The Great Wrong Turn

On February 19, 1861, Tsar Alexander II signed the manifesto abolishing serfdom. Sixty-eight years later, on November 7, 1929, Pravda published an article by Stalin, “The Year of the Great Turning Point,” that heralded the peasantry’s return to a state closely resembling slavery.

By 1929, the effort to drive peasants into kolkhozes had been under way for almost two years, ever since the 15th Party Congress had adopted a plan to collectivize agriculture. One sign of the turning point discussed in the article was that “middle peasants” (середняки, the moderately well-off peasants that made up the bulk of the rural population) were now, supposedly, buying into the party line, giving up their private farming operations, and joining kolkhozes to further the cause of collectivization.

What came in the wake of Stalin’s article was horrific. Since the majority of peasants were now supposedly going along with collectivization, there was no reason to show laggards the slightest mercy. The article marked the beginning of the brutal policy of “total collectivization” and the emergence of the slogan, “We will destroy the kulak as a class,” a politically correct way of saying “We will kill the kulaks,” which is how the slogan was often applied.

Peasants were now physically forced into kolkhozes, and local authorities tried to outdo one another in their race to collectivize private farms. The brutal winter of 1929-1930 brought the Russian peasantry to its knees at a time when it had only just begun to find its bearings after the turmoil of revolution and civil war. Most of the tragic scenes that unfolded across the Russian countryside, scenes worthy of Shakespeare in terms of the passions at play, will forever be hidden from history.

Posterity will never know how many peasants, choking back tears, slaughtered their cows rather than hand them over to the kolkhoz, or how many eagerly divvied up the possessions of their “dekulakized” neighbors sent into exile. It will never know in which villages the peasants (as, for example, happened outside Ryazan) formed a human chain to protect their village church when it was slated for destruction, or in which the locals were happy to join in desecration of icons.

What we do know is that in 1929 a tragedy of historic proportions played out in the country, a tragedy in which millions were hapless victims and the poorer rural population (incited by the authorities) lashed out at its prosperous neighbors.

Some historians believe that during the early months of 1930 Russia was on the verge of a second civil war, one that might have toppled the Soviet government, had it not been for a clever move by Stalin. In March, he published his infamous “Dizzy with Success” article, blaming local party bosses for all the “excesses” that had so far been perpetrated in the course of collectivization. In so doing, Stalin adopted the role of the “Good Tsar,” a ploy that had worked so well throughout Russian history, whenever the country’s ills needed to be placed at the feet of the “evil boyars.” [See Russian Life, Mar/Apr 2010] Comrade Stalin could not possibly have known that people were being strong-armed into joining the kolkhozes! Thank heavens he was finally interceding!

During the spring of 1930, the number of kolkhozes was sharply reduced, but not for long. By the end of 1931, almost all the peasants had been forced to rejoin them. Stalin got his way in the end; it just took a little longer than initially planned.

“Drive the kulaks out of kolkhozes!”

What were the forces working in Stalin’s favor? Was it the eternal hatred poor peasants felt for rich ones? Or was it just that the peasantry had not yet managed to develop an understanding of or respect for private property? Were they ever given an opportunity to develop that understanding and respect?

Instead of giving land directly to the peasants, the 1861 reform gave it to peasant communes, which meant that individual households still did not have any sense of real ownership.

In 1906, Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin did away with the commune system by allowing those who wished to become independent farmers to go into business for themselves. The number of peasants who took Stolypin up on his offer were fewer than he would have liked, but more than the revolutionaries might have expected. Enough people opted out of communal farming to spur an agricultural boom in Russia, a boom that fed the country and left enough for agricultural exports. Siberian butter was sold in England, a testament to efficient, low cost production.

Then came 1917, and the Bolsheviks published their confiscatory Decree on Land. All the holdings of the gentry’s landed estates were given to the peasants, who enthusiastically divided them up among themselves. This redistribution did not seem at all unjust to them. What right did the landowners have to the land? They were not the ones who worked it, after all. Although we know of cases where peasants protected their former landlords, there are many more where they killed and robbed them before burning down the manor house.

Then, just one year later, the first requisition detachments arrived, demanding grain to feed the army and offering little in the way of compensation. Suddenly the peasants remembered the virtues of private property and were not happy about giving away the fruits of their labor. The forcible confiscation of grain was the main argument in favor of peasant support for the Whites. But on the other side of the equation, fear that the landowners might return to power compelled most peasants to support the Reds. Better to hand over grain than land, they reasoned, not realizing that in fewer than ten years land is exactly what they would be relinquishing, along with livestock, grain, and, during the famine of 1932, many lives, when it turned out that the kolkhozes were not very good at producing food and millions starved to death.

In the early 1990s, after perestroika, the kolkhozes, which had been in a state of gradual decline for decades, collapsed. The rural population largely fled, and many of the enthusiasts who tried to make a go of private farming came from the city (or, in some cases, other countries). They encountered enormous barriers put in place by government bureaucracies, as well as the bafflement and even hostility of their neighbors, the former kolkhozniks, who couldn’t figure out what these city slickers were so excited about.

Will our ill-fated land ever be farmed in a normal, sensible way? Many historians and economists are pessimistic in their replies, citing the absence of a tradition of independent farming or respect for private property. There are entire oblasts where fields that were once cultivated have grown over with forest; countless villages have turned into ghost towns.

Surely there is still hope for the future. Maybe those who remember collectivization – the descendants of its victims and the descendants of the perpetrators of this policy of compulsion – have to die off so that a new generation can take their place.

In Siberia there are prosperous settlements founded by surviving kulaks who were torn from their homes in the temperate zone and transported to the frigid middle of nowhere, essentially left to die. Yet, instead of dying, they cleared the forest and built thriving farms.

It can be done.