Simultaneously Stalin launched an assault on the final bastion of the old order—the hinterlands that encompassed the predominantly grain-growing provinces of Russia and Ukraine, the arid steppes of Central Asia, and the hunting and fishing preserves of the far north and Siberia. Here, according to the census of 1926, lived nearly 80 per cent of the Soviet Union’s 142 million people. Here too was the greatest challenge to the Communist Party leadership and its ambitions for socialist construction. Communists were few and far between in the Soviet countryside: in July 1928 they numbered 317,000 (22.7 per cent of the party’s total membership)—one communist for every 336 rural dwellers. Most were recent recruits with only the most tenuous grasp of communist ideology. Although teachers, agronomists, and other white-collar professionals represented the state and could propagandize the fruits of Soviet rule, the peasant masses generally were distrustful of ‘their’ village soviets and the Soviet government at large, a wariness borne of a history of endless depredations by outsiders.
This attitude was mutual. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of ‘alliance’ (smychka) or rather because prosperous peasants (kulaks, literally ‘the tightfisted’) seemed to profit from the concessions associated with NEP, Soviet authorities regarded the peasantry as a petty bourgeois mass of small property-holders and a major barrier to the building of socialism. By all accounts, the grain procurement crisis of 1927–8 was the turning-point in this conflictual relationship. Having personally supervised the campaign to seize grain and other foodstuffs in the Urals and western Siberia, Stalin hit on the idea of organizing collective and state farms to pump out surpluses. These rural production units, fitfully and ineffectually sponsored in the past, henceforth became the regime’s formula for socialist construction in the countryside that was to serve the over-arching goal of industrialization.
The industrialization drive itself was suffused with military metaphors, but collectivization was the real thing, a genuine war against the peasants. The ‘fortresses’ in this war were the peasants’ ‘material values’—their land, livestock, draught animals, and implements, all of which were to be confiscated and pooled as collective property. Party propagandists characterized mass collectivization as a ‘rural October’, analogous to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. But collectivization and the resistance it provoked among the peasants cost vastly more in lives than the October Revolution or even the ensuing civil war.
Not all peasants opposed collectivization. The poorest elements in the villages (the bedniak families without land or the means to work it) probably welcomed the prospect of gaining access to the property of their better-off neighbours. But the mass of ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki) was not swayed by promises of tractors and credits. As a peasant told Maurice Hindus (a Russian-Jewish émigré who visited his native village), ‘Hoodlums and loafers … might readily join a kolkhoz. What have they to lose? But decent people? They are khoziaeva [independent producers and householders], masters, with an eye for order, for results. But what could they say in a kolkhoz? What could they do except carry out the orders of someone else. That’s the way I look at it.’
The way Stalin looked at it, as he made clear at a party conference in April 1929, was that the kulaks were fomenting opposition to collectivization. This ad hoc ‘theory’ of the ‘intensification of the class struggle’ henceforth guided party policy as if it were a universal truth. Over the ensuing months, the party sought to accelerate the formation of collective farms. By June, one million—out of some 25 million—peasant households had enrolled in 57,000 collectives. Obviously, though, the vast majority still held back. Regional party appa-ratchiki, spurred on by directives and plenipotentiaries from the centre, pleaded with and cajoled village assemblies. ‘Tell me, you wretched people, what hope is there for you if you remain on individual pieces of land?’ an agitator shouted at the peasants in Hindus’s village. ‘You will have to work in your own old way and stew in your old misery. Don’t you see that under the present system there is nothing ahead of you but ruin and starvation?’ ‘We never starved before you wise men of the party appeared here,’ was the reply.
