9
COLLECTIVIZATION
Lynna Viola
“Now even the blind can see
that if there is any serious
dissatisfaction among the main
mass of the peasantry it is
not because of the collective
farm policy, of the Soviet
government, but because the
Soviet government is unable to
keep pace with the growth of
the collective farm.”
above Life on a collective farm.
An idyllic look at life on a collective farm.
Courtesy of the Hoover Collection

— Excerpt from an article by Stalin in 1929
The collectivization of agriculture was a key feature of the
Communist economy of the Soviet Union. Collectivization
was intended to socialize peasant agriculture through the
creation of collective farms.
Within the collective farms, equipment and work animals
were held in common, while the land was worked jointly by
the collective farmers; peasant families continued to live in
separate homes and were permitted a small plot of land to
farm for their personal needs. In theory, after paying their
taxes and other obligations to the state, the collective
farmers were supposed to divide the remains of the harvest.
However, throughout most of the Stalin era, the state would
take the lion’s share of what was produced, leaving peasants
to live on what they managed to grow on their private plots.
The result was widespread rural poverty which led in  – 
to mass famine.
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…we have succeeded in
organizing this radical change
deep down in the peasant itself,
and in securing the following
of the broad masses of the poor
and middle peasants in spite of
incredible difficulties, in spite
of the desperate resistance of
dark forces of every kind, from
kulaks and priests to philistines
and right opportunists…
Joseph Stalin, 1929
Collectivization was viewed as an essential ingredient in the
“construction” of socialism. Socialist construction meant
not only the eradication of traditional peasant farming, but
the industrialization and modernization of the country.
The collectivization of agriculture was intended to pay for
industrialization through what Stalin called in  a
“tribute” from the peasantry.  What this meant was that
the peasantry would be “squeezed” for the resources to pay
for industrialization. This would occur through high
taxation, artificially low prices for agricultural produce, and
draconian grain requisitions to meet export needs. The
collective farms were intended to regulate the production and
transfer to the state of agricultural goods, thus simplifying
the control of the rural economy. By increasing grain production and mechanizing agriculture, collectivization was
expected to free up capital and labor for industry and food
resources for a growing urban industrial work force. 
And although most historians agree that collectivization
did not pay for industrialization, at least in the short term, it
is clear that this expectation was an important motivation
behind collectivization.
The idea of collectivization was derived from Communist
ideology. The tenets of Marxism-Leninism judged collectivization to be not only a more rational economic system
than the capitalist system of farming based on market forces,
but presumed collectivization to be the logical outcome
of the supposedly progressive dynamics of class forces in the
countryside. Marxist-Leninists artificially grafted urban
concepts of class and class struggle onto the peasantry. They
divided the peasantry three groups — poor peasants and
rural proletarians, the supposed allies of the working class;
food consumed (kilograms per person) 
grains
potatoes
meat & lard
butter
Urban Rural
Urban Rural
Urban Rural
Urban Rural
1928
174.4
250.4
87.6
141.1
51.7
24.8
2.97
1932
211.3
214.6
110
125
16.9
11.2
1.75
.70
+ 26 % -11 %
-67 %
-55 %
-41 %
-54 %
% Change
+21 % -14 %
1.55
left
TRANSLATION: We will fully finish
collectivization. We will attain
victory in the socialist reworking of
agriculture.
38
the life and times of stalin
top
Workers are urged to work as hard
as possible on the newly-created
collective farms.
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute.
middle peasants, a large and politically wavering intermediate stratum sharing features common to both proletariat
and bourgeoisie; and the kulak, a rural bourgeoisie with
social and economic power disproportionate to its relatively
small numbers, considered to be the class enemy. They
assumed that poor peasants and agricultural laborers would
rally to the side of the collective farm on the basis of their
class interests, swaying the middle peasant to their side and
defeating the kulak in the process. In practice, peasants
rarely performed according to class principles, instead uniting
in defense of common interests — subsistence, ways of life,
and belief — threatened by the theory and practice of collectivization. The poor peasant in most cases failed to support
the regime, and the regime’s inability to provide a clear and
consistent definition of the kulak most often meant that
politics rather than social or economic status determined
who was classified as a kulak.
The Communist Party launched the collectivization
campaign in early . Collectivization was a top-down,
state initiated transformation based on force. Violence
was widespread as peasants were forced into the collective
farms. At village meetings, the authorities would lay their
guns on the table and, instead of calling a vote for or against
the collective farm, simply asked the assembled peasants,
“Who is against the Soviet government?” Anyone who put up
his hand could face arrest or a beating.  The momentum of
the collectivization campaign was such that already by March
, close to   of the peasantry was declared collectivized! In fact, most of these statistics were based on a “race
for percentages” waged among the cadres of collectivization
and based on “paper” collective farms i.e., collective farms
in name only.
Along with collectivization, the Communist Party launched
two other repressive campaigns in the countryside. The first
campaign was a frontal attack on religion and the village
church. Priests were subject to widespread arrests; as many
as   of village churches were closed; and believers were
subject to harassment in the form of the desecration of
religious symbols and objects. Peasants in fact associated
collectivization with what they saw as “godless communism.”
In one village, a peasant said to her neighbor, “Look
Matrena, yesterday your husband joined the collective farm
and today they took our icons. What is this communism,
what is this collectivization?”
bottom
TRANSLATION: Easter Egg
Drawing of a worker exposing the
enemies of Communism: the Pope,
a banker, a kulak, and a socialdemocrat.
