The Peasant Economy and the Soviet System, 1917–29

Abstract

The victory of the Bolshevik revolution in a predominantly peasant country posed a fundamental dilemma to the makers of Soviet economic policy. In Anti-Dühring, written in 1878, Engels had vividly presented the marxist vision of the new social and economic order which would emerge after a socialist revolution:

The seizure of the means of production by society puts an end to commodity production, and therewith to the domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious organisation on a planned basis … The laws of his own social activity, which have hitherto confronted him as external, dominating laws of Nature, will then be applied by man with complete understanding … It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.¹

Marx and Engels exempted the numerous small peasant economies, which persisted even in advanced capitalist countries like France and Germany, from the forcible expropriation to which the factories of the industrialists and the estates of large landowners would be subjected. Instead, the peasants should be converted to collective production and ownership ‘by example and by offering social aid for this purpose’.²