Commune to kolkhoz: Soviet collectivization and the transformation of communal peasant farming, 1930-1941

This study examines the interaction of Soviet policies and the peasant commune in the formation of the Soviet collective farm system. It argues that collectivization involved a direct conflict between the Soviet regime and the traditional village commune. The commune was ultimately destroyed as an institution, but not without influencing the new collective farm system in fundamental ways.;The Soviet regime undertook collectivization in part to industrialize agriculture, but during 1930-1932 it was too weak in the countryside to impose effectively new systems of organization and remuneration in the collective farms. The peasants were able to adapt labor and remuneration in the collectives to the egalitarian values that they retained from the commune and to their interest in avoiding responsibility for the farms' failings. The resultant disorganization, exacerbated by drought and crop failure in 1931 and confiscatory state grain procurements, led to an extremely low harvest and famine in 1932-1933.;Soviet leaders, while refusing to acknowledge that the famine was taking place, undertook important measures to eliminate its causes. They dispatched worker-communists to the villages as political departments to impose labor discipline on the farms in 1933-1934. The political departments were generally successful in this, though the famine provided a considerable incentive. In 1935-1936 the regime conducted a major land reform in the farms that eliminated holdovers of traditional peasant land use, and institutionalized the dichotomy of private plot and socialized field in the collective farms.;The great purges of 1936-1938, however, decimated the local officials responsible for overseeing agriculture, with the result that the peasants expanded their plots and worked less in the collectives. On the eve of the war, the regime waged a campaign to cut back the private plots and reimposed labor discipline by requiring a certain amount of work in the socialized sector.;Collectivization had created an agricultural system imbued with resentment and resistance. The Soviet government ended up in a position of constantly having to react to crises in agriculture, while the peasants tried in every way to frustrate any policies not in their interest. This situation prevented the regime from achieving the goals it had set for collective farming, and left the Soviet Union unable to achieve its agricultural potential.