How far can it be argued that Stalin’s policy of collectivisation was driven by ideology?

Question 1

IDEOLOGY

Answer 1

Peasants mostly thought of as petit bourgeois – kulaks influential leaders, therefore enemies; too often holding the country to ransom.
 Socialist solution not to have private holdings (NEP), but ‘socialist agrotowns’.
 The administrative weakness in the countryside contradicts the dictatorship of the proletariat.
 Part of Stalin’s ‘Great Turn’
 Strengthening control of Central Party apparatus over provinces.
 Sorting out Party cliques at local level.
 Needed to prepare for potential war and to support industrial
expansion.
 To compete with USA as a superpower, create a “soviet America”.
 Initially popular with party as NEP would end; it was seen as
ideologically unsound.
 Concept of the peasant collective was ideologically correct.

Question 2

force

Answer 2

Force, propaganda and terror was used.
 Liquidation of the kulak class, to make the middle peasants obey
Stalin.
 ‘Twenty Five Thousanders’ rounded up families and deported some
10 million people (some estimate 20 million dead or deported).
 The extent of denunciations by neighbours reflects the success of the
propaganda machine in inflaming class hatred.
 Armed resistance and riots: crops, tools and houses burned rather
than hand them over.
 Women’s protests were significant and effective in organisation and
outcome.

Question 3

Pratical Reasons

Answer 3

1917–18 agrarian revolution seen as a step backwards economically.
 Many crops suited better to larger farms – small farms meant poor use
of labour, unable to benefit from mechanisation. Too much
consumed by the farm, not enough going to market.
 Larger units of land meant efficiency via mechanisation – tractors and
machinery supplied through MTS.
 Fewer peasants needed to work land – releasing labour for industry.
 Easier for state to take grain for cities and export – controlled by
Communist supporters.
Page 169
Historians E Mawdsley
Cold War historians
M. Lewin
R Conquest S Cohen
 Grain procurement crisis 1928–9 – peasants were resisting government policies and not sending goods to market; bread and meat therefore rationed in the cities. Building a social and economic system to make USSR a great power.
 Would break peasant strangle-hold on the economy and provide grain and manpower for industrialisation.

Question 4

Economic

Answer 4

By end of February 1930 claimed 50% collectivisation but; Agriculture was a disaster: significant numbers of animals slaughtered, enterprising peasants had left the country, fled to city to seize opportunity of upward mobility.
 Those left were in no mood to begin work, and passive resistance was the order of the day – referred to this as second serfdom.
 Statistics in 1930s distorted to show alleged success.
 ‘Dizzy with success’ speech (2nd March 1930) meant pace slowed
down and return to voluntary principle indicates limitations of policy.
 Life was the same for most, same wooden huts.
 Tractors were largely imaginary – 2,500 MTS in first three years, but
this was a proletarian bastion in the countryside, staffed by workers
and OGPU.
 Famine 1932–34 because high targets at time of huge drop in grain
production due to collectivisation, OGPU were vicious. 1.73 million
tons exported and 7 million died from a man-made famine.
 Estimated 70% peasants households collectivised by 1934 and 90% by
1936; 120 million people, 600,000 villages, 25 million holdings
consolidated into 240,000 state-controlled collective farms.
 But peasants had private plots, condoned because of desperation for food. Best farmers were those most resistant to the policy and were
therefore shot or deported thus affecting yields through loss of
expertise.
 Furthermore, livestock production did not recover until post WWII.

Question 5

E Mawsley

Answer 5

Stalinist Russia did face real external threats but this led to a ‘continuation’ of the industrial and military build-up that that already begun.

Question 6

M Lewin

Answer 6

creating a ‘quicksand society’ where the state was in control of everyone and all were ‘equal’.

Question 7

R Conquest

Answer 7

states that collectivisation was the weapon used to break peasant resistance.

Question 8

S Cohen

Answer 8

states that the peasantry was seen as “a vast inert and yet somehow threatening mass of people, barring Russia’s path to industrialisation, modernity, socialism: a kingdom of darkness that must be conquered before the Soviet Union could become the Promised Land”.