Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 315

of ambitious high-modernist schemes for which local knowledge practice, and
context are considered irrelevant or at best an annoyance to be circumvented.

Collectivization in Soviet Russia

What we have here isn’t a mechanism, it’s people living here. You can’t get them

squared around until they get themselves arranged. I used to think of the revo-

lution as a steam engine, but now I see that it’s not.

Andrei Platonov, Chevengur

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was an extreme but diagnostic case of
authoritarian high-modernist planning. It represented an unprecedented transfor-
mation of agrarian life and production, and it was imposed by all the brute force
at the state’s disposal. The officials who directed this massive change, moreover,
were operating in relative ignorance of the ecological, social and economic arrange-
ments that underwrote the rural economy. They were flying blind.
Between early 1930 and 1934, the Soviet state waged a virtual war in the coun-
tryside. Realizing that he could not depend on the rural Soviets to ‘liquidate the
kulaks’ and collectivize, Stalin dispatched 25,000 battle-tested, urban Commun-
ists and proletarians with full powers to requisition grain, arrest resistors and
collectivize. He was convinced that the peasantry was trying to bring down the
Soviet state. In reply to a personal letter from Mikhail Sholokhov (author of And
Quiet Flows the Don) alerting him to the fact that peasants along the Don were on
the verge of starvation, Stalin replied, ‘The esteemed grain growers of your district
(and not only of your district alone) carried on an “Italian strike” (ital’ianka), sabo-
tage!, and were not loathe to leave the workers and the Red Army without bread.
That the sabotage was quiet and outwardly harmless (without bloodshed) does not
change the fact that the esteemed grain growers waged what was virtually a “quiet”
war against Soviet power. A war of starvation, dear comrade Sholokhov.’^33
The human costs of that war are still in dispute, but they were undeniably
grievous. Estimates of the death toll alone, as a result of the ‘dekulakization’ and
collectivization campaigns and the ensuing famine, range from a ‘modest’ 3 or 4
million to, as some current Soviet figures indicate, more than 20 million. The
higher estimates have, if anything, gained more credibility as new archival material
has become available. Behind the deaths rose a level of social disruption and vio-
lence that often exceeded that of the civil war immediately following the revolu-
tion. Millions fled to the cities or to the frontier, the infamous gulag was vastly
enlarged, open rebellion and famine raged in much of the countryside, and more
than half of the nation’s livestock (and draft power) was slaughtered.^34
By 1934, the state had ‘won’ its war with the peasantry. If ever a war earned the
designation ‘Pyrrhic victory’, this is the one. The sovkhoz (state farms) and kolkhoz