Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 317What seems clear, in the brief account that follows, is that collectivization per
se cannot be laid solely at the feet of Stalin, though he bore much responsibility for
its exceptional speed and brutality.^38 A collectivized agriculture was always part of
the Bolshevik map of the future, and the great procurement struggles of the late
1920s could hardly have had any other outcome in the context of the decision to
pursue forced-draft industrialization. The party’s high-modernist faith in great col-
lectivist schemes survived long after the desperate improvisations of the early
1930s. That faith, which claimed to be both aesthetic and scientific, is clearly vis-
ible in a much later agrarian high-modernist dream: namely, Khrushchev’s virgin
lands scheme, launched well after Stalin’s death and after his crimes during col-
lectivization had been publicly denounced. What is remarkable is how long these
beliefs and structures prevailed, in spite of the evidence of their manifold failings.
Round one: The Bolshevik state and the peasantry
It sometimes seems to me that if I could persuade everyone to say ‘systematize’
each time he wanted to say ‘liberate’ and to say ‘mobilization’ every time he
wanted to say ‘reform’ or ‘progress’ I would not have to write long books about
government–peasant interaction in Russia.George Yaney, The Urge to MobilizeIn the particular book quoted above, Yaney was writing about pre-revolutionary
Russia, but he could just as easily have been writing about the Bolshevik state.
Until 1930, the continuities between the rural policy of the Leninist state and its
czarist predecessor are more striking than their differences. There is the same belief
in reform from above and in large, modern, mechanized farms as the key to pro-
ductive agriculture. There is also, alas, the same high level of ignorance about a
very complex rural economy coupled, disastrously, with heavy-handed raids on the
countryside to seize grain by force. Although the continuities persisted even after
the institutional revolution of 1930, what is new about the all-out drive to collec-
tivize is the revolutionary state’s willingness to completely remake the institutional
landscape of the agrarian sector, and at whatever cost.
The new Bolshevik state faced a rural society that was significantly more
opaque, resistant, autonomous and hostile than the one encountered by the czarist
bureaucracy. If the czarist officials had provoked massive defiance and evasion in
their ‘crude Muscovite tribute-collecting methods’ during World War I,^39 there
was every reason to suspect that the Bolsheviks would have an even harder time
squeezing grain from the countryside.
If much of the countryside was hostile to the Bolsheviks, the sentiment was
abundantly reciprocated. For Lenin, as we have seen, the Land Decree, which
gave to the peasants the land that they had seized, had been a strategic manoeu-
vre designed to buy rural quiescence while power was consolidated; he had no
doubt that peasant smallholdings must eventually be abolished in favour of large,