Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 323Committee, twelve agronomists have been sitting for twenty days composing an
operational-production plan for the non-existent raion commune without ever
leaving their offices or going out into the field’.^60 When another bureaucratic
monstrosity in Velikie Lukie in the west proved unwieldy, the planners simply
reduced the scale without sacrificing abstraction. They divided the 80,000-hectare
scheme into 32 equal squares of 2500 hectares each, with one square constituting
a kolkhoz. ‘The squares were drawn on a map without any reference to actual vil-
lages, settlements, rivers, hills, swamps or other demographic and topological char-
acteristics of the land.’^61
Semiotically, we cannot understand this modernist vision of agriculture as an
isolated ideological fragment. It is always seen as the negation of the existing rural
world. A kolkhoz is meant to replace a mir or village, machines to replace horse-
drawn ploughs and hand labour, proletarian workers to replace peasants, scientific
agriculture to replace folk tradition and superstition, education to replace igno-
rance and malokulturnyi, and abundance to replace bare subsistence. Collectiviza-
tion was meant to spell the end of the peasantry and its way of life. The introduction
of a socialist economy entailed a cultural revolution as well; the ‘dark’ narod, the
peasants who were perhaps the great remaining, intractable threat to the Bolshevik
state, were to be replaced by rational, industrious, de-Christianized, progressive-
thinking kolkhoz workers.^62 The scale of collectivization was intended to efface the
peasantry and its institutions, thereby narrowing the gulf between the rural and
urban worlds. Underlying the whole plan, of course, was the assumption that the
great collective farms would operate like factories in a centralized economy, in this
case fulfilling state orders for grain and other agricultural products. As if to drive the
point home, the state confiscated roughly 63 per cent of the entire harvest in 1931.
From a central planner’s perspective, one great advantage of collectivization is
that the state acquired control over how much of each crop was sown. Starting
with the state’s needs for grains, meat, dairy products and so on, the state could
theoretically build those needs into its instructions to the collective sector. In prac-
tice, the sowing plans imposed from above were often wholly unreasonable. The
land departments, which prepared the plans, knew little about the crops they were
mandating, the inputs needed to grow them locally, or local soil conditions. Nev-
ertheless, they had quotas to fill, and fill them they did. When, in 1935, A. Iakov-
lev, the head of the Central Committee’s agricultural department, called for collective
farms to be managed by ‘permanent cadres’ who ‘genuinely knew their fields’, he
implied that the present incumbents did not.^63 We catch a glimpse of the disasters
from the Great Purges of 1936–1937, when a certain amount of peasant criticism of
kolkhoz officials was briefly encouraged in order to detect ‘wreckers’. One kolkhoz
was instructed to plough meadows and open land, without which they could not
have fed their livestock. Another received sowing orders that doubled the previous
acreage allotted for hay fields by taking in private plots and quicksands.^64
The planners clearly favoured monoculture and a far-reaching, strict division
of labour. Entire regions, and certainly individual kolkhozy, were increasingly
specialized, producing only, say, wheat, livestock, cotton or potatoes.^65 In the case