Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 33766 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, p. 304. The analogy took concrete form in many of the early
revolts against collectivization, during which the peasantry destroyed all the records of labour
dues, crop deliveries, debts, and so on, just as they had under serfdom.
67 Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 152.
68 The resemblances to serfdom are spelled out in some detail in Fitzgerald, Stalin’s Peasants, pp.
128–139. For a careful and informed discussion of serfdom and comparisons to slavery, see Peter
Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1987).
69 For an astute account by a Soviet journalist and human rights campaigner in the 1980s, indicating
that the basic pattern had not greatly changed, see Lev Timofeev, Soviet Peasants, or The Peasants’
Art of Starving, trans. Jean Alexander and Alexander Zaslavsky, ed. Armando Pitassio and Alexan-
der Zaslavsky (New York: Telos Press, 1985).
70 I am persuaded by the historical accounts that characterize the mir as the peasantry’s adaptation
to a gentry and state that treated it as a collective unit for the purposes of taxation, conscription
and some forms of servile dues. The periodic redivision of land among the households ensured
that all had the means of paying their share of the head taxes, which were levied on the commune
collectively. That is, the relative solidarity of the Russian repartitional commune is itself a result of
a distinct history of relations with overlords. This claim is perfectly compatible with the fact that
such solidarity, once in place, can serve other purposes, including resistance.
71 Fitzgerald, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 106 (emphasis added).
72 I am immensely grateful to my colleague Teodor Shanin and his research teams, who are conduct-
ing comparative work on more than 20 collective farms, for making available to me the maps and
photographs for this chapter. Particular thanks to Galya Yastrebinskaya and Olga Subbotina for
the photograph of the older village of Utkino, founded in 1912 and located 20 miles from the city
of Vologda.
73 Notice that the old-style houses that were not moved (legend reference 12) are themselves laid out
on roughly equal plots along the main road. I do not know whether there were administrative
reasons behind these forms in the 18th century, when the village was founded, or whether the
original pioneers themselves laid out the grid. How the older houses that have been relocated were
originally disposed is also a mystery.
74 The same logic, of course, applied to industry, in which large units are favoured over small factor-
ies or artisanal production. As Jeffrey Sachs has observed: ‘Central planners had no desire to
coordinate the activities of hundreds or thousands of small firms in a sector if one large firm could
do the job. A standard strategy, therefore, was to create one giant firm wherever possible’ (Poland’s
Jump into the Market Economy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]). In the context
of the Soviet economy, the largest industrial unit was the huge steel complex at Magnitogorsk. It
is now a stunning example of an industrial and ecological ruin. See also Kotkin, Magnetic Moun-
tain.
75 For a more extensive treatment of the ecological effects of Soviet agriculture, see Murray Fesh-
bach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: 1995),
and Ze’ev Wolfson (Boris Komarov), The Geography of Survival: Ecology in the Post-Soviet Era
(New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
76 I worked for six weeks in 1990 on a cooperative (ex-collective) farm in East Germany, on the
Mecklenburg Plain, not too far from Neubrandenburg. The local officials were exceptionally
proud of their world-class yields per hectare in rye and potatoes with high starch content grown
for industrial uses. It was clear, however, that as an economic matter, the market cost of the inputs
(labour, machinery and fertilizer) needed to produce these yields made this enterprise an ineffi-
cient producer by any cost-accounting standard.
77 There is no doubt that a number of bureaucratic ‘pathologies’ amplified the disaster of Soviet col-
lectivization. They include the tendency of administrators to concentrate on specified, quantifia-
ble results (e.g., grain yields, tons of potatoes, tons of pig iron) rather than on quality and the fact