Stalin's Assault on Agriculture in 1930

Stalin's Assault on Agriculture in 1930

The heart of the issue in assessing why Stalin embarked on this policy

of aggression is in asserting whether, collectivisation and the war on

the Kulaks was an economic necessity or an act of sheer brutality

designed to break the peasantry into submission. In 1929, the party

moved in favour of collectivised agriculture - large state-organized

farms in place of small private peasant plots, and the destruction of

independent market in agricultural products. Mass collectivisation

began in October; a month later Stalin announced what he called the

“The Great Turn” in the process of building a modern, socialized

agriculture. He saw the crisis as central to revolutionary survival:

“Either we succeed,” he told the Central Committee plenum, “or we go

under.” On 27 December 1929 Stalin finally called for an

uncompromising policy of “liquidating the Kulaks as a class”. The

language of violent class warfare would permeate all rural policy. The

scale of collectivisation was staggering, 120 million people living in

600,000 villages were directly effected. 25 million individual

holdings were consolidated into 240,000 state-controlled collective

farms in a matter of months. I shall now examine each of the factors

that influenced this assault in turn.

An instigator to collectivisation was the grain procurement crisis of

1927-8. The regime had extreme difficulty in extracting grain from the

peasants in this period and Stalin knew this would have to change for

long term stability, even if this required short term suffering.

However the state itself was largely to blame itself for this

situation. State pric...

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yielded to the state only 14% of the grain harvest in 1928, yielded

26% in 1931 and 40% in 1933. Infamously, Stalin was willing to drive

living standards below subsistence level in 1933 to extract grain and

break the peasantry. 10 million tons of grain was exported in the

proceeding two years and nearly 2 million tons of grain a year

continued to be exported as famine raged. Stalin passed the five stalk

law whereby dealing of collective property was punishable by a minimum

of 10 years prison with no amnesty, within five moths over 50,000 had

been reprimanded.

Thus I would argue that despite the undoubted hardship and oppression

that his policies created it seems as though he achieved a great deal

of his collectivisation goals. In this respect his aggressive actions

against agriculture were successful from 1930.