Abstract
While many of the contemporary institutional features of the Soviet Union were established in the 1930s, this chapter focuses on the period from 1917 to late 1929 in an attempt to show the historical reasons for the conjunction of industrialisation and forced collectivisation in the 1930s, a conjunction which has left such a deep imprint on the structure of Soviet society. There have in recent years been a number of analyses of the reasons for this conjunction which have attempted to break from the widely accepted view that there was a necessary connection between forced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation.1 It will be argued here that a policy of voluntary collectivisation could and should have been pursued much more vigorously throughout the 1920s. Furthermore, it will be argued that the New Economic Policy (NEP) would have faced fewer problems if the conditions for such voluntary collectivisation had been secured. This would have provided more investment funds than were actually available in the late 1920s and early 1930s for rapid industrialisation, thus easing the implementation of the first Five Year Plan.
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Notes
See M. Harrison, ‘The Soviet Economy in the 1920s and 1930s’, Capital and Class, no. 5, 1978;
S. Grosskopf, L’Alliance Ouvrière et Paysanne en URSS: Le Problème du Blé, Maspero, Paris, 1976;
A. Hussain and K. Tribe, Marxism and the Agrarian Question, vol. 2, Macmillan, London, 1981;
G. Littlejohn, ‘The Agrarian Marxist Research in its Political Context: The Soviet Rural Class Structure in the 1920s’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, January 1984.
See O. Narkiewicz, The Making of the Soviet State Apparatus, University of Manchester Press, Manchester, 1970; and
M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, Allen & Unwin, London, 1968, ch. 16.
D. G. Atkinson, ‘The Russian Land Commune and the Revolution’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1971, p. 149.
This corroborates the arguments advanced by L. Kritsman, Proletarskaya Revolyutsia i Derevnya, Moscow, 1929, by
Grosskopf, L’Alliance Ouvrière;
and by Hussain and Tribe, Marxism and the Agrarian Question;
M. Dobb, Russian Economic Development since the Revolution, London, 1928, p. 340
For a further discussion of the effects of the Kombedy, see the extracts from Kritsman’s Geroicheskii Period Velikoi Russkoi Revolyutsii (1925), which are reprinted in Kritsman, Proletarskaya Revolyutsia, pp. 79–106.
Unfortunately, the full Russian version is not available to me, but for those who read German, it is available as Kritsman, Die heroische Periode der Grossen russischen Revolution, Verlag Neue Kritik, Frankfurt, 1971.
The Russian version is referred to (along with a book by Larin and Kritsman) both in Dobb, Russian Economic Development, and in
Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1966.
in L. Kritsman, ‘Class Stratification of the Soviet Countryside’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, October 1984.
Atkinson, ‘The Russian Land Commune’, p. 174.
For the geographical distribution of Lenin’s famous ‘two roads’ of capitalist development, which clearly locates the ‘capitalist peasantry’ road in the Ukraine and the South in general, see the maps in S. M. Shipley, ‘The Sociology of the Peasantry, Populism and the Russian Peasant Commune’, unpublished M. Litt, thesis, University of Lancaster, 1979.
This can be taken as a rough index of the extent of peasant capitalist development in these areas between 1906 and 1914, and fits well with the map of the percentages of private agricultural property in 1916 which is provided by S. Grosskopf, L’Alliance Ouvrière, p. 71.
Groman had begun work on this in 1923 and continued the work in Gosplan until 1928 or 1929: see N. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to be Remembered, Cambridge University Press, 1972, ch. 6.
L. Kritsman, Tri Goda Novoi E konomicheskoi Politiki, 1924, an extract of which is reprinted on pp. 106–16 of Kritsman, Proletarskaya Revolyutsia i Derevnya.
See also Dobb, Russian Economic Development, on the recovery of agriculture up to 1925.
See S. G. Solomon, ‘Controversy in Social Science: Soviet Rural Studies in the 1920s’, Minerva, vol. XIII, no. 4, 1975, p. 568.
C. Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, Harvester, Brighton, 1978, vol. 2, implies that these unemployed should have been taken on anyway by industry, but it is not clear that this would have done anything other than raise the costs of industry, leading to a ‘scissors’-type pressure on industrial prices.
For a discussion of Preobrazhensky’s position see K. Smith, ‘Introduction to Bukharin: Economic Theory and the Closure of the Soviet Industrialisation Debate’, Economy and Society, vol. 8, no. 4, November 1979, pp. 446–72.
See L. Kritsman, O Samarskom Obsledovanie (1928), reprinted in Proletarskaya Revolyutsia i Derevnya, pp. 342–57.
Ibid, pt II, ch. 2, on which this account draws heavily, as does the account of Hussain and Tribe, Marxism and the Agrarian Question, ch. 4. A review of the Tribe and Hussain work (P. Bew and C. Roulston, ‘Land and the European Left’, Economy and Society, vol. 11, no. 1, February 1982, pp. 60–8) considers it strange that they claim that the crisis of NEP began in 1925.
This lack of support turned to open support of the kulaks, with the ‘Provisional Ordinances’ of April 1925.
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© 1984 Gary Littlejohn
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Littlejohn, G. (1984). Hammer and Sickle: Problems of a Worker-Peasant Alliance. In: A Sociology of the Soviet Union. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17358-7_3
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