Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 321sailors and workers in Kronstadt. At this point the beleaguered party beat a tactical
retreat, abandoning War Communism and inaugurating the New Economic Pol-
icy (NEP), which condoned free trade and small property. As Figes notes, ‘Having
defeated the White Army, backed by eight Western powers, the Bolshevik govern-
ment surrendered before its own peasants.’^50 It was a hollow victory. The deaths
from the hunger and epidemics of 1921–1922 nearly equalled the toll claimed by
World War I and the civil war combined.
Round two: High modernism and procurement
The conjunction of a high-modernist faith in what agriculture should look like in
the future and a more immediate crisis of state appropriation helped to spark the
all-out drive to collectivization in the winter of 1929–1930. In focusing on just
these two issues, we must necessarily leave to others (and they are a multitude) the
gripping issues of the human costs of collectivization, the struggle with the ‘right’
opposition led by Bukharin, and whether Stalin intended to liquidate Ukrainian
culture as well as many Ukrainians.
There is no doubt that Stalin shared Lenin’s faith in industrial agriculture. The
aim of collectivization, he said in May 1928, was ‘to transfer from small, backward,
and fragmented peasant farms to consolidated, big, public farms, provided with
machines, equipped with the data of science, and capable of producing the greatest
quantity of grain for the market’.^51
This dream had been deferred in 1921. There had been some hope that a
gradually expanding collective sector in the 1920s could provide as much as one-
third of the country’s grain needs. Instead, the collectivized sector (both the state
farms and the collective farms), which absorbed 10 per cent of the labour force,
produced a dismal 2.2 per cent of gross farm production.^52 When Stalin decided
on a crash industrialization programme, it was clear that the existing socialist agri-
cultural sector could not provide either the food for a rapidly growing urban work-
force or the grain exports necessary to finance the imported technology needed for
industrial growth. The middle and rich peasants, many of them newly prosperous
since the New Economic Policy, had the grain he needed.
Beginning in 1928, the official requisition policy put the state on a collision
course with the peasantry. The mandated delivery price of grain was one-fifth of
the market price, and the regime returned to using police methods as peasant
resistance stiffened.^53 When the procurements faltered, those who refused to deliver
what was required (who, along with anyone else opposing collectivization, were
called kulaks, regardless of their economic standing) were arrested for deportation
or execution, and all their grain, equipment, land and livestock were seized and
sold. The orders sent to those directly in charge of grain procurement specified
that they were to arrange meetings of poor peasants to make it seem as if the ini-
tiative had come from below. It was in the context of this war over grain, and not
as a carefully planned policy initiative, that the decision to force ‘total’ (sploshnaia)
collectivization was made in late 1929. Scholars who agree on little else are in