4.1 Changes in Agriculture

Question 1

What were the political reasons leading to Stalin taking control of agriculture?

Answer 1

Stalin wanted more control over the countryside, and he finally wanted to defeat Bukharin, a supporter of the NEP (new economic policy).

Question 2

What were the economic reasons that influence Stalin to take control of agriculture?

Answer 2

Money was easily gained by selling grain abroad, this could pay for rapid industrialisation, Stalin could then move forward and attempt modernised farming

Question 3

Why did stalin believe that taking control of the agriculture was necessary (Stalin’s ideologies)?

Answer 3

Stalin feared that the peasants were secretly capitalist and needed to be under control, this idea was also popular with workers, who didn’t get as much from the revolution than peasants

Question 4

Main communist ideologies to agriculture (according to Marxist beliefs)?

Answer 4

The highest stage of human developmet occured when countries were industialised and mass produced goods.

Question 5

Main communist ideologies to agriculture (according to Marxist beliefs)?

Answer 5

A traditional rural society (working in agriculture & living in countryside) would be replaced by an urban society (workers live in towns & cities)

Question 6

Main communist ideologies to agriculture (according to Marxist beliefs)?

Answer 6

Private property would be replaced by shared ownership.

Question 7

Main communist ideologies to agriculture (according to Marxist Beliefs)?

Answer 7

Wealth would be redisturbed to close the great gap between rich + poor

Question 8

Describe the state of Russia in the early 1920s

Answer 8

Russia was rural and agricultural, it only had a small industrial working class and backwards farming, with very little education and very religious all which was against the communist ideologies.

Question 9

State the problems with farming in Russia.

Answer 9

It was run by independent peasant farmers, the farmers behaved like capitalists and wanted the government to leave them alone, the communist government wanted to get rid of this last survival of independence and capitalism, and bring farming under the control of the government.

Question 10

Name the conditions of the New Economic Policy (NEP).

Answer 10

Under NEP, peasant farmers had gained considerable freedom to run their farms, sell their produce, and make money.

Question 11

What were the kulaks?

Answer 11

The kulaks were the richest of the farmers.

Question 12

State the problems of the New Economic Policy (NEP)

Answer 12

In the 1920s, some communist (Bukharin) hoped that by allowing greater freedom to peasants, farming would improve and modernise gradually.

Question 13

What was the NEP designed for?

Answer 13

The NEP was hoped to generate wealth and this could potentially be invested in industrialising the Soviet Union, and also to encourage the ideas that workers and peasants were allies in the Soviet Union.

Question 14

Why was the NEP unpopular with many?

Answer 14

Many communists were unwiling to raise a higher price for grains as they felt dictated to by the peasants.

Question 15

How did the decrease in the rate of grain production create more problems for the Russians?

Answer 15

As the peasant grain production fell, the government faced two crises, how was it going to be able to get enough grain out of the countryside to feed the cities and to pay for new industries?

Question 16

State four successes of the NEP.

Answer 16

More grain was being provided, there were no more food shortages, the small business sector was growing and lastly, there was less peasant unrest (a threat to communist rule)

Question 17

State the failures of the NEP related to the kulaks.

Answer 17

It appeared that the peasants were deciding govermnent policy and that the Kulaks had officially ‘won’. industrialisation was happening too slowly

Question 18

State the failures of the NEP related to marxist beliefs.

Answer 18

Peasants were making a profit, capitalism seemed to be of a growing influence, agriculture was still not being modernised and organised round privately owned farms.

Question 19

Describe the ‘war scare’ of 1927

Answer 19

The fear of war breaking out with the neighbouring anti communist counries, tensions rising with Poland in the west and Japan and China to the east.

Question 20

Why was the ‘war scare of 1927’ fearful for many in communist leadership despite there being very little chance of a war actually breaking out?

Answer 20

Many in communist leadership worried about how they would feed the Red Army and the people in towns and cities, if a war did break out

Question 21

What was the effect of the ‘war scare of 1927’?

Answer 21

Communist leaders now decided to take control of agriculture and force more grain out of the peasants

Question 22

Who was Stalin’s last rival in the struggle for power and how was he able to tackle the situation?

Answer 22

Stalin’s last rival in the power of struggle was Bukharin, who supported the NEP and the idea of co operating with the peasants and so Stalin thought be abandoning the NEP and taking on the peasants he could be able to isolate Bukharin.

Question 23

Why was Stalin eager to transform the Soviet Union?

Answer 23

Stalin wanted to make the country into the kind of place where a communist revolution should have happened.

Question 24

What did the policy of collectivisation include?

Answer 24

Agriculture now needed to become more efficent and productive and to do so, small farms would be combined into larger state run farms, run according to modern ideas and methods, equipped with modern machinery.

Question 25

Why did collectivisation gain so much support within the Communist Party?

Answer 25

Only in this way could agriculture support the wider aims of the state, modernised collective farms would generate enough produce to feed the growing cities and the Red Army, and a surplus produce could be sold abroad to pay for new industrial machinery.

Question 26

Why did Stalin dislike the NEP?

Answer 26

Stalin was too impatient to give the NEP time as he disliked how it gave peasants a lot of freedom.

Question 27

How would collective farms function?

Answer 27

All peasants should join the collective farms (kolkhozes), where they would work together sharing land and equipment to produce grain and other farm produces according to the targets set out by the government. the profits would then be distributed amongst the kolkhozes only after the demands were met.

Question 28

Describe state-owned farms (give comparisions to collective farms)?

Answer 28

State farms were a type of community, also known as sovkhozes, they usually had more land than kolkhozes and the peasants were paid wages.

