1921-1991 🇷🇺 Communist Russia

Collectivisation

Why

• Survival/security of the USSR
• moolah 💸🤑
  • grains sold overseas generated revenue → funnelled into transformation, development, industrialisation, modernisation
• ensure a stable supply of food to feed industrial workers
• pushed the ‘Socialism in One Country’ as an ideological replacement to 1921-03 New Economic Policy
  • removed the capitalist class of kulaks → ideologically, it became more communist
    • under NEP, a class of ‘rich’ peasants known as NEPmen or Kulaks developed
    • peasants → NEPmen → state was how the pipeline was supposed to go

Stalin’s Great Break

Great Break

A turning point in Soviet development, with great political, economic and social impacts.

• development of Kulaks brought up The Peasant Question – what was the state supposed to do with them?
  • they were a problem

Was Collectivisation Successful?

Criteria/Yardstick

1. How can we define success?
   • unpack keywords like “success”
2. Success for who? From whose POV?
3. What impact/effect/consequence did this cause, politically, economicaly and socially?
4. What do historians like [Orlando Fige(http://www.orlandofiges.info/section10_RevolutionfromAbove/TheFiveYearPlan.php), Robert Conquest (shared link), and others (textbook) say about the issue?
   • these historians are considered foremost experts on Russia
   • sources

Economic impacts

• establishment of a ==command economy==
  • top-down decision making on economic matters
    • discipline was key, with harsh consequences for those who failed to meet targets
      • peasants were severely overworked, and production managers were pressured to meet impossible targets
      • most ended up lying, thus creating a false image of the USSR’s economic success
    • central body (GOSPLAN) placed in charge of economic planning & production targets
• intended to reduce wastage via central planning
  • BUT

todo

Social Impacts

Positive

• 70% of households were in collectives
  • 1936: 90% of household
• peasants kept production → enabled food stability
  • food security for urban population increased → prevented unrest & instability → prevented challenges on Stalin’s government
• theoretically promoted socialist equality across the board by eliminating the kulak class

Negative

• grain production increased but never made it back to pre-collectivisation levels
• high human cost – wages war on the peasant class
  • liquidation of the kulak class – peasants lost their accumulated wealth under NEP
  • dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families
  • abolition of private land ownership
  • concentration of remaining peasants in party-controlled “collective” farms
• feeding the workers (primary objective) was a failure from 1930-1932 in Ukraine
  • Ukraine is the bread basket of Russia

Political Impacts

Positive

• ensured control
• USSR achieved self-sufficiency; it could feed itself

Negative

• resistance as peasants refused to hand over their animals, tools, land or to be ordered around by farm managers