Collectivization and socialist agriculture (1917- 1992): Revised comparison of the Soviet and East-European experience. Part I. Soviet collectivization under Stalin (1925-1953)

Abstract

Literature on collectivization in Eastern Europe presents an outdated picture of Soviet collectivization close to Stalin’s interpretation, and literature on Soviet collectivization ignores alternative policies to promote forced industrialization in countries with predominantly small-scale peasant farms. Before discussing collectivization and socialist agricultural policy in Eastern Europe, the author examines collectivization in the Soviet Union under Stalin, combining this analysis with some methodological reflections on the approach and central terms applied. Then the author focuses on the entangled comparison of collectivization and socialist agricultural policy after the World War II in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to thoroughly reassess this policy by answering the following key questions for the assessment of socialist agricultural policy: whether enforced collectivization was necessary or harmful for industrialization; whether Stalin’s collectivization aimed at modernization of the agrarian sector at all; why socialist agricultural policy, after liquidation of private farms during collectivization under Stalin and Khrushchev, since the late 1970s in almost all socialist countries returned to supporting private small agricultural production. In addition to focusing on the decisive turning points of the agricultural policy, the author keeps the whole period in view, distinguishing the following phases with basically different political approaches: (1) collectivization under Stalin as based on class war and peasant subjugation to transfer capital from agriculture to industry; (2) collectivization under Khrushchev striving to complete it, although this policy was basically put in question (in 1953 in the Soviet Union and in 1957 in the GDR and Hungary); (3) efforts to stabilize the economically weak collective farms in the 1960s after finishing collectivization and replacing Khrushchev; (4) the final turn to modernization of agriculture expecting economies of scale through different concepts of industrialization in the 1970s; (5) the failure of these concepts causing a cost trap and enforcing the rehabilitation of small-scale private agriculture in the 1980s. The first part of the article shows how Stalin in 1929 turned collectivization away from modernization goals, which made collectivization an end in itself, enforcing the diversion of resources from agriculture to industrialization. Stalin did not trust the peasants and ignored their great capacities of increasing production, which made members of collective farms forced laborers with limited civil rights. Mechanization ensured primarily state control over agriculture and prevented an increase in yields.