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute.
above
TRANSLATION: In our collective
farm, there is no place for popes and
kulaks
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute.
below
On the left is a new, Soviet
collective farm. On the right is a
barren land of religious peasants
controlled by capitalists.
The second, the campaign to “liquidate the kulak as a class”
was aimed at peasant families who were considered to
represent capitalism in the countryside. “Liquidation” meant
that as many as , such peasant families ( in 
alone ) were declared to be kulaks and subject to the forced
expropriation of their properties; of these, no less than
, were expelled from their villages and exiled to the
most remote hinterlands of the Soviet Union. Both the
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“Thanks to Yakov Lukich’s
example, men began
slaughtering their cattle
every night in Gremyachy.
As soon as it grew dusk,
one could hear the short
muffled bleating of sheep,
the death squeal of a pig
piercing the stillness, the
whimper of a calf. Both the
peasants who had joined
the collective farm and
the individual farmers
killed off their stock. They
slaughtered oxen, sheep,
pigs, even cows; they even
slaughtered their breed
animals. In two nights the
head of cattle in Gremyachy
was halved. Dogs began to
drag offal about the streets,
the grocery stall sold nearly
two hundred poods of salt
that had been lying on the
shelves for eighteen months.
“Kill, it’s not ours now!” “Kill,
the stat butchers will do it if
we don’t!” “Kill, they won’t
give you meat to eat in the
collective farm!” the insidious rumors spread around.
And the villagers killed.
They ate until they could eat
no more. Young and old had
the belly-ache. At dinnertime the peasants’ tables
sagged under their loads
of boiled and roasted meat.
At dinner-time all mouths
glistened with fat and there
was belching enough for a
funeral feast; and in every
eye there was an owlish expression of drunken satiety.”
From M. Sholokhov,
Virgin Soil Upturned
livestock & grain harvest in ussr 1928 – 1933 
1928
1930
1933
grain (in millions of tons)
73.3
83.5
68.4
-7%
% Change
horses (in millions)
34 (1929) 30.2
16.6
-51%
cattle (in millions)
70.5
52.5
38.4
-46%
pigs(in millions)
26
13.6
12.1
-53%
sheep & goats (in millions)
146.7
108.8
50.2
-66%
attack on the church and the liquidation of the kulak as a
class aimed at the destruction of traditional sources of
village leadership.
In the meantime, peasants were responding with massive
violence: In , there were close to , riots in the village,
some quite large; over , murders of rural officials; and
widespread arson, or the “Red Rooster” as it was known by
peasants. Throughout the countryside, peasants rose up
with shouts of “Down with the Collective Farm,” “Down with
the Communists.” Peasants also responded with the
wholesale destruction of property and livestock in an effort
to avoid losing these to the collective farms. Head of
cattle declined by some ,, between  and ,
and there were even greater declines in the number of
smaller livestock.
As one peasant put it, “It’s all the same — soon everything
we own will be socialized. It’s better now to slaughter and
sell the livestock than to let it remain.” 
As a consequence of the peasant response, Stalin called a
temporary halt to the collectivization campaign, accusing
lower-level cadres of being “dizzy with success,” which in
turn led to a massive exodus of peasants from the collectives
and a decline in percentages of collectivized households to
some   by the summer. The campaign was resumed at a
relatively more measured pace the following fall.
Collectivization was completed in the major grain-producing
regions by . By the mid- s, there were approximately
, collective farms in the Soviet Union. 
Collectivization represented an upheaval of cataclysmic
proportions and resulted in chronic structural weaknesses in
the rural economy. Agricultural productivity plummeted
after collectivization and corruption and poor management
plagued the system. Between  and , close to ten
million peasants left the village forever, moving into the
towns and cities of the Soviet Union in search of work; and
the exodus would continue well beyond the Stalin years,
leading to a massive decline in the rural population. Chronic
food shortages became a fixture of the system, resulting in
the necessity of importing grain from abroad, which the
Soviets did in the  s.
households collectivized 
1930
40
1931
1932 1933
1934 1935 1936
percentage of peasant households collectivized 23.6%
52.7% 61.5% 64.4% 71.4% 83.2% 89.6%
percentage of crop area collectivized
67.8% 77.6% 83.1% 87.4% 94.1% -----
the life and times of stalin
33.6%
above
A propaganda picture of a
milkmaid and a healthy cow.
above
We will excel in the collection
of the Bolshevik harvest.
Courtesy of The Library of Congress
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute
above
Top: We were a country
of the plough; Bottom: We
have become a country of
tractors and combines
A poster from 1934
showing the progress made
by collectivization.
Courtesy of the Hoover Institute
Lynne Viola, V.P. Danilov, N.A. Ivnitskii, Denis Kozlov, eds., The War Against the Peasantry
(New Haven: Yale U Press, 2005), p 149.
1
Lynne Viola, V.P. Danilov, N.A. Ivnitskii, Denis Kozlov, eds., The War Against the Peasantry
(New Haven: Yale U Press, 2005), p 99.
Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (NY: Pelican 1990), p 177.
4
Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant
2
3
Resistance (NY: Oxford U Press, 1996), p 146.
Zapiski oblastnoi komitet VKP (b). Sten. otchet 2-i oblastnoi partkonferentsii (MoscowSmolensk, 19310, p. 165.
6
Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (NY: Pelican 1990), p 186.
7
Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant
Resistance (New York: Oxford U Press, 1996), pp. 103, 135.
8
Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (NY: Pelican 1990), p 174.
5
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life & policies
41