving, it was explained to them that they were the eyes and the ears of the Central Committee: thanks to their physical presence on the front lines, the leadership hoped to acquire a mater
ialist understanding of the upheavals in the countryside and the problems of collectivization. They were also told to discuss with the peasants their organizational experience, acquired as industrial workers, since the old tradition of individual work constituted a serious handicap for the collective use of the land. Finally, they were told that they would have to judge the Communist quality of the Party functionaries and, if necessary, purge the Party of foreign and undesirable elements.