Another obstacle were the kulaks, and the fact that they owned 90% of the most fertile land, this problem would require and agreement or some form of negotiation which was a problem for the Bolsheviks as they were majoritively from an urban background and did not understand the complexities of peasant lifestyles.
Stalin enforced collectivization with brute force, showing his desire to make sure that his commands would be obeyed. 25,000 police and Red Army Units confiscated grain and livestock to feed the cities meaning that it would become very hard for the peasants to resist. Also, Motor Tractor Stations were set up all over the country so that the collectives could hire machinery and have their grain collected and to mechanize farming on the whole.
Stalin introduced collectivization because he believed it to be the answer to Russia’s agricultural problems – In 1928; he said ‘agriculture is developing slowly, comrades. This is because we have about 25 million individually-owned farms. They are the most primitive and undeveloped form of economy. We must do our utmost to develop large farms and to convert then into grain factories for the country organized on a modem scientific basis.’ This shows that Stalin was clearly concerned about the state if the economy, and he was right to be – Russia’s agriculture had barely any mechanized equipment such as tractors, meaning that it was not as advanced as the west and therefore, not as productive as Stalin wanted it to be.
So one of Stalin’s economic aims was to improve efficiency and to catch up with the advanced countries, as he said ‘we are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries, we must catch up with this distance in 10 years. Either we do it or go under’. So collectivization was introduced with the aim to boost Russia’s economy and to help its farming methods become more mechanized. Stalin had managed to succeed with this economical aim as food production did increase (wheat went up by 33%) and overall efficiency increased. Also, a huge achievement for Stalin was that he managed to keep the poor conditions and treatment of peasants a secret from the rest of Russia. This was an achievement because he had introduced Collectivization as a way of extending his power over peasants, which he ultimately did achieve, due to his brutality and the fear which this had caused in the peasants. So Stalin did achieve this aim to a certain extent but in other ways, he did not.
At first, collectivization was an economic disaster due to the amount the country needed to catch-up on, and the amount of time they had, meaning that the paces of change was simply just too fast. The government had tried to collectivize 60% of all farms in Russia between December 1929 and March 1930, causing chaos amongst the peasants because between 1929 and 1933, food production levels fell because the peasants would rather have killed their own livestock that hand it over to the kolkhoz. Collectivization had damaged the peasants and they simply stopped producing because they could not adapt to the new collective system. They left their land and this meant that over 10 million peasants being deported. Because of their actions, there was a national famine resulting in 3 million deaths, creating a great human cost for collectivization.
Stalin had political aims too that he wanted to achieve through collectivization. In January 1930, Stalin announced that he wanted 25% of the grain producing areas to be collectivized by the end of the year. He abandoned the New Economic Policy too, which had been introduced by Lenin in March 1921, after he came to the conclusion that: ‘only by coming to an agreement with the peasants can we save the socialist revolution.’ The NEP had meant that farmers were now allowed to sell food onto the open market and could also employ other peasants to work for them. Because of this, a new class had emerged known as ‘kulaks’ – rich peasants who employed poorer peasants to work for them and hoarded their produce, so that the food prices remained high.
Stalin noticed this class of people and knew that his only way to modernize the USSR would be by breaking this class apart. So when he introduced collectivization, the Kulaks did not approve as it meant the government could seize their grain and use it to feed the Red Army during World War II, and it would spell an end to their independence. So they sold their grain off cheaply, slaughtered their own livestock (livestock levels did not recover until 1953) and burned down their own houses, meaning that Stalin did not advance economically with collectivization at first.
The Country was in a national crisis too, the USSR needed industrial investment and manpower if it was going to catch up on the western countries. And as Stalin had little sympathy for the peasants, because he believed the future belonged to the urban workers, this meant that their surplus grain would be sold abroad to raise capital for the industries, and the peasants producing this surplus would then become factory workers. The only problem with this being that there was no grain surplus- in fact, there was a grain shortage. Stalin said that this was due to rich peasants farmers hoarding their grain as a way to encourage collectivization. This gave the poorer peasants an excuse to kill the richer peasants, as they undertook ‘de-kulakisation’ in an attempt to settle old scores, spurred on by Stalin’s encouragement (and the OGPU anti-kulak forces he provided), eventually destroying the Kulak class as 6.5 million people died.
Although Stalin had achieved this aim, he now faced a problem: by attacking the Kulaks, the government had effectively destroyed their most capable and effective farmers, and the ones who could have adapted to the change in technology and mechanization.
Stalin wanted to merge small peasants into Solkhoz and Kolkhoz because he defined collectivization as ‘the setting up of collective farms and the state farms in order to squeeze out all capitalist elements from the land’. The Kolkhoz peasants pooled their resources and shared their work profits. The kolkhoz farms were also useful because it meant that the farmers would have schools, hospitals and nurseries. And in the Solkhoz, the peasants worked directly for the state and were paid their own wage.
Another success was that the farms could become more mechanized as there was more land so heavy machinery was more efficient, e.g.: tractors, and could be more frequently used. This meant that Stalin had managed to mechanize agriculture, despite the initial resistance.