- How to organize agriculture in the new, supposedly communist, Soviet
state had always been a difficult problem for two related reasons. First,
according toMarx, the revolution was not supposed to happen until a country
was thoroughly industrialized and would therefore have a rather small and
dependent peasantry. Consequently the peasantry, as a category, fits badly into
the class analysis of Marxism, which posits two, and only two, mutually
opposed classes. Secondly, in order to achieve theBolshevikrevolution,
Lenin had had to lean heavily on the support of the peasantry, in the absence
of a large industrial proletariat, yet peasants in Russia, as is almost a universal
truth of sociology, were extremely conservative. Their only interest in the
revolution had been to gain legal control of the land they had often farmed as
tenants, or to gain land from redistribution of large semi-feudal estates. This
tendency had been exacerbated by the relaxation of communist economic
rules that Lenin had been forced into in theNew Economic Policy, which
had considerably increased the size of the class known as Kulaks, rich peasants
with considerable land holdings. Because of the general inadequacy of the
industrial base there was not enough money to buy for the urban proletariat
the foodstuffs hoarded by the agricultural sector. In any case, the large-scale
ownership of private property, and the straightforward profit motivation of the
peasantry, were embarrassing in a newly-created communist society.
Stalin’s answer was to create vast collective farms, on which the agricultural
workers would be employed in much the same way as industrial workers were
employed in the state-controlled and centrally-planned factories of the indus-
trial sphere. Other benefits were expected from increasing returns to scale, as
high levels of mechanization were seen as economically more suitable than on
small-scale private farms. The peasantry in general, and the Kulaks most of all,
resented and opposed this appropriation of ‘their’ land, and the forced change
of status from individual owners (and often employers) to mere wage labourers,
but Stalin and the party, helped by the Red Army, used all necessary violence to
overcome the objections. Massive deportations to other parts of the Union,
and the murder of, in some estimates as many as six million, Kulaks and
peasants produced an entirely transformed agriculture.
There can be no doubt that the overall results of this policy were catastrophic;
agricultural yields fell, despite later efforts byKhrushchevto humanize and
moderate the system. The Soviet Union, in most recent years, depended on
Western agricultural surpluses for as much as 40% of its grain requirements.
Some steps were taken to reintroduce a private incentive, by allowing peasants
on collective farms to control small plots of land themselves and sell their
produce on a free market, but no immediate solution to the agricultural
problems became apparent even after the period ofperestroikaand the
fundamental reorganization of what used to be the Soviet Union. It should
be noted, however, that part of the agricultural problem has always been one of
Collectivization