by Ludo Martens
It was during the month of January 1930 that the 25,000 arrived on the front line of collectivization. The detailed analysis of their activities and of the rфle that they played can give a realistic idea of the collectivization, that great revolutionary class struggle. These workers maintained regular correspondence with their factories and their unions; these letters give a precise idea of what was happening in the villages.
The 25,000 against the bureaucracy
Upon arrival, the 25,000 immediately had to fight against the bureaucracy of the local apparatus and against the excesses committed during the collectivization.
Viola wrote:
`Regardless of their position, the 25,000ers were unanimous in their criticism of district-level organs participating in collectivization .... The workers claimed that it was the district organs which were responsible for the race for percentages in collectivization.'
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Ibid. , p. 103.
Zakharov, one of the 25,000, wrote that no preparatory work had been done among the peasants. Consequently, they were not prepared for collectivization.
.
Ibid.
Many complained of the illegal acts and of the brutality of rural cadres. Makovskaya attacked `the bureaucratic attitude of the cadres towards the peasants', and she said that the functionaries spoke of collectivization `with revolver in hand'.
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Ibid. , p. 109.
Baryshev affirmed that a great number of middle peasants had been `dekulakized'. Naumov allied himself with the peasants attacking the Party cadres who `appropriated for themselves the goods confiscated from the kulaks'. Viola concluded that the 25,000ers `viewed rural officials as crude, undisciplined, often corrupt, and, in not a few cases, as agents or representatives of socially dangerous class aliens'.
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Ibid. , p. 141.
By opposing the bureaucrats and their excesses, they succeeded in winning the confidence of the peasant masses.
.
Ibid. , p. 135.
These details are important, since these workers can be considered to have been direct envoys from Stalin. It was precisely the `Stalinists' who fought bureaucracy and excesses most consistently and who defended a correct line for collectivization.
The 25,000 against the kulaks
Next, the 25,000 played a leading rфle in the struggle against the kulaks.
They first confronted the terrible army of rumors and defamations, called `kulak agit-prop'. The illiterate peasant masses, living in barbaric conditions, subject to the influence of the pops (Orthodox priests), could easily be manipulated. The Pop claimed that the Reign of the Anti-Christ had come. The Kulak added that those who entered the kolkhoz made a pact with the Anti-Christ.
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Ibid. , p. 154.
Among the 25,000, many were attacked and beaten. Several dozen were murdered, shot or finished off with an axe by the kulaks.
The 25,000 and the organization of agricultural production
But the essential contribution of the 25,000 in the countryside was the introduction of a completely new system of production management, way of life and style of work.
The poor peasants, on the frontline for collectivization, did not have the slightest idea about the organization of collective production. They hated their exploitation and, for that reason, were solid allies of the working class. But as individual producers, they could not create a new mode of production: this is one of the reasons that the dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary. The dictatorship of the proletariat expressed itself through the ideological and organizational leadership of the working class and of the Communist Party over the poor and middle peasants.
The workers introduced regular work days, with morning roll call. They invented systems of payment by piecework and wage levels. Everywhere, they had to introduce order and discipline. Often, a kolkhoz did not even know its borders. There was no inventory of machinery, tools or spare parts. Machines were not maintained, there were no stables, nor fodder reserves. The workers introduced production conferences where the kolkhozians exchanged practical knowledge, they organized Socialist Competition between different brigades, and they set up workers' tribunals where violations of rules and negligence were judged.
The 25,000 workers were also the living link between the proletariat and the kolkhozian peasantry. At the request of `their' worker, large factories would send agricultural equipment, spare parts, generators, books, newspapers and other items impossible to find in the countryside. Worker brigades came from the city to do certain technical or reparatory tasks or to help with the harvest.
The worker also became schoolmaster. He taught technical knowledge. Often, he had to accomplish accounting tasks while training, on the job, new accountants. He gave elementary political and agricultural courses. Sometimes he looked after literacy campaigns.
The contribution of the 25,000 to collectivization was enormous. During the twenties, `Poverty, illiteracy and a chronic predisposition to periodic famine characterized much of the rural landscape'.
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Ibid. , p. 172.
The 25,000 helped elaborate the organizational structures of socialist agriculture for the next quarter century to come. `(A) new system of agricultural production was indeed established, and this, although not without its problems, did end the periodic crises which characterized earlier market relations between the cities and the countryside'.
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Ibid. , p. 216.
