Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 2 ·
Collectivisation in the USSR
Chapter 2 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “The Great Turn: Collectivisation”
In the Great Turn of 1929 Stalin abandoned the NEP’s market compromise and forced peasants into collective farms, to give the state cheap grain for the towns, exports and war. Kulaks were sorted into categories for camps, execution or deportation, and peasants resisted on a large scale in 1929–30.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, March 1930 — Collectivisation — the countryside in revolt.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1930 · Europe in 1930.
Part of IB History: The Soviet Union under Stalin →
SHORT EXPLANATION
Four Soviet citizens in five lived in villages in 1929, most on small family farms. Stalin’s “Great Turn” changed the terms on which they worked. He abandoned the market compromise with the peasants and forced their farms into collective units, making himself a dictator in fact as well as in title.
The new kolkhoz pooled land, animals and tools. It owed the state a fixed grain quota, and its members were paid from what remained, much like sharecroppers receiving what was left after the landlord’s share. Stalin expected the grain to feed towns, buy machinery abroad and build reserves for war. The arrangement also brought independent peasants under party control.
Officials drove the share of households collectivized from under a tenth to over half in the winter of 1929–30. Alongside this rush came “dekulakisation”: the seizure of the property of better-off peasants, or kulaks (“fists”), roughly the village’s small business owners. Dark arrows trace the deportation of some 1.8 million people in 1930–31 to the northern forests, the Urals, western Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Resistance threatened the spring sowing. Political police recorded more than 13,000 riots and revolts in 1930, involving perhaps 2.5 million people; dashed outlines show the unrest. Stalin retreated for a few months in March, then resumed the drive. By 1937 almost every household had been collectivized. The state controlled the harvest, but the countryside had lost much of its livestock and trust.
The full story
The state’s need for grain lay at the center of the Great Turn. Under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), introduced in 1921, peasants could sell on a free market and hold grain back when prices did not suit them. To Stalin, the grain crisis of 1927–28 showed that a government dependent on those decisions could not supply rapid industrialization. He sought a system in which the state could take grain without bargaining for it.
The attack on the better-off peasants began openly on 27 December 1929, when Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”. The party regarded these farmers as rural capitalists. On 30 January 1930 the Politburo, its small ruling committee, set out three categories: “counter-revolutionary activists” were to go to camps or face execution; wealthier families were to be deported to remote regions; and the rest were to be resettled on poor land nearby. Officials had quotas to meet and little time. Even a poor peasant who protested could be labeled a kulak. The category could identify an opponent as readily as an economic position.
The campaign required people to run farms suddenly assembled from village holdings. About 27,000 urban workers, the “Twenty-Five Thousanders”, were sent to take charge, alongside party brigades and troops of the OGPU, the political police and a forerunner of the KGB. Their arrival placed representatives of the party directly over village work.
Peasants responded both by resisting the takeover and by slaughtering animals they would otherwise have to surrender. By 1933 the numbers of horses and cattle had roughly halved. The map’s dashed outlines mark unrest in right-bank Ukraine, the Kuban, the Volga, the Black Earth region and southern Kazakhstan in 1930. Women often led protests known as babi bunty (“women’s riots”), partly because authorities were slower to shoot them.
Revolts around Tulchyn in the Ukrainian border districts particularly alarmed Moscow. With spring sowing at risk, Stalin published “Dizzy with Success” on 2 March 1930 and blamed local officials for “excesses”. Millions left the collective farms within weeks. Their departure showed how little of the earlier rush had depended on willing consent.
The state did not give up its objective. From autumn 1930 it used taxes, delivery quotas and the threat of deportation to bring peasants back. These pressures worked more slowly than the first campaign: about three-fifths of households were collectivized by 1932 and over nine-tenths by 1937.
The deportation arrows lead to guarded “special settlements” around Kotlas in the northern forests, in the Urals, at Narym in Siberia and on the Karaganda steppe. Families had to build these exile villages themselves, and many died in the first winters. Some showcase farms, such as Gigant on the Salsk steppe, received tractors. Most villages instead relied on machine-tractor stations, state depots that rented machinery and supplied political supervisors.
The new system let the state take much more grain even as harvests fell. It had acquired control over delivery, but taking grain did not ensure that enough remained for the people who grew it. That gap led directly to the famines of 1932–33.
FULL EXPLANATION
Counting the peasant revolt
After 1991, opened police records made it possible to see the scale of the revolt. In Peasant Rebels under Stalin (1996), Lynne Viola uses OGPU counts of about 13,750 mass disturbances in 1930, involving roughly 2.5 million people. March alone accounted for more than 6,500 incidents, and Ukraine was the most rebellious republic. This was the largest rural revolt in Europe since the Russian civil war. The count is a floor: officials could record only incidents reported to them. The authorities called the revolt “kulak terror”, blamed hidden enemies and used that explanation to justify further deportations. Viola and Andrea Graziosi describe a “peasant war” fought through petitions, riots, arson and murders of activists. Sheila Fitzpatrick, in Stalin’s Peasants (1994), gives more attention to the resistance that followed open defeat: peasants worked slowly on collective fields and devoted effort to their private plots. Open revolt failed by 1931, but resistance continued in the routines of village life.
Did collectivisation pay for industry?
