Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 325The resulting labour rules, property regime and settlement pattern did in fact
resemble a cross between plantation or estate agriculture on one hand and feudal
servitude on the other.
As a vast, state-imposed blueprint for revolutionary change, collectivization
was at least as notable for what it destroyed as for what it built. The initial intent
of collectivization was not just to crush the resistance of well-to-do peasants and
grab their land; it was also to dismantle the social unit through which that resist-
ance was expressed: the mir. The peasant commune had typically been the vehicle
for organizing land seizures during the revolution, for orchestrating land use and
grazing, for managing local affairs generally, and for opposing procurements.^70 The
party had every reason to fear that if the collectives were based on the traditional
village, they would simply reinforce the basic unit of peasant resistance. Hadn’t the
village Soviets quickly escaped the state’s control? Huge collectives, then, had the
decided advantage of bypassing village structures altogether. They could be run by
a board consisting of cadres and specialists. If the giant kolkhoz was then divided
into sections, one specialist could be named manager of each, ‘“like the bailiffs in
the old days” [of serfdom] as [one] ... report wryly noted’.^71 Eventually, except in
frontier areas, practical considerations prevailed and a majority of the kolkhozy
coincided roughly with the earlier peasant commune and its lands.
The kolkhoz was not, however, just window dressing hiding a traditional com-
mune. Almost everything had changed. All the focal points for an autonomous
public life had been eliminated. The tavern, rural fairs and markets, the church
and the local mill disappeared; in their places stood the kolkhoz office, the public
meeting room, and the school. Nonstate public spaces gave way to the state spaces
of government agencies, albeit local ones.
The concentration, legibility and centralization of social organization and pro-
duction can be seen in the map of the state farm at Verchnyua Troitsa (Upper
Trinity) in Tver Oblast (Figure 14.1).^72 Much of the old village has been removed
from the centre and relocated on the outskirts (legend reference 11).^73 Two-story
apartment houses containing 16 flats each have been clustered near the centre
(legend references 13, 14, 15; see also Figure 14.2), while the local administration
and trade centre, school and community building, all public institutions run by
the state, lie close to the centre of the new grid. Even allowing for the exaggerated
formalism of the map, the state farm is a far cry from the sprawl and autonomous
institutional order of the precollectivized village; a photograph showing the old-
style housing and a lane illustrates the stark visual contrast (see Figure 14.3).
Compared to Haussmann’s retrofitting of the physical geography of Paris to
make it legible and to facilitate state domination, the Bolsheviks’ retrofitting of
rural Russia was far more thoroughgoing. In place of an opaque and often obsti-
nate mir, it had fashioned a legible kolkhoz. In place of myriad small farms, it had
created a single, local economic unit.^74 With the establishment of hierarchical state
farms, a quasi-autonomous petite bourgeoisie was replaced with dependent
employees. In place, therefore, of an agriculture in which planting, harvesting and
marketing decisions were in the hands of individual households, the party-state