Question 29

Describe collective farms (give comparisions to state-owned farms)?

Answer 29

These were called kolkhozes. They were run as collectives, and peasants could keep some surplus if they met their targets.

Question 30

Why were the consequences of cutting down wages paid to peasants?

Answer 30

The government needed to sell grain abroad in order to industrialise the Soviet Union. However, they were reluctant to pay peasants to produce more and from 1926, the peasants cut back on the amount of grain they were producing or hoarded it (kept in storage).

Question 31

Why did the peasanta hoarding grain create a problem for the Soviet Union?

Answer 31

To the communist government the peasants were to blamed. However, they were completely responsible for creating the problem, the peasants and the government were on a head-on collision course.

Question 32

What happened during the winter of 1927-28?

Answer 32

In the winter of 1927-28, the grain shortages were extremely bad that Stalin led a campaign of force to seize grain from peasants this became known as the ‘Urals Siberian method’

Question 33

What impact did the Urals-Siberian method have on the NEP?

Answer 33

The NEP was now officially dead.

Question 34

What punishment was given to peasants who resisted when asked to join kolkhozes?

Answer 34

Those peasants who resisted were denounced as kulaks and arrested.

Question 35

What were kulaks officially referred to as and what did it change to?

Answer 35

At first, only 2% of the peasants that were wealthy enough to employ other peasants were kulaks but then the word streched to anyone who refused to join a collective farm in the winter of 1929-1930.

Question 36

How was collectivisation carried out?

Answer 36

Communist Party officials organised and held votes on villages, if peasants resisted, collectivisation was forced upon them by soldiers and workers, any hidden grain that was suspected was hunted down and then from there a kolkhoz is set up with a communist in charge.

Question 37

How were kulaks treated (specifically in the years of 1930-31)?

Answer 37

Kulaks were treated terribly, in 1930-31, around 30,000 kulaks were murdered on the spot, others taken away from home or transported to the Arctic North or Siberia where many worked to death, died from the unbearable cold or the poor quality food.

Question 38

What is liquidation?

Answer 38

To liquidate means to get rid of, to arrest, kill or property being stripped away.

Question 39

Why was the liquidation of Kulaks seen as a completion of the revolution of the countryside by Stalin?

Answer 39

For Stalin, a revolution in the countryside was more about seizing grain and reorganising agriculture as well as stamping the control of the Communist Party onto the peasant population, to summarise it was all about power and politics.

Question 40

Why did the peasants oppose collectivisation and how did this differ from the government’s claims?

Answer 40

In reality both rich and poor peasants resented the idea of government interfering in their lives however official propaganda claimed that it was just the kulaks who opposed collectivisation and that most peasants supported the move to collective farms.

Question 41

How was the countryside spiralling into chaos and why?

Answer 41

Many peasants opted for the idea to destroy crops and livestock rather than handing them over to the communists, resulting in a large number of animals being destroyed.

Question 42

Why did stalin, in 1930, halt the collectivisation campaign?

Answer 42

Stalin made a speech accusing the Communist Party Officials of being ‘dizzy with success’ where he claimed that they went beyonf their orders when forcing peasnts to join collective farms he took no part in accepting the blame and by his luck, almost everyone brought this lie.

Question 43

What happened during the 1932-33 collectivisation campaign?

Answer 43

As the collectivisation campaign was completed, a famine struck the Soviet Union. Roughly 6 to 8 million people died as a result of the upheavals, deportations and government grain seizures.

Question 44

By July 1933, how massive was the rate of collectivisation?

Answer 44

By July 1933, 83 percent of all arable land and 64 percent of all peasant households had been collectivised, the Communist Party was finally in control of the countryside.

Question 45

Why were Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) set up?

Answer 45

MTSs were set up to rent out agricultural machinery to groups of collective farms, it also acted as collecting points for the grain being demanded by the state, each MTS had a ‘political department’ staffed by members of the secret police to watch out on local communities as there was a lot of confusion over who was managing the kolkhozes.

Question 46

Describe the ‘Holodomor’ and why did this famine happen?

Answer 46

Holodomor was a man-made famine that killed at least 6 million Ukrainians. Some historians believe Stalin did this on purpose to wipe our Ukrainian nationalists that he saw as a threat. Holodomor can be translated as ‘to kill by starvation’ and is referred to as the Ukrainian Holocaust.

Question 47

Why was collectivisation a massive issue for the Ukrainians?

Answer 47

Many Ukrainian peasants refused to join collective farms as to them it felt like if they were going back to the times of serfdom (a period where peasants were owned their landlords), they had no intention of giving up their freedom and independence. However, armed workers, the secret police forced peasants to join collective farms and liquidated anyone classed as a kulak.

Question 48

Why did Ukraine suffer the most in the USSR?

Answer 48

It was partly due to the population consisting mainly of peasant families but also Stalin’s goverment was determined to crush Ukrainian independence and national family culture.

Question 49

What were the devasting consequences of taking more and more grain from Ukraine?

Answer 49

As more and more grain was taken, many people resolved in cannabalism (eating corpses), the situation become so out of control that parents began to eat their starving children as a way to survive, desperate peasants fled into cities in search for food

Question 50

What happened in Ukraine between the years 1932-33?

Answer 50

uge numbers died in one of the largest famines in human history, during June 1933, an estimate of 28,000 people died every day.

Question 51

How did Stalin react to the famines?

Answer 51

Stalin’s goverment began to deny all accusations against him, refused foreign aid and kept the famines going, at the same time Ukrainian religious and political leaders were being executed.