Collectivisation and the Attack on the Kulaks
Why Stalin Abandoned the NEP
By 1927 the New Economic Policy had restored Soviet grain output to roughly the level of 1913. But the cities were growing faster than the countryside could feed them, and the state could not industrialise on a peasant economy that sold its surplus on an open market. Then came the 1927–28 grain procurement crisis. Faced with low state prices, peasants in the major grain regions withheld grain rather than sell it cheap, and state purchases ran perhaps 25 per cent below what was needed. Stalin travelled to Siberia in January 1928 and ordered local officials to seize grain by force in the manner of War Communism. By the end of 1929 he had committed the regime to a complete reversal of the NEP: the wholesale collectivisation of agriculture and the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.
Stalin’s aims for collectivisation were threefold: feed the cities reliably, fund industrialisation by exporting grain, and break peasant resistance to Bolshevik rule. Peasants were to be moved off their family plots into kolkhozes (collective farms) and sovkhozes (state farms). Mechanisation came through state-run Machine Tractor Stations, which doubled as political surveillance posts.
The First Wave, 1929–30
In December 1929 Stalin announced collectivisation. The plan was to push 25 per cent of peasant households into collectives by the autumn of 1930; in many regions local officials, terrified of failure, drove the figure far higher. By March 1930 around 58 per cent of peasant households had been collectivised, often by armed party teams (the ‘25,000-ers’ — urban communists sent into the villages) using threats, beatings and arrest. Peasants were ordered to bring all their land, livestock and tools to the new collective. Many slaughtered their animals rather than surrender them: between 1929 and 1933 the USSR lost roughly half its horses, more than 40 per cent of its cattle, and around two-thirds of its sheep and goats. Soviet livestock numbers did not recover until the 1950s.
In March 1930, with rural revolt threatening the spring sowing, Stalin published ‘Dizzy with Success’ in Pravda. He blamed local officials for excesses and allowed peasants to leave the new collectives. Within months perhaps half of those collectivised had walked out. The retreat was tactical. By the end of 1931 the campaign was renewed; by 1934 around 70 per cent of households were on collectives, and by 1937 the figure was over 90 per cent.
Dekulakisation
Stalin needed an enemy to drive collectivisation forward. The chosen target was the kulak, supposedly the wealthier peasant who hired labour and exploited his neighbours. In practice the term was applied flexibly to anyone who resisted — a peasant with one cow, a single hired hand, or a literate peasant who answered back. Local officials were given quotas of kulak families to identify, and the quotas expanded as the campaign rolled on. In January 1930 the Politburo divided kulaks into three categories: the first to be shot or sent to labour camps; the second to be deported to Siberia, the Urals or Kazakhstan; the third to be expelled from their villages and resettled on poor land. Around 1.8 million peasants were deported as ‘dekulakised’ between 1930 and 1932; perhaps 30,000 were executed in the first wave, and many more died in the resettlements from cold, hunger and disease.
Students often write that kulaks were a real class of wealthy peasants who exploited their neighbours. The Bolshevik category was always loose. By 1929 the Soviet countryside had been levelled by a decade of war, requisitioning and the redistribution of estate land in 1917; few peasants owned more than a small plot. In practice the ‘kulak’ label was a quota imposed from above and filled locally with whoever was resisting. The historian Lynne Viola has shown that ‘dekulakisation’ targeted middle peasants, women, the elderly and clergy as readily as wealthier farmers. Strong answers separate the propaganda category from the social reality.
The Holodomor, 1932–33
The grain quotas set by Moscow rose every year while output fell. In Ukraine and the North Caucasus the harvest of 1932 was poor; the quota set on the kolkhozes was higher than the villages could deliver and still feed themselves. Brigades of officials seized seed grain, hidden stocks and the reserve from peasant homes. In late 1932 a series of decrees made it a criminal offence to leave a famine zone, blacklisted villages from receiving manufactured goods, and barred peasants from migrating to the cities without internal passports. Grain continued to be exported from Soviet ports while villagers starved. The death toll from the resulting Holodomor — literally ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian — is estimated at around 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine alone, with comparable death rates in Kazakhstan from the parallel collectivisation of nomadic herders.
Historians disagree on whether the Ukrainian famine was a deliberate national genocide. Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum argue that Stalin used the famine as a weapon against Ukrainian national identity, citing the export of grain during the famine, the closure of borders, and the simultaneous attack on Ukrainian language, culture and Communist Party cadres. R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft argue for criminal indifference rather than directed national targeting — that Stalin was prepared to let the peasantry starve to fund industrialisation rather than singling out Ukrainians as a nation. Strong answers acknowledge that grain export, the blacklists and the internal-passport decree are agreed on; what is contested is the question of intent.
Successes and Failures
By 1937 over 90 per cent of peasant households were on collectives. The state now controlled grain procurement directly: it took what it needed from the farms before the peasantry got their share. Soviet grain exports paid for the foreign machinery imported under the First Five-Year Plan. The peasantry, the regime’s main political problem since 1917, had been broken as an independent force. From the regime’s viewpoint these were successes.
The cost was extraordinary. Soviet livestock losses were not made good for two decades. Grain output stagnated through the 1930s; per capita food consumption was lower in 1937 than in 1928. Several million people died in the famine. The dekulakised population, swept off into special settlements and labour camps, became one source of forced labour for the new factories and canals. Vyacheslav Molotov, chair of Sovnarkom, signed off the rising quotas; Lazar Kaganovich oversaw the Ukrainian operation in person. The political verdict on collectivisation depends on what is being weighed: state control of the countryside and grain for industry on one side, demographic catastrophe and a peasantry alienated for a generation on the other.
Roughly 1.8 million peasants were deported as ‘dekulakised’ between 1930 and 1932. The USSR lost about half its horses, 40 per cent of its cattle and two-thirds of its sheep and goats by 1933. Around 3.5 to 5 million people died in the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, with further mass deaths in Kazakhstan. By 1937 over 90 per cent of peasant households were on collective farms.