discontent that coercion in the procurement of
grain was producing.
It was in part wishful thinking and in part a
command that collectivisation was to be quickly
achieved regardless of what resistance remained.
In December 1929 mass ‘dekulakisation’ began.
Stalin decreed their ‘elimination as a class’.
Elimination of the individual peasant defined as
kulak did not yet mean death, except in the case
of those categorised as the most active counter-
revolutionaries, but meant the confiscation of his
property and imprisonment or the deportation of
the whole family to Siberia, where with a few
tools they began to farm again. Some kulaks were
allowed to remain in their locality and were inte-
grated into the collective system. The whole pro-
gramme was carried through with the utmost
violence and barbarity; 6 million peasants were
the victims. Many perished through deprivation
or suicide. The miseries of the depression do not
compare with the human disaster that unfolded
in Stalin’s Russia.
The result in the countryside was chaos. More
than half the peasant farmers had been collec-
tivised by the spring of 1930. As the time
for spring sowing approached, reports from the
countryside came back to Moscow that the for-
cible collectivisation was preparing the way for
an unparalleled disaster. There was much peasant
resistance, including uprisings. The new collec-
tives were unlikely to produce a fraction of the
food produced by the individual peasants before
collectivisation. Stalin, faced with disastrous
failure, compromised. In the face of so great a
failure, his own standing could be jeopardised. He
published an article, ‘Dizzy with Success’. Local
party workers were blamed for the excesses; coer-
cion was wrong; those peasants who wished to
leave the collective farms could do so. But instead
of the expected few there was a mass exodus;
more than half the peasants left the collectives
and took back some of their land to farm. The
collective farmers retained the best land.
To counter this unexpected turn of events,
Stalin in the summer of 1930 ordered a resump-
tion of forcible collectivisation. There was no let-
up this time. By 1935, 94 per cent of the crop
area of land was collectivised. The results in pro-
ductivity were appalling. The peasants slaughtered
their animals; the collectives were inefficient; the
yield of crops dropped and party purges and coer-
cion could not relieve the food shortages. The
conditions of the early 1930s revived the experi-
ences of the early 1920s. There were widespread
famines and millions perished. The situation
would have been even worse if Stalin had not
learnt one lesson from the winter of 1929–30 and
the widespread peasant violence and resistance to
collectivisation. The collectivised peasants were
permitted small plots and to own a few animals
from 1930 onwards. After 1932 they were even
allowed to sell food privately over and above the
quota to be delivered to the state at state prices.
The private peasant plot became an important
element in the supply of milk and meat. Agri-
culture recovered slowly from the onslaught, but
there was no leap forward as occurred in the
industrial sector. The pre-1928 levels were only
just attained again, though the population had
grown in the meantime. Economically Stalin’s
collectivisation did not solve Russia’s need for
growth of agricultural production before the
German invasion in 1941 dealt a devastating
blow. Even Stalin had to compromise with the
peasantry in allowing some private production
and sale, or face the prospect of permanent
conditions of famine.
The enormous tensions created by Stalin’s
industrial and agricultural policies from 1929 to
1934 were accompanied by a policy of terrorisation
to thwart any possible opposition. Propaganda
sought to raise Stalin to the public status of a demi-
god, the arbiter of every activity of society – art, lit-
erature, music, education, Marxist philosophy.
Terror tactics were not new under Soviet rule.
Show trials, which turned those who were con-
structing the new Russia into scapegoats for fail-
ures, had begun in 1928. It appears that Stalin’s
power was not absolute between 1928 and 1934
and that the failures, especially in agriculture, were
weakening his position. Perhaps a straw in the
wind was the curious fact that the Seventeenth
Party Congress early in 1934 changed his title
from that of ‘general secretary’ to just ‘secretary’
of the party. Was this a rebuke against his attempt
to gather all power in his hands? Was the leader of
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