201. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie, 115 (no citation). “We are facing a combat situation here,” one soldier in Bashkiria noted, according to a spring 1930 police report with many such examples. “I see how they are driving the peasants, and my heart is broken. Nothing can be done, I’ll have to keep silent.” Sevost’ianov et al., “Sovershenno sekretno,” VIII/ii: 1219–24 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 8, por. 653, l. 305–7).
202. Ivnitskii, Sud’ba raskulachennykh, 24. See also Jasny, Socialized Agriculture, 308.
203. Davies, Soviet Collective Farm, 153.
204. Viola, Best Sons, 157–8. Peasants, too, were getting promoted by the hundreds of thousands into positions of rural authority, taking ad hoc study courses. Aruntiunian, Mekhanizatory sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR.
205. Rozenfel’d, Dvadtsatipiatitysiachniki, 31, 158–9.
206. Davies, Soviet Collective Farm, 292, citing Sotsialisticheskoe zemleutsroitsvo, 1930, no. 3–4: 56–9. Individual peasants received the new land allocations last in line and in smaller allotments, which were less conveniently located and often marshy or infested, but they persevered.
207. Davies, Soviet Collective Farm, 160, citing Resheniia partii i pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam (1967), II: 196 (March 14, 1930). No single decree had introduced the NEP, and no single decree would abolish it—in fact, technically, NEP would be “transcended” in the Hegelian, dialectical sense.
208. Decisions on how to distribute income from the 1930 harvest would be made locally. There would be wide variation, but also a basic calculation such that collective farmers would receive compensation out of what remained after expenses and tax payments on a “per eater” basis, meaning farmers would get a portion of the harvest irrespective of how much work they had done, a disincentive to work harder. Davies noted that “perhaps the most remarkable feature of the spring of 1930 is that the sowing took place quite successfully in the kolkhozy even though the collective farmers were working on credit for an unknown amount of payment, often not knowing by which system they would be paid.” The original compensation idea—that collective farmers would be paid factory-style wages based on a piece rate system (in line with a vision of gigantic farms)—failed, and not only because cash was in short supply: a guaranteed wage promised to shift the financial burden of any crop failures to the state. Davies also shows that only in June 1930, by which time sowing had been completed, did the regime decide upon remuneration on the basis of “labor days,” a system that treated work accomplished as a dividend to be paid from what was left over from the collective farm’s income (in kind and money) after state deliveries and taxes. Record keeping remained sporadic, however. Davies, Soviet Collective Farm, 140, 140–67; S”ezdy sovetov Soiuza Sovetskikh SSR, III: 189.
209. Partiinoe khoziaistvo, 1930, no. 7–8: 8 (Wolf).
210. Davies, Soviet Collective Farm, 310, citing Sotsialisticheskoe zemledelie, June 3, 1930.
211. Murin, Stalin v ob”iatiakh, 29 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 1550, l. 30), 41n17.
212. Trapeznikov, Kommunisticheskaia partiia, 38–9; Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 178–9; Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 211–2, 218. Because some were later rehabilitated, or because incomplete figures were initially reported, sometimes the figure is reported as 130,000, including 14,000 who quit voluntarily: Partiinoe stroitel’stvo, 1930, no. 10 (12): 14–9; Schapiro, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 435. Cf. Pravda, April 23, 1931. A comprehensive study of rural Communists in the RSFSR in 1929 had shown that one in four owned property worth more than 800 rubles, compared with one in six of the overall peasant population. Communist peasants were also more likely to employ hired labor. Gaister and Levin, “O sostave sel’partorganiztsii.”
213. Gill, Origins, 137; Rigby, Communist Party Membership, 420; Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution, 48; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 132. Tsarist-era officials comprised 10 percent of the staff in commissariats, albeit a mere 2 percent had been ministers or high officials. This was after sweeping purges of the state apparatus. Izvestiia, Aug. 10, 1930.
