The Great U-Turn

Abstract

Despite mounting anxiety in the central leadership about the disastrous turn of events, with a few exceptions, there were virtually no public pronouncements on the effect of the party’s new policies during February. Unease over the direction that dekulakization was taking on the ground was reflected in a Pravda editorial on 1 February 1930, which castigated officials who had allowed the policy to deteriorate into ‘nothing but a division of the spoils’. Some days later, Stalin himself voiced his concern that there was insufficient linkage between the implementation of dekulakization and the development of collectivization. He feared that dekulakization had degenerated in practice from ‘a policy of socializing in kolkhozes the confiscated kulak property to a policy of share-outs [delezhki] of this property for the personal enrichment of individual peasants’.¹ Of the key party leaders, only Syrtsov took an unqualified critical stance against the party’s policy. Beginning with a press report of a session of Sovnarkom RSFSR on 11 February, he took the leading role in speaking out against the ‘conveyor-belt of repressions’ in the countryside and raising awareness of the negative consequences that abuses in collectivization and dekulakization would have for the spring sowing campaign.² He described the excesses of collectivization as the ‘most shameful travesty of Soviet power’ and spoke of the need to curb the zeal of dekulakizers — and this was almost two weeks before Stalin spoke out against excesses. In an oblique attack on Stalin’s circle, he blamed the ‘paper tempos’ of comprehensive collectivization not on ‘revolutionary enthusiasm’ but on ‘bureaucratic optimism’.³