Collectivization

The turn

The grain crisis of 1928 was the immediate trigger. When peasants refused to sell at state procurement prices set below market ones, the party revived forced procurement under what became known as the Urals-Siberian method. The Central Committee plenum of November 1929 fixed the course of full collectivization, and that December Stalin declared the liquidation of the kulaks as a class an official task.

The machinery followed quickly. The Politburo decision of 30 January 1930 and the OGPU order No. 44/21 issued under it sorted kulaks into three categories: arrest with camp or execution, deportation to remote regions, and resettlement on poor land within their own district. Because the sorting was done against numerical quotas set region by region, it routinely swept in middling peasants and resisting poor peasants who were not rich farmers at all.

Course

Collectivization rates jumped within the first months of 1930, and resistance spread in the form of livestock slaughter and refusal to sow. In March 1930 Stalin published "Dizzy with Success", shifting blame for coerced enrollment onto local cadres and retreating for a time. Peasants left the kolkhozy in large numbers, but pressure was reimposed from the autumn.

From 1931 to 1933 mass famine struck Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the lower Volga, and the North Caucasus. In Kazakhstan forced sedentarization destroyed the nomadic economy and produced the heaviest proportional population loss. Whether the famine is to be read as the outcome of procurement quotas and movement bans, and what intent operated in which region, remains argued over after the opening of the archives.

Outcome

By 1937 more than ninety percent of peasant households had been brought into the kolkhozy. The state controlled sowing plans and procurement prices and used Machine Tractor Stations to place equipment and political supervision in the countryside together. Grain was allocated to urban rationing and to export, becoming part of the funding of industrialization.

Agricultural productivity did not recover for a long time, and livestock numbers stayed below their 1928 level until the end of the 1930s. The pattern set here, in which household plots and private sideline production carried a disproportionate share of both peasant income and urban food supply, lasted until the Soviet Union dissolved.