Soviet textbooks credited collectivization with financing industry. Grain taken from agriculture, however, was only one side of the account. In the 1960s Soviet economist A. A. Barsov calculated that spending on machinery and the collapse of livestock left little or no net agricultural surplus for industry in 1928–32. James Millar reached the same conclusion in the West. Robert C. Allen’s Farm to Factory (2003) offered a further comparison. He argued that retaining a grain market could have produced growth as fast or faster: peasants’ movement to towns was the main source of industrial labor, and a market would also have supplied it. R. W. Davies and other historians accept the economic costs but emphasize the control gained over grain, which allowed the state to feed cities and the army regardless of the harvest. The debate points to political security as the more substantial return, paid for by the countryside.
The kolkhoz bargain
After 1933 the state and villages arrived at a working compromise that shaped rural life until the Soviet Union ended. Under the Model Statute of the collective farm, revised in 1935, each household could keep a private plot of up to half a hectare and some animals, usually a cow, a few pigs and poultry. Work for the collective earned “labour days”, credits paid in grain and a little cash at year’s end. The state’s quota came first, so payment was small and unpredictable. The plots occupied little farmland but produced a large share of Soviet potatoes, vegetables, milk and meat; much was sold at free prices in kolkhoz markets. They gave households a means to survive alongside poorly rewarded collective work. The December 1932 internal passport system excluded collective farmers, tying them to their farms much as serfdom had tied their grandparents to estates. Peasants called the kolkhoz the “second serfdom”. The compromise endured while leaving the state in control.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The grain crisis convinced Stalin the market had failed. Low fixed prices and scarce goods gave peasants little incentive to sell; some held grain back or fed it to livestock. State purchases fell sharply in winter 1927–28. Stalin called this a kulak “grain strike” and concluded that industrialization could not depend on peasants choosing when to sell. Emergency seizures brought grain in 1928–29 but reduced sowing, making compulsory delivery appear a necessary permanent solution.
Industrialisation needed grain, labour and foreign currency. The First Five-Year Plan, approved in 1929 and subsequently raised, required food for millions of urban workers and grain exports to pay for foreign machinery. Officials expected collective farms to deliver both cheaply and on schedule under quotas fixed before harvest. They also expected tractors and larger farms to release workers for Magnitogorsk and other new cities.
Bolshevik ideology distrusted the peasant smallholder. For Marxists, private farming could generate capitalism again. Lenin had warned that small-scale production did so “daily, hourly”, and had called NEP a temporary retreat. Many party members therefore regarded collective farming as the socialist future of the village. The 1927 war scare added urgency: peasants might hoard grain or side with an invader when the state needed their cooperation.
Victory over the Right removed every brake. Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky warned that coercion would wreck the alliance between workers and peasants. Their defeat by 1929 removed the last voices urging caution. In the Politburo, a call for slower change risked the accusation of “Right deviation”, while officials raised targets repeatedly to demonstrate loyalty. This political climate helped determine the speed of the campaign in 1929–30.
THE TURNING POINT
Tulchyn and “Dizzy with Success”, March 1930. Revolt in February and March 1930, especially in the Ukrainian border districts around Tulchyn, forced Stalin’s only retreat from collectivization. His article of 2 March blamed local zealots, and millions left the collective farms. When the campaign resumed in autumn, the regime relied on taxes, quotas and selective deportation: pressures that brought peasants back without repeating the same immediate confrontation. By 1932 the state could take the harvest without a single decisive battle.
What it changed
The famines of 1930–33. Moscow’s compulsory quotas claimed grain regardless of the harvest, while slaughtered livestock could no longer serve as a reserve. Harvests fell in 1931 and 1932, but quotas remained high. Villages in Ukraine, the Kuban, the Volga and above all Kazakhstan were left without food. The system intended to secure grain had removed the margin on which their survival depended.
The special settlements and the Gulag. Some 1.8 million deported “kulaks” formed the Stalin era’s first great forced-labor population. Under OGPU control, they lived in barracks and dugouts, cut timber in the north and dug mines in the Urals. The settlements showed the police how deportees and prisoners could be used to open remote regions, and became a prototype for the Gulag.
A rural economy that never recovered. The damage outlasted the campaign. Livestock numbers did not recover their 1928 level until the 1950s, and grain yields remained low for decades. Collective farmers, paid little and late, put their strongest efforts into their own plots. The gap between state fields and village gardens persisted, and weak agriculture troubled leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev.
Peasants into workers. Millions escaped collectivization by leaving for towns and building sites, expanding the industrial workforce faster than planners expected. Between 1926 and 1939 the urban population more than doubled. The internal passports introduced in December 1932 sought to control movement, making city residence a privilege the state could grant or withhold.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was collectivisation above all an economic policy or a political one?
Stalin faced an economic problem: the grain crisis of 1927–28 threatened food for the towns and exports needed to buy foreign machinery. He chose to solve it by bringing the countryside under state control. Was that choice economically successful? Economists from Barsov to Allen find that collectivization probably supplied little net surplus to industry, because livestock was destroyed and yields fell; a market alternative might have produced growth as fast. The political gain was more immediate and lasting. Independent farmers could no longer withhold grain, and party officials, machine-tractor stations and the threat of deportation policed the countryside. Bolshevik belief that private farming bred capitalism joined the political and economic aims. The evidence weighs toward control as the decisive motive. It shows how an authoritarian regime can choose control over output and present that choice as economic necessity.
An interesting fact
In late 1929 the party sought 25,000 experienced industrial workers for the countryside. About 70,000 applied and roughly 27,000 went, mostly from factories in Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine. Many had never farmed. Lynne Viola studied these volunteers in The Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987). Many sincerely believed they were bringing modern methods to backward villages; peasants often saw them as occupiers. Several hundred were attacked and some killed in the revolts of 1930.
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