Why and With What Success did Stalin Embark on an 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 prices increasingly fell behind market prices, so the peasantry had little incentive to part with their grain. By early 1929, this grain-exporting country was forced to import grain and introduce bread rationing. In retaliation, Stalin returned to the forcible requisitioning of War Communism. He harangued local officials and encouraged use of Article 107 of the criminal code against 'speculation' to justify the seizures. As Alec Nove and indeed Stalin himself said, "It was a great turning point in Russian history." However this decision would obviously not encourage greater grain production. Effectively the realisation of this fact was a decision leading to collectivisation. With devastating understatement, Moshkov recalled, "The content and character of these changes were such that they had to be followed by the beginning of widespread social transformation in the countryside."
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 prices increasingly fell behind market prices, so the peasantry had little incentive to part with their grain. By early 1929, this grain-exporting country was forced to import grain and introduce bread rationing. In retaliation, Stalin returned to the forcible requisitioning of War Communism. He harangued local officials and encouraged use of Article 107 of the criminal code against 'speculation' to justify the seizures. As Alec Nove and indeed Stalin himself said, "It was a great turning point in Russian history." However this decision would obviously not encourage greater grain production. Effectively the realisation of this fact was a decision leading to collectivisation. With devastating understatement, Moshkov recalled, "The content and character of these changes were such that they had to be followed by the beginning of widespread social transformation in the countryside."
