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In the Soviet Union, collectivization was introduced in the late 1920s as a scheme to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into cooperatives called collective farms (Russian: колхоз, kolkhoz). The theory behind collectivisation was that it would replace the small-scale unmechanised and inefficient farms that were then commonplace in the Soviet Union with large-scale mechanised farms that would produce food far more efficiently.
Although conditions varied over the vast expanse of the Soviet Union and among ethnic groups and enclaves, traditional farming among Russians and allied ethnic groups such as the Ukrainians was carried on by a host of small-holders or peasants who lived in small villages. Thatched log or earthen huts lined muddy streets surrounded by farmland and common pasture. Farmland was characteristically laid out in strips divided by boundary ridges and dead furrows, and could be worked by small horsedrawn equipment, but not by modern tractors. The richest peasants, called by the perjorative term kulaks, might own 2 or 3 horses, 4 or more cows and work 30 or 40 acres (120,000 or 160,000 m²) of land with the help of one employee. The poorest peasants often could not afford a single horse.
The Revolution and subsequent Civil War disrupted food distribution in Russia. Due to the collapse of industrial production and the monetary system there was little incentive for farmers to sell their products. The money was, in their view, no good and in any event there was nothing available to buy. During the Civil War the authorities resorted to the policy of War communism. In agriculture, it amounted to direct requisition, with the leaders of a community often held hostage pending delivery of food. The New Economic Policy (NEP) replaced requisitions by foodstuffs tax; however, it turned out to favor the capitalistic sector of the peasantry, an undesirable outcome from the Communist point of view.
Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. Social and ideological goals would also be served though mobilization of the peasants in a cooperative economic enterprise which could serve a secondary purpose of providing social services to the people.
It was argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks. It was hoped that the goals of collectivization could be achieved voluntarily, but when the new farms failed to attract the number of peasants hoped, the government blamed the oppression of the kulaks and resorted to forceful implementation of the plan.
Given the goals of the First Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy-industrialization.
Theoretically, landless peasants were to be the biggest beneficiaries from collectivisation, because it promised them an opportunity to take an equal share in labour and its rewards. For those with property, however, collectivisation meant giving it up to the collective farms and selling most of the food that they produced to the state at low prices set by the state itself, so they were opposed to the idea. Furthermore, collectivisation involved significant changes in the traditional village life of Russian peasants within a very short timeframe, with a high potential for causing alienation, despite the long Russian rural tradition of collectivism in obshchinas.
Due to the aforementioned factors and a number of others, opposition to collectivisation proved to be widespread among the Russian rural population.
Therefore, in November 1928, the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivisation. This marked the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Grain requisitioning intensified, and wealthy peasants were forced to join the collective farms, giving up their private plots of land. In response to this, many such peasants initiated an armed resistance.
In an attempt to overcome this resistance, shock brigades were used to coerce reluctant peasants into joining the collective farms between 1929 and 1933. As a form of protest, many of the targeted peasants preferred to slaughter their animals rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock. The price of forced collectivisation was so high that the March 2, 1930 issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article , in which he discouraged overzealousness:
By 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized.
Due to unreasonably high government quotas, farmers often got far less for their labor than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization was to reduce grain output and almost halve livestock. Despite the initial plans and expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940.
Stalin blamed this drop in food production on kulaks (Russian: fist; prosperous peasants), whom he believed were capitalistic parasites who were organising resistance to collectivisation. In reality, however, the term "kulak" was a loose term to describe anyone who opposed collectivisation, which included many peasants who were anything but rich. The policy of "раскулачивание", liquidation of kulaks as a class, formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant executions, forced labor camps, and forced resettlement to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
On August 7, 1932, the Ukase about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for "any sabotage (вредительство) or theft of communal property" ranged from ten years of incarceration up to the death sentence. Soon it became infamously known as the Law of spikelets ("Закон о колосках"): peasants (including children) who attempted to hand-collect the leftovers of grains in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for "damaging the state grain production". Martin Amis writes in Koba the Dread that the number of sentences only for this particular offence in the period from August 1932 to December 1933 was 125,000.
Most historians agree that the disruption caused by forced collectivization worsened famine conditions during the time of drought, especially in the Ukraine, a region famous for its rich soil (chernozem), and also in the Northern Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and the Volga region. The number of people who died of starvation in these famines is estimated at between two and five million, at a time when the Soviet Union continued to export millions of tonnes of grain on world markets.
The actual number of casualties is bitterly disputed to this day. In 1975, Abramov and Kocharli estimated that 265,800 "kulak" families were sent to the Gulag in 1930. In 1979, Roy Medvedev used Abramov's and Kocharli's estimate to calculate that 2.5 million peasants were exiled between 1930 and 1931, but he suspected that he underestimated the total number. Robert Conquest also documented the effects of the famine on the Ukrainian people. According to the most cited figures, between 5 and 7 million perished from famine in Ukraine, ca. 1 million in the Don Kossack area and more than a million Kazakhs. For instance, Matthew White's gives the following sources:
Famine, 1926-38
Richard Overy, Russia's War (1997): 4.2M in Ukraine + 1.7M in Kazakhstan
Green, Barbara ("Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: the Great Famine" in Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique?) cites these sources for the number who died in the famine:
Nove: 3.1-3.2M in Ukraine, 1933
Maksudov: 4.4M in Ukraine, 1927-38
Mace: 5-7M in Ukraine
Osokin: 3.35M in USSR, 1933
Wheatcraft: 4-5M in USSR, 1932-33
Conquest:
Total, USSR, 1926-37: 11M
1932-33: 7M
Ukraine: 5M
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