its purpose to ‘modernise’ agriculture on a scale
similar to industry.
Stalin’s cure for Russia’s backward agriculture
was to transform the small, scattered peasant
holdings into large farms, collectively and coop-
eratively farmed. In theory this was sound. In
practice, productivity slumped when the individ-
ual peasant’s personal ownership of his lands and
his livestock was abolished. The peasants did not
voluntarily give up their land and join collective
farms. By 1928 less than three acres in a hundred
of sown land were cultivated by collective or state
farms. At the beginning of that year Stalin organ-
ised from his own secretariat the forcible seizure
of grain as the peasants were unwilling to part
with it for the artificially low prices laid down. It
was a return to the methods of war-communism.
Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky, once Stalin’s allies
against the Trotsky ‘left’, as has been seen,
attacked Stalin from May 1928 onwards when
they realised he intended to continue the emer-
gency measures. Bukharin, in particular, con-
demned Stalin’s dictatorial pretensions, declaring:
‘We stand by the principle of collective action and
refuse to accept the principle of control by a
single individual, no matter how great his author-
ity.’ Stalin countered by savagely attacking
Bukharin as a right-wing deviationist. Between
February and July 1929 the political standing of
the three leaders was progressively undermined
and the expulsion from the Politburo of Tomsky
and Bukharin in November 1929 marked the
elimination of their opposition to Stalin’s indus-
trial and agricultural plans. (Rykov retained his
membership of the Politburo until 1930.)
From the summer of 1929 Stalin issued party
directives to secure more grain for state purchase
at low prices. The kulaks were singled out as the
most prosperous and therefore pressure on them
would, it was thought, yield a good return. Not
only their grain but their farms too began to be
seized. NEP was breaking up. On 7 November
1929 Stalin signalled the drive for forcible col-
lectivisation at the greatest possible speed. He
characteristically declared that the middle peas-
ants as well as the poor peasants had turned to
the collective farms. The continuing crisis caused
by the difficulty of getting grain was a crucial
reason for the sudden urgency, but behind
Stalin’s assault also lay a long-felt suspicion of
peasants as reliable allies of the urban proletariat.
Between the Bolsheviks and the peasants there
was a large gap. The notion of petty-peasant pro-
prietorship simply did not fit into the communist
model of the future classless society. Stalin saw
even the poorest peasant defending his possession
of land and animals as exhibiting the characteris-
tics of the ‘petty-capitalist class’. As long as the
landed peasant persisted in Russian society, Stalin
believed, a communist state would never be built.
He may have calculated that by ruining the more
prosperous peasants, the kulaks, by defining them
as a class to be destroyed, all the peasants would
be taught the lesson that successful private enter-
prise held no future for them. Certainly, party
leaders believed that they could stir up class war
between the poor peasant and the kulak and so
gain some peasant support. ‘Kulak’ was, more-
over, an entirely elastic definition and could be
extended to any peasant; those too obviously poor
could simply be labelled as kulak sympathisers.
Under the cover of the supposed kulak enemy,
land could be seized, peasants expelled and sent by
cattle trucks to Siberia, and the whole peasantry
could be terrorised. Without forcible measures to
overcome the agricultural crisis, Stalin believed,
the acceleration of industrialisation would fail, and
one of his close supporters improbably claimed
that all industrial growth would come to a
standstill halfway through the Five-Year Plan if
industrialisation was not accelerated.
Plans for the acceleration of industrial produc-
tion went hand in hand with plans for the accel-
eration of collectivisation of the peasant farms.
From the summer of 1929 onwards the peasants
were being pressurised by party representatives in
the villages to join the collective farms. The peas-
ants reacted with suspicion or outright hostility.
By October 1929 collectives were farming almost
one acre in eleven of sown land. Meanwhile,
forcible procurement of grain by party task forces
over the whole country was securing results. In
the autumn of 1929 Stalin, supported by
Molotov and Kaganovich, determined to break all
resistance to a great leap forward and to the mass