324 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
of livestock production, one kolkhoz would produce fodder for beef cattle or hogs
while another would raise and breed them. The logic behind kolkhoz and regional
specialization was roughly comparable to the logic behind functionally specific
urban zones. Specialization reduced the number of variables that agronomists had
to consider; it also increased the administrative routinization of work and hence
the power and knowledge of central officials.
Procurement followed a comparable centralizing logic. Starting with the needs
of the plan and a usually unreliable estimate of the harvest, a series of quotas for
every oblast, raion and kolkhoz was mechanically derived. Each kolkhoz then
claimed that its quota was impossible to fulfil and appealed to have it lowered.
Actually meeting a quota, they knew from bitter experience, only raised the ante
for the next round of procurements. In this respect collective farmers were in a
more precarious situation than industrial workers, who still received their wages
and ration cards whether or not the factory met its quota. For the kolkhozniki,
however, meeting the quota might mean starvation. Indeed, the great famine of
1933–1934 can only be called a collectivization and procurement famine. Those
who were tempted to make trouble risked running afoul of a more grisly quota: the
one for kulaks and enemies of the state.
For much of the peasantry, the authoritarian labour regime of the kolkhoz
seemed not only to jeopardize their subsistence but to revoke many of the freedoms
they had won since their emancipation in 1861. They compared collectivization to
the serfdom their grandparents remembered. As one early sovkhoz worker put it,
‘The sovkhozy are always forcing the peasants to work; they make the peasants
weed their fields. And they don’t even give us bread or water. What will come of all
this? It’s like barschina [feudal labour dues] all over again.’^66 The peasants began to
say that the acronym for the Ail-Union Communist Party – VKP – stood for vtoroe
krepostnoe pravo, or ‘second serfdom’.^67 The parallel was not a mere figure of speech;
the resemblances to serfdom were remarkable.^68 The kolkhoz members were
required to work on the state’s land at least half-time for wages, in cash or kind,
that were derisory. They depended largely on their own small private plots to grow
the food they needed (other than grain), although they had little free time to cul-
tivate their gardens.^69 The quantity to be delivered and price paid for kolkhoz
produce was set by the state. The kolkhozniki owed annual corvée labour dues for
roadwork and cartage. They were obliged to hand over quotas of milk, meat, eggs
and so on from their private plots. The collective’s officials, like feudal masters,
were wont to use kolkhoz labour for their private sidelines and had, in practice if
not in law, the arbitrary power to insult, beat or deport the peasants. As they were
under serfdom, they were legally immobilized. An internal passport system was
reintroduced to clear the cities of ‘undesirable and unproductive residents’ and to
make sure that the peasantry did not flee. Laws were passed to deprive the peas-
antry of the firearms they used for hunting. Finally, the kolkhozniki living outside
the village nucleus (khutor dwellers), often on their old farmsteads, were forcibly
relocated, beginning in 1939. This last resettlement affected more than half a mil-
lion peasants.