322 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
accord on this point: the overriding purpose of collectivization was to ensure the
seizure of grain. Fitzpatrick begins her study of the collectives with this assertion:
‘The main purpose of collectivization was to increase state grain procurements and
reduce the peasants’ ability to withhold grain from the market. This purpose was
obvious to peasants from the start, since the collectivization drive of the winter of
1929–1930 was the culmination of more than two years of bitter struggle between
the peasants and the state over grain procurements.’^54 Robert Conquest concurs:
‘The collective farms were essentially a chosen mechanism for extracting grain and
other products.’^55
It appears that this was also how the vast majority of the peasantry saw it, judg-
ing from their determined resistance and what we know of their views. The seizure
of grain threatened their survival. The peasant depicted in Andrei Platonov’s novel
about collectivization sees how the seizure of grain negates the earlier land reform:
‘It’s a sly business. First you hand over the land, and then you take away the grain,
right down to the last kernel. You can choke on land like that! The muzhik doesn’t
have anything left from the land except the horizon. Who are you fooling?’^56 At
least as threatening was the loss of what little margin of social and economic auton-
omy the peasantry had achieved since the revolution. Even poor peasants were
afraid of collectivization, because ‘it would involve giving up one’s land and imple-
ments and working with other families, under orders, not temporarily, as in the
army, but forever – it means the barracks for life.’^57 Unable to rely on any signifi-
cant rural support, Stalin dispatched 25,000 ‘plenipotentiaries’ (party members)
from the towns and factories ‘to destroy the peasant commune and replace it by a
collective economy subordinate to the state’, whatever the cost.^58
Authoritarian high-modernist theory and the practice of
serfdom
If the move to ‘total’ collectivization was directly animated by the party’s determi-
nation to seize the land and the crops sown on it once and for all, it was a determi-
nation filtered through a high-modernist lens. Although the Bolsheviks might
disagree about means, they did think they knew exactly what modern agriculture
should look like in the end; their understanding was as much visual as scientific.
Modern agriculture was to be large in scale, the larger the better; it was to be highly
mechanized and run hierarchically along scientific, Taylorist principles. Above all,
the cultivators were to resemble a highly skilled and disciplined proletariat, not a
peasantry. Stalin himself, before practical failures discredited a faith in colossal
projects, favoured collective farms (‘grain factories’) of 125,000 to 250,000 acres,
as in the American-assisted scheme described earlier.^59
The Utopian abstraction of the vision was matched, on the ground, by wildly
unrealistic planning. Given a map and a few assumptions about scale and mecha-
nization, a specialist could devise a plan with little reference to local knowledge
and conditions. A visiting agricultural official wrote back to Moscow from the
Urals in March 1930 to complain that, ‘on the instruction of the Raion Executive