JOSEPH STALIN
PROBLEMS OF AGRARIAN POLICY IN THE USSR (1929)
Born Josef Dzhugashvili (1879-1953), the son of a poor cobbler, Joseph Stalin joined Russia's leftist political underground in his early twenties and slowly advanced in the Bolshevik Party organization. As Lenin's health failed between 1922 and 1924, several Bolshevik officials began jockeying for power. Stalin slowly isolated and discredited his competitors and achieved unrivaled power by 1928. During the late 1920s and 1930s, Stalin secured his power through a system of organized repression terror that identified and crushed both real and imaginary threats to his authority. For Stalin, these threats arrived not only from the educated classes but also from the peasantry, which he considered reactionary and innately resistant to modernization. In the excerpt below from Stalin's 1929 speech on Soviet agriculture, he outlines his effort to refashion the countryside by expropriating better-off peasants so as to empower the collectivized remainder.
The main fact of our social-economic life at the
present time, a fact which is attracting general attention, is the enormous
growth of the collective farm movement.
The characteristic feature of the present collective
farm movement is that not only are separate groups of poor peasants joining the
collective farms, as has been the case hitherto, but that the mass of the
middle peasants are also joining the collective farms. This means that the collective farm movement
has been transformed from a movement of separate groups and sections of the
laboring peasants into a movement of millions and millions, of the bulk of the
peasantry. This, by the way, explains
the tremendously important fact that the collective farm movement, which has
assumed the character of a mighty and growing anti-kulak avalanche, is sweeping the resistance of the kulak from
its path, is breaking kulakdom and clearing the road for extensive socialist
construction in the rural districts....
The October Revolution [1] abolished the private
ownership of land, abolished the sale and purchase of land, established the
nationalization of the land. What does
this mean? It means that the peasant
has no need to buy land in order to produce grain. Formerly he was compelled to save up for years in order to buy
land; he got into debt, went into bondage, only to acquire a piece of
land. The expenses which the purchase
of land involved naturally entered into the cost of production of grain. Now, the peasant does not have to spend
money on the purchase of land. He can
produce grain now without buying land.
Does this ameliorate the condition of the peasants or not? Obviously it does.
Further.
Until recently, the peasant was compelled to dig the soil with the aid
of obsolete implements by individual labor.
Everyone knows that individual labor, equipped with obsolete, now
unsuitable, means of production, does not produce the results required to
enable one to lead a tolerable existence, systematically to improve one's
material position, to develop one's culture and to get out onto the highroad of
socialist construction. Today, after
the accelerated development of the collective farm movement, the peasants are
able to combine their labor with the labor of their neighbors, to unite in
collective farms, to break up virgin soil, to cultivate waste land, to obtain
machines and tractors and thereby double or even treble the productivity of
their labor. And what does this
mean? It means that today the peasant,
by joining the collective farms, is able to produce much more than formerly
with the same expenditure of labor. It
means, therefore, that grain will be produced much more cheaply than was the
case until quite recently. It means,
finally, that, with stable prices, the peasant can obtain much more for his
grain than he has obtained up to now....
Of course, there are contradictions in the
collective farms. Of course, there are
individualistic and even kulak survivals in the collective farms, which have
not yet disappeared, but which are bound to disappear in the course of time as
the collective farms become stronger, as they are provided with more
machines. But can it be denied that the
collective farms as a whole, with all their contradictions and shortcomings,
the collective farms as an economic fact,
represent, in the main, a new path of development of the countryside, the socialist path of development of the
countryside as opposed to the kulak, capitalist path of development? Can it be denied that the collective farms
(I am speaking of real collective farms and not of sham collective farms)
represent, under our conditions, a base and a nucleus of socialist construction
in the countryside‑a base and a nucleus which have grown up in desperate
fights against capitalist elements?
The characteristic feature of our work during the
past year is: (a) that we, the Party and the Soviet government, have developed
an offensive on the whole front against the capitalist elements in the
countryside; and (b) that this offensive, as you know, has brought about and is
bringing about very palpable, positive results.
What does this mean? It means that we have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting proclivities
of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating
the kulaks as a class. This means
that we have made, and are still making, one of the most decisive turns in our
whole policy.
1. The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917.
1. According
to Stalin, how has the elimination of private property affected peasant farming?
2. On
what basis does Stalin justify the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a
class? Does he say how he intends to do
this?
3. What
is the importance of a “kulak identity” to Stalin's argument? How does this alleged class identity relate
to Stalin's fears of national movements?
4. As
the economic and political leaders of the Ukrainian peasants, at least in
Stalin’s mind, how do the Ukrainian kulaks pose a double threat to the Soviet
Union?