336 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
representative village soviet. ‘One government official from Samara Province claimed, with con-
scious irony, that the conflicts between the kombedy and the Soviets represented the main form
of “class struggle” in the rural areas during this period’ (ibid., p. 197). In the larger villages, some
support for Bolshevik agrarian plans could be found among educated youth, schoolteachers and
veterans who had become Bolsheviks while serving with the Red Army during World War I or the
civil war (and who might have imagined themselves occupying leading roles in the new collective
farms). See Figes, ‘Peasant Aspirations and Bolshevik State-Building’.
46 There was also a tendency to hide income from craft, artisanal and trading sidelines as well as
‘garden’ crops. During this same period, it should be added, insufficient resources – manpower,
draft animals, manure and seed – meant that some of the arable either could not be planted or
could only produce yields that were far lower than usual.
47 Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, pp. 515–516. For Yaney, the continuity in aspirations from what he
terms ‘messianic social agronomists’ under the czarist regime to the Bolshevik collectivizers was
striking. In a few cases, they were the same people.
48 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, p. 250.
49 Hunger and flight from the towns had reduced the number of urban industrial workers from 3.6
million in 1917 to no more than 1.5 million in 1920 (Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p.
85).
50 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, p. 321.
51 Quoted in Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 39.
52 In theory, at least, the most ‘advanced’ were the state farms – the proletarian, industrial, collective
farms in which workers were paid wages and no private plots were allowed. These farms also
received the bulk of state investment in machinery in the early years. For production statistics, see
Davies, The Socialist Offensive, p. 6.
53 Ibid., pp. 82–113.
54 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 4.
55 Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 183.
56 Andrei Platonov, Chevengur, trans. Anthony Olcott (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1978).
57 M. Hindus, Red Breed (London, 1931), quoted in Davies, The Socialist Offensive, p. 209.
58 Davies, The Socialist Offensive, p. 205.
59 The size of collective farms remained enormous, even by American standards, throughout the
Soviet period. Fred Pryor calculates that in 1970 the average state farm comprised more than
100,000 acres, while the average collective farm comprised over 25,000 acres. The state farms
were greatly favoured in access to inputs, machinery and other subsidies. See Frederick Pryor, The
Red and the Green: The Rise and Fall of Collectivized Agriculture in Marxist Regimes (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), table 7, p. 34.
60 Fitzgerald, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 105.
61 Ibid., pp. 105–106. One imagines that the soils and existing cropping patterns were also ignored.
62 As the Bolsheviks explained, ‘The kolkhozy are the only means by which the peasantry can escape
from poverty and darkness’ (Davies, The Socialist Offensive, p. 282). Perhaps the best visual images
of the culturally transforming properties of electricity, machinery and collectivization are found
in Sergey Eisenstein’s film The General Line, a veritable technological romance set in rural Russia.
The film masterfully conveys the Utopian aspirations of high modernism by contrasting the plod-
ding dark narod with his horse and scythe with images of electric cream separators, tractors, mow-
ing machines, engines, skyscrapers, engines and airplanes.
63 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 194.
64 Ibid., pp. 306–309.
65 For an account of how an even more extreme version of regional specialization was imposed on
the Chinese countryside, in violation of local soil and climatological conditions, see Ralph Thax-
ton, Salt of the Earth: The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).