For most Russians, the Soviet experiment was not something that happened in Moscow, in party congresses or in the pages of newspapers. It happened in the village, in the field, at the threshing floor and at the kitchen table. The great majority of the population still lived on the land when Joseph Stalin decided, at the end of the 1920s, that the countryside would be remade by force. The policy was called collectivization, and its purpose, as the regime presented it, was to bring socialist order to a backward peasantry, to feed the cities and to fund the rapid industrialisation of the country. In practice it meant that the land, the animals and the grain that families had farmed for generations were taken into collective farms run by the state. The video below tells that story through archive footage and testimony, and its title is deliberately blunt: this was not the liberation of the peasantry, but its enslavement.
The word enslavement is strong, and it deserves to be examined rather than simply accepted. A peasant in a collective farm was not a slave in the legal sense, and the Soviet state did not use that word. But the comparison survives because of what the new system took away. A peasant family lost the right to farm its own land, to sell its own produce freely, to move where it wished and, most importantly, to keep enough of its harvest to live on. The state decided what would be sown, how much would be taken and what, if anything, would be left. When the state took too much, the family went hungry, and when it complained, it was treated as an enemy. That loss of control over the most basic conditions of life, land, food and movement, is what gives the title its force, and it is the thread that runs through the whole chapter.
A War on the Village
Collectivization was launched in late 1929, after a decade in which the Soviet state had already fought a long, bitter struggle with the peasantry. During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had seized grain by force to feed the cities and the army, and the peasantry had responded with revolt. In the 1920s, under the New Economic Policy, the state had allowed peasants to farm and trade on a limited basis, and the village had recovered to a point. Stalin regarded that recovery as a problem rather than a success. He believed that a socialist state could not depend on millions of small, independent farmers, and that the grain needed to feed the cities and to pay for imported machinery could only be secured by taking the countryside under direct state control. The decision, once taken, was pursued with a speed that left no room for preparation, for consent or for the harvest itself.
The campaign was carried out by activists sent from the towns, by local officials under pressure to meet quotas, and by the police. Villages were told to join the collective farm, and those that resisted were threatened, fined or arrested. Livestock was slaughtered in huge numbers by peasants who refused to hand it over, and the animals that were collected into the new farms often died for lack of fodder and care. The machinery that was supposed to replace the peasant’s horse and plough arrived slowly, if at all. Within a few years, the agricultural system that had fed Russia for centuries was broken, and the people who knew how to work it had been driven from their land, imprisoned or killed. The state had won control of the village, but at a price that it did not, at the time, admit even to itself.
Dekulakization: The Enemy Within
At the heart of collectivization was an idea that turned a social class into a crime. The kulak was, in theory, a wealthy peasant who exploited his neighbours by hiring labour and lending grain at high prices. In practice, the term was applied far more widely, to any peasant who owned a little more than his neighbours, who resisted the collective farm, or who simply spoke out. The campaign against the kulaks, called dekulakization, was launched alongside collectivization, and it was used to break the village’s resistance by removing its most independent and most capable farmers. Families were stripped of their property, loaded onto carts and trains, and deported to remote regions in the north and east, where many died of cold, hunger and disease.
The number of people caught up in this campaign is still argued over by historians, but it ran into the hundreds of thousands of families, and the effect on the village was devastating. The farmers who remained learned, quickly, that owning anything of value, or appearing to do so, was dangerous. The most enterprising peasants were gone, and those who stayed kept their heads down, did what they were told and said as little as possible. The village lost not only its people but its leadership, its habits of independence and its willingness to trust its neighbours, because denunciation was often the way to survive. Dekulakization was presented as justice, the removal of exploiters, but its real purpose was intimidation, and in that purpose it succeeded completely.
Grain, Quotas and Famine
The most terrible consequence of collectivization came not from a single order, but from the way the system worked once it was in place. The state set grain quotas for each collective farm, and those quotas were set high, because the state needed grain for the cities, for the army and for export. When the harvest was poor, the quota did not fall. When the farm had already handed over its grain, officials came back for more, searching houses for hidden stores and treating any grain kept back for food as theft from the state. The peasants who had produced the grain were left, in many districts, with nothing to eat. The famine that followed in 1932 and 1933 was worst in Ukraine, where it is remembered as the Holodomor, but it struck other grain-growing regions as well, and it killed millions of people.
Historians still argue about how much of that famine was the result of deliberate policy and how much was the result of a system that was callous, incompetent and unwilling to admit failure. What is not in dispute is that the Soviet government knew that people were starving, that it continued to take grain, and that it refused for years to acknowledge the famine in public. The regime treated the famine as a secret to be hidden rather than a disaster to be relieved, and it punished those who tried to report it. That combination, a policy that took the food, a state that denied the consequences and a police that silenced the witnesses, is what makes the famine of 1932 to 1933 one of the central crimes of the Soviet period, and it is why the video returns to it again and again. It was not an accident of the weather. It was the outcome of a system that valued the quota above the people who produced it.
The Passport and the Collective Farm
Even after the famine, the peasants were not free to leave. In 1932 the Soviet Union introduced a system of internal passports, and collective farm workers were, in practice, denied them. Without a passport, a peasant could not legally move to a town, take a job in a factory or even travel without permission. The collective farm became not only a place of work but a place of confinement, and the peasant became, in effect, bound to the land in a way that had not been seen in Russia since serfdom was abolished in 1861. The comparison is not exact, and it should not be pressed too far, but the peasants themselves understood it, and they used the word serfdom to describe their condition. The state had abolished the old order and then recreated its central feature, a rural population tied to the land and subject to the will of its masters.
Life on the collective farm was, for most of its existence, a life of hard work and little reward. Peasants were paid in workdays, a system of accounting that often left them with almost nothing at the end of the year, and many families survived only because they were allowed a small private plot on which to grow food for themselves. That private plot, a tiny patch of land worked in the evenings after the collective’s work was done, produced a disproportionate share of the country’s vegetables and meat, which is itself a measure of how badly the collective system worked. The state tolerated the plot because it needed the food, and the peasants clung to it because it was the one place where their labour belonged to them. The irony was not lost on anyone who lived through it: the system that claimed to have abolished private farming survived only because private farming was allowed to continue in miniature.
The Long Shadow
Collectivization did not end with Stalin. The collective farm remained the basic unit of Soviet agriculture for the rest of the Soviet Union’s existence, and the countryside never fully recovered from the blow it received in the early 1930s. The village lost its young people, who left for the towns whenever they could, and it lost its confidence, its traditions and its willingness to take risks. Soviet agriculture remained, throughout the history of the regime, one of its most persistent failures. The country that had once been one of the world’s great grain exporters became, by the later Soviet period, a major importer of grain, and the state spent vast sums buying food abroad that its own farms could not produce. That failure was not a matter of soil or climate. It was the legacy of a decision taken in 1929 to treat the peasantry as an obstacle to be removed rather than as a partner to be worked with.
The lesson of this chapter is a simple one, and it is also a sobering one. A state that sets out to remake the countryside by force will, in the end, destroy the very thing it claims to be building. The collective farm was supposed to be the foundation of a modern, socialist agriculture. It became, instead, a symbol of the Soviet system’s failure to understand the people it ruled. The video below, with its archive footage of villages, of trains carrying the deported and of farms that were supposed to feed a nation, makes that failure visible in a way that words alone cannot. It is a story that deserves to be remembered, not because the past can be undone, but because the temptation to remake society by force has not gone away, and the history of the Soviet countryside is a warning about where that temptation leads.