Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 335between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our
strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who was master here. It has cost
millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay, we’ve won the war’ (quoted in ibid.,
p. 261).
34 The so-called Great Leap Forward in China was at least as deadly and may be analysed in compa-
rable terms. I have chosen to concentrate on Soviet Russia largely because events there occurred
some 30 years before the Great Leap Forward and hence have received much more scholarly atten-
tion, especially during the past seven years, when the newly opened Russian archives have greatly
expanded our knowledge. For a recent popular account of the Chinese experience, see Jasper
Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (London: John Murray, 1996).
35 In cases where yields were high among state farms and show projects, they were typically achieved
with such costly inputs of machinery, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that the results were
economically irrational.
36 For an exceptionally perceptive account of collectivization and its results, see Moshe Lewin, The
Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon,
1985), especially part 2, pp. 89–188.
37 I use the term ‘lumpen’ here to designate a huge floating population of great variety and shifting
occupations. Although Marx and Lenin always used the term scornfully, implying both criminal
tendencies and political opportunism, I intend no such denigration.
38 Stalin, it is now believed, was personally responsible for drafting in August 1932 a secret decree
branding all those who withheld grain, now declared to be ‘sacred and untouchable’ state prop-
erty, as ‘enemies of the people’ and ruling that they should be summarily arrested and shot. The
same Stalin, at the Second Congress of Outstanding Kolkhozniks in 1935, championed the
retaining of adequate private plots: ‘The majority of kolkhozniks want to plant an orchard, culti-
vate a vegetable garden or keep bees. The kolkhozniks want to live a decent life, and for that this
0.12 hectares is not enough. We need to allocate a quarter to half a hectare, and even as much as
one hectare in some districts’ (quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Sur-
vival in the Russian Village After Collectivization [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], pp.
73, 122).
39 Ibid., p. 432.
40 Orlando Figes, ‘Peasant Aspirations and Bolshevik State-Building in the Countryside, 1917–
1925,’ paper presented at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, 14 April
1995, p. 24. Figes also links these views to socialist tracts that date from at least the 1890s and that
pronounced the peasantry doomed by economic progress (p. 28).
41 R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1980), p. 51.
42 Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 43.
43 Also, the collapse of urban enterprises, which would normally have supplied consumer goods and
farm implements to the rural areas, meant that there was less incentive for the peasantry to sell
grain in order to make purchases in the market.
44 See Orlando Figes’s remarkably perceptive and detailed book, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga
Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Even near revolutions
create a similar vacuum. Following the 1905 revolution, it took the czarist government nearly two
years to reassert its control over the countryside.
45 The relative unity of the village was itself enhanced by the revolutionary process. The richest
landlords had left or been burned out, and the poorest, landless families had typically gotten some
land. As a result, the villagers were more socioeconomically similar and therefore more likely to
respond similarly to external demands. Since many of the independent farmers were pressured to
return to the commune, they were now dependent on the entire village for their household’s allot-
ment of the communal lands. Thus it is not hard to understand why, in those instances where the
kombedy was an instrument of Bolshevik policy, it faced determined opposition from the more