The political direction of collectivization
At the same time as these organizational measures, the Central Committee elaborated political measures and directives to give direction to the collectivization.
It is first important to note that vivid and prolonged discussions took place within the Party about the speed and scale of collectivization.
In October 1929, the Khoper okrug in the Lower Volta Region, which had registered 2.2 per cent of collectivized families in June, had already reached 55 per cent. A Kolkhoztsentr (the Union of kolkhozy) commission, which was suspicious of the speed and scale of the collectivization, was sent to conduct an enquiry. Baranov, its vice-president, declared:
`The local authorities are operating a system of shock-work and a campaign approach. All the work of setting up kolkhozy is carried out under the slogan `The more the better'. The directives of the okrug are sometimes twisted into the slogan `Those who do not join the kolkhoz are enemies of Soviet power'. There has been no extensive activity among the masses .... In some cases sweeping promises of tractors and loans were made --- `You'll get everything --- join the kolkhoz'.'
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Davies, op. cit. , pp. 152--153.
On the other hand, in Pravda, Sheboldaev, the Party Secretary for the Lower Volta Region, defended the rapid expansion of the Khoper collectivization. He `hailed the ``tremendous uplift and enthusiasm'' of collective ploughing, and declared that only 5 to 10 per cent opposed collectivization', which had become `a big mass movement, going far beyond the framework of our notions of work on collectivization'.
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Ibid. , p. 154.
Contradictory opinions existed in all units, included in this Khoper vanguard unit. On November 2, 1929, the newspaper Krasnyi Khoper reported with enthusiasm the collective ploughing and the formation of new kolkhozy. But in the same issue, a article warned against hurried collectivization and the use of threats to push poor peasants into the kolkhozy. Another article affirmed that in certain areas, kulaks had pushed an entire village into the kolkhoz to discredit collectivization.
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Ibid. , p. 155.
During the November 1929 Central Committee Plenum, Sheboldaev defended the Khoper experience with its `horse columns'. Given the absence of tractors, `simple unification and aggregation of farms would increase labor productivity'. He declared that the Khoper collectivization was `a spontaneous movement of the masses of poor and middle peasants' and that only 10 to 12 per cent voted against.
`(T)he party cannot take the attitude of `restraining' this movement. This would be wrong from a political and an economic point of view. The party must do everything possible to put itself at the head of this movement and lead it into organised channels. At present this mass movement has undoubtedly overwhelmed the local authorities, and hence there is a danger that it will be discredited.'
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Ibid. , pp. 161--162.
Sheboldaev affirmed that 25 per cent of the families were already collectivized and that towards the end of 1930 or mid-1931, collectivization would essentially be complete.
.
Ibid.
Kossior, who spoke at the Plenum about the situation in Ukraine, reported that in dozens of villages, collectivization was `blown up and artificially created; the population did not participate in it and knew nothing about it'. But ` ``the very many dark sides'' (could not) block from view the general picture of collectivization as a whole'.
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Ibid. , p. 165.
It is therefore clear that many contradictory opinions were expressed within the Party, at the time that the movement for collectivization was started up in the countryside. Revolutionaries had the duty to find and protect the wish of the most oppressed masses to get rid of their age-old political, cultural and technical backwardness. The masses had to be encouraged to advance in the struggle, the only method to weaken and destroy the deeply rooted social and economic relations. Right opportunism did everything it possibly could to slow down this difficult and contradictory consciousness-raising. Nevertheless, it was also possible to push collectivization too fast, by rejecting in practice all the Party's principles. This tendency not only included leftism, which came from habits picked up during the Civil War --- when it was normal to `command' the Revolution --- but also bureaucracy, which wanted to please the leadership with `great achievements'; in addition the exaggerations could also come from the counter-revolution, which wanted to compromise collectivization by pushing it to the absurd.
The November 1929 resolution
The Central Committee Resolution of November 17, 1929, officially launching the collectivization, summarized discussions within the Party.
It began by noting that the number of peasant families in the kolkhozy rose from 445,000 in 1927--1928 to 1,040,000 one year later. The share of the kolkhozy in market grain rose from 4.5 per cent to 12.9 per cent in the same period.
`This unprecedented rate of collectivization, which exceeds the most optimistic projections attests to the fact that the true masses of the middle peasant household, convinced in practice of the advantages of the collective forms of agriculture, have joined the movement ....
