Collectivisation and the War on the Kulaks

In 1928 Stalin abandoned the NEP. The Five Year Plans needed grain to feed the cities and to export for foreign currency, and the peasants were not delivering enough. Stalin’s solution was to take farming out of peasant hands altogether. The result, between 1929 and 1933, was the most violent transformation of rural Europe in modern history: an estimated five to seven million dead, a famine that ravaged Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and the destruction of an entire way of life.

The ‘Great Turn’ of 1928

By 1927 a ‘grain procurement crisis’ meant the state was buying about 25 per cent less grain than the year before. Bukharin argued for higher prices and continued NEP. Stalin instead drove a hard line: peasants were hoarding grain, and the Five Year Plans could not wait. The Great Turn of 1928 ended the NEP and committed the state to forced industrialisation paid for by squeezing the countryside.

How Collectivisation Worked

Collectivisation meant peasants surrendered their land, livestock and tools to a collective. Two structures dominated:

• The kolkhoz: a notionally cooperative collective farm. Peasants worked the land together; the state took a fixed quota first, then peasants were paid in kind from what remained. They kept tiny private plots.
• The sovkhoz: a state farm where peasants were paid wages like factory workers; less common but more directly state-run.

Tractors, ploughs and other machinery were concentrated in Machine Tractor Stations (MTS), which hired equipment to the kolkhozes for a fee paid in grain. Each MTS had a political department that watched the surrounding farms. The state could reach into rural Russia in a way the Tsars never had.

Dekulakisation

In December 1929 Stalin called for ‘the liquidation of the kulaks as a class’. The kulak label, which had once meant a richer peasant employing labour, was now applied to almost anyone resisting collectivisation. A peasant with one extra cow, two horses, or a metal roof could be denounced. Roughly a fifth of dekulakised families were executed or sent to forced-labour colonies; another two thirds were deported to Siberia, the Urals or Kazakhstan. Over five million people were affected.

The label was politically constructed. Local activists faced quotas: each district had to find its kulaks. In practice the campaign was less a war on rich peasants than a quota-driven assault on the most successful families in the village.

The Famine of 1932-1933

By 1932 sown area had collapsed and grain output was below 1928 levels — yet state procurement quotas were raised, partly to fund industrial imports. The collision produced famine. The hardest-hit areas were Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan. In Ukraine, where the famine is now called the Holodomor (‘death by hunger’), about four million people died. In Kazakhstan, around 1.5 million Kazakhs — nearly a quarter of the population — died as nomadic herding was destroyed and forced settlement disrupted the seasonal grazing on which Kazakh life depended.

Soviet authorities denied the famine externally and prevented peasants from leaving the affected regions through internal passport controls (introduced December 1932). The Soviet press carried no reports; foreign journalists in Moscow who tried to investigate, such as the Welshman Gareth Jones, were dismissed and discredited by colleagues. Survivors described eating bark, weeds, leather and, in extreme cases, human corpses. Whether Stalin deliberately engineered the Ukrainian famine to crush Ukrainian national identity, or whether it was a product of brutal policy without specific genocidal intent, remains debated. Many historians, the Ukrainian state and several governments now classify the Holodomor as genocide; Russian and some Western historians question the deliberate-targeting argument while accepting Stalin’s responsibility for mass death.