The Mechanisation of Agriculture

Abstract

The famous passage with which Stalin concluded his article published on November 7, 1929, reflected the spirit and the hopes of the party activists in the second half of 1929. The theme that agriculture no less than industry could be transformed by advanced technology was not a novel one. Lenin declared ten years previously that ‘100,000 first-class tractors’, with petrol and drivers, if only they were available, could win the middle peasantry for communism.¹ In the Goelro plan of 1920, Krzhizhanovsky looked forward to the time when the columns of the proletariat would go into the countryside to show the peasants the great possibilities held out by advanced technology. The theme was common to all wings of the party. In his ‘Notes of an Economist’ Bukharin praised the tractor columns as ‘the fighting battalions (druzhiny) of technical revolution’, as a result of which ‘the free feather-grass is singing its last song before its death’.²

We are becoming a metal country, a motorised country, a tractorised country. And when we have seated the USSR on an automobile and the peasant on a tractor—let the esteemed capitalists, who boast about their ‘civilisation’, try to catch us up then. We will then be able to see which countries can then be ‘classified’ among the backward and which among the advanced.^a

^a Stalin, Soch., xii 135.