`The decisive breakthrough in the attitude of the poor and middle peasant masses toward the kolkhozes ... signifies a new historical stage in the building of socialism in our country.'
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Robert H. McNeal, editor, Resolutions and decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Volume 3, The Stalin Years: 1929--1953 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 23.
The progress of collectivization was made possible by putting into practice the Party's line for building socialism on all fronts.
`These significant successes of the kolkhoz movement are a direct result of the consistent implementation of the general party line, which has secured a powerful growth of industry, a strengthening of the union of the working class with the basic masses of the peasantry, the formation of a co-operative community, the strengthening of the masses' political activism, and the growth of the material and cultural resources of the proletarian state.'
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Ibid. , p. 29.
Reject Bukharin's opportunism
The Central Committee insisted that this impressive advance was not made `in all tranquility', but that it was taking place with the most bitter class struggle.
`(T)he intensification of the class struggle and the stubborn resistance of capitalist elements against an advancing socialism in a situation of capitalist encirclement of our country, are reinforcing the pressure of petty bourgeois elements on the least stable element of the party, giving rise to an ideology of capitulation in the face of difficulties, to desertion, and attempts to reach an understanding with the kulak and capitalist elements of town and countryside ....
`This is precisely what is at the root of the Bukharin group's complete incomprehension of the intensification of the class struggle that has taken place; the underestimation of the kulak and the NEP-man elements' power to resist, the anti-leninist theory of the kulak's `growing' into socialism, and resistance to the policy of attacking the capitalist elements in the countryside.'
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Ibid. , p. 27.
`The rightists declared the planned rates for collectivization and for building sovkhozes to be unrealistic; they declared that the necessary material and technical prerequisistes were lacking and that the poor and middle peasantry did not want to switch to collective forms of agriculture. In actual fact, we are experiencing such a turbulent growth of collectivization and such a headlong rush to socialist forms of agriculture on the part of the poor and middle peasant holdings that the kolkhoz movement has already reached the point of transition to total collectivization of entire districts ....
`(T)he right opportunists ..., objectively speaking, were serving as spokesmen for the economic and political interests of petty bourgeois elements and kulak-capitalist groups.'
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Ibid. , p. 25.
The Central Committee indicated that changes in the form of class struggle had to be followed carefully: if, before, the kulaks did everything they possibly could to prevent the kolkhoz movement from starting up, now they sought to destroy it from within.
`The widespread development of the kolkhoz movement is taking place in a situation of intensified class struggle in the countryside and of a change in its forms and methods. Along with the kulaks' intensification of their direct and open struggle against collectivization, which has gone to the point of outright terror (murder, arson, and wrecking), they are increasingly going over to camouflaged and covert forms of struggle and exploitation, penetrating the kolkhozes and even the kolkhoz management bodies in order to corrupt and explode them from the inside.'
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Ibid. , p. 29.
For this reason, profound political work had to be undertaken to form a hard kernel that could lead the kolkhoz down the socialist path.
`(T)he party must assure through persistent and regular work the rallying of a farm labourer and poor peasant nucleus on the kolkhozes.'
.
Ibid.
New difficulties, new tasks
These successes could not make the Party forget the `new difficulties and short-comings' to be resolved. The plenum enumerated them:
`(T)he low level of the kolkhozes' technical base; the inadequate standards of organization and low labour productivity at kolkhozes; the acute shortage of kolkhoz cadres and the near total lack of the needed specialists; the blighted social make-up at a portion of the kolkhoz; the fact that the forms of management are poorly adapted to the scale of the kolkhoz movement, that direction lags behind the rate and the scope of the movement, and the fact that the agencies directing the kolkhoz movement are often patently unsatisfactory.'
.
Ibid.
The Central Committee decided upon the immediate startup of the construction of two new tractor factories with a capacity of 50,000 units each and of two new combine factories, the expansion of factories making complex agricultural equipment and of chemical factories, and the development of Machine Tractor Stations.
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Ibid. , pp. 30--31.
`Kolkhoz construction is unthinkable without a rigorous improvement in the cultural standards of the kolkhoz populace'. This is what had to be done: intensify literacy campaigns, build libraries, intensify kolkhoz courses and various types of study by correspondence, enroll children in schools, intensify cultural and political work amon
g women, organize crиches and public kitchens to reduce their burden, build roads and cultural centers, introduce radio and cinema, telephone and mail services to the countryside, publish a general press and a specialized press designed for the peasants, etc.