Abstract
The collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s may have been the most significant and traumatic of the many transformations to which the Communist regime subjected the people of the former Russian empire. Historical and other literatures have viewed this policy with considerable ambivalence. On the one hand, it involved considerable violence and the harsh policy of ‘dekulakisation’, provoked numerous peasant protests, disrupted the agricultural system, and was a factor in the great famine of 1931–33, though not the most important cause.1 At the same time, collectivisation brought substantial modernisation to traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relatively high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s.2
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Notes
On this, see M. B. Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933 (Pittsburgh: Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1506, 2001)
J. Millar, ‘Mass Collectivization and the Contribution of Soviet Agriculture to the First Five-Year Plan’, Slavic Review, 33 (1974), pp. 750–66
M. Hanison, ‘Why did NEP Fail?’, Economics of Planning, 16(2) (1980), pp. 57–67.
No Western study examines this famine in any detail; E. H. Carr discusses it briefly in Socialism in One Country (New York, 1958), vol. 1, ch. 1. See also I. A. Poliakov, ‘Nedorod 1924 g. I bor’ba s ego posledstviiami’, Istoriia SSSR, (1) (1958), pp. 52–82
On higher productivity, see the documents in Koooperativno-kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR 1923–27 (Moscow, 1991), especially the mid-1926 report by the agriculture cooperative council documenting much higher yields in collective farms, pp. 173–88; more generally, E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, pt. 1, vol. 1 (New York, 1969), ch. 6, especially pp. 158–60.
I. E. Zelenin, ‘Pervaia sovetskaia programma massovogo osvoeniia tselinnykh zemel’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, (2) (1996), pp. 55–70
On Campbell, see H. Drache, ‘Thomas D. Campbell — The Plower of the Plains,’ Agricultural History, 51(1) (January 1977), pp. 78–91
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© 2006 Mark B. Tanger
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Tauger, M.B. (2006). Stalin, Soviet Agriculture, and Collectivisation. In: Trentmann, F., Just, F. (eds) Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597495_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597495_6
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