Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 329goes a long way toward explaining the state’s failure to realize anything but a simu-
lacrum of the high-modernist agriculture that Lenin so prized.
State Landscapes of Control and Appropriation
Drawing on the history of Soviet collectivization, I shall now venture a few more
frankly speculative ideas about the institutional logic of authoritarian high mod-
ernism. Then I shall suggest a way of grasping why such massive social bulldozing
may have worked tolerably well for some purposes but failed dismally for others.
The headlong drive to collectivization was animated by the short-term goal of
seizing enough grain to push rapid industrialization.^78 Threats and violence had
worked, up to a point, for the harvests of 1928 and 1929, but each annual turn of
the screw elicited more evasion and resistance from the peasantry. The bitter fact
was that the Soviet state faced an exceptionally diverse population of commune-
based smallholders whose economic and social affairs were nearly unintelligible to
the centre. These circumstances offered some strategic advantages to a peasantry
waging a quiet guerrilla war (punctuated by open revolt) against state claims. The
state, under the existing property regime, could only look forward to a bruising
struggle for grain each year, with no assurance of success.
Stalin chose this moment to strike a decisive blow. He imposed a designed and
legible rural landscape that would be far more amenable to appropriation, control
and central transformation. The social and economic landscape he had in mind
was of course the industrial model of advanced agriculture – large, mechanized
farms run along factory lines and coordinated by state planning.
It was a case of the ‘newest state’ meeting the ‘oldest class’ and attempting to
remake it into some reasonable facsimile of a proletariat. Compared to the peasantry,
the proletariat was already relatively more legible as a class, and not just because of its
central place in Marxist theory. The proletariat s work regimen was regulated by fac-
tory hours and by man-made techniques of production. In the case of new industrial
projects like the great steel complex at Magnitogorsk, the planners could start virtu-
ally from zero, as with Brasília. The peasants, on the other hand, represented a welter
of small, individual household enterprises. Their settlement pattern and social organ-
ization had a historical logic far deeper than that of the factory floor.
One purpose of collectivization was to destroy these economic and social units,
which were hostile to state control, and to force the peasantry into an institutional
straitjacket of the state’s devising. The new institutional order of collective farms
would now be compatible with the state’s purposes of appropriation and directed
development. Given the quasi-civil war conditions of the countryside, the solution
was as much a product of military occupation and ‘pacification’ as of ‘socialist
transformation’.^79
It is possible, I believe, to say something more generally about the ‘elective affin-
ity’ between authoritarian high modernism and certain institutional arrangements.^80