The Rise of Soviet Russia

Stalin's policy for Agriculture and Industry, 1929-39
The Collective Farms, Industry's Five-Year Plans

6.  Stalin's policy for Agriculture and Industry, 1929-39

 A The Collective Farms

  i   There were two agricultural revolutions in Soviet Russia.  The first in 1918 took the land from the large landholders and handed it over to the peasants to be divided into smallholdings.  The second revolution, brought in by Stalin in 1929, substituted collective farms for individual holdings. 

  ii   The peasant had suffered during the Civil War and even in the post-war years he found that his corn brought little reward because corn prices were very low when compared with the price of manufactured goods.  The peasants therefore cut down their production of grain.  In addition farming was less productive on the smallholdings compared with the crops grown on the large estates.  In 1929, there was a shortage of grain and therefore of bread in the towns.  The bigger farmers, the Kulaks, took advantage of the shortage to push up the prices of their grain.  Stalin was faced with discontent and famine in the towns whose factory workers were the backbone of the Communist movement. 

  iii   Stalin's solution was to get rid of the Kulaks, the more prosperous farmers, to bring together smallholdings into large collective farms and to force the peasant to bring his cattle, his implements and his labour into the common pool of the collective farm.  The economies of large-scale farming, mechanization, scientific methods and therefore increased food produc-tion were the advantages looked for in the collective farm.  The poorer peasants still working with a wooden plough might welcome the opportunity of using the implements and tending the cattle confiscated from the Kulaks.  The larger farmers, the more prosperous peasants, fought the change, killed off their cattle, left their fields untitled and brought in as little as pos-sible of their property to the collective farm. 

  iv   In 1929 and 1930, the policy of collectivization was enforced ruthlessly and by 1932 over half of all holdings had been integrated into collective farms.  In the first stages nearly all the farmer's belongings were declared collective property, and he lived on a wage just like a farm labourer.  In the middle thirties the members shared in the profits of the collective farm on the basis of their working contribution and they were allowed to own privately small plots of land, poultry and some cattle.  Each collective farm had to deliver to the state an agreed amount of the total produce.  The farms were run by a management committee supervised by the local Communist party. 

  v   Within ten years the collective farms were producing significant results.  Grain crops were thirty to forty million tons higher than under individual fanning.  Industry had begun to supply the tractors and combine harvesters to give Russian farming a high degree of mechanization.  Large numbers of men and women had been trained to drive tractors and to manage collective farms.  All opposition had been crushed and two million Kulaks, deprived of their property and debarred from the new collective farms, had been deported to Siberia or found themselves in forced labour camps. 

 B Industry's Five-Year Plans

When he embarked on his agricultural changes in 1929, Stalin found himself desperately short not only of agricultural machinery and tractors, of the petrol to drive them and of electrical power, but also of the plants, factories and power stations to produce them.  In his Five-Year Plans for Russian industry he achieved a remarkable expansion of industrial production.  The first Five-Year Plan concentrated on increasing the output of coal, iron and steel, the basis of modern industry.  Exports were stepped up to obtain vital raw materials and consumption goods for the home market were cut down.  Steel plants, factories for producing tractors and agricultural machinery, new,hydro-electric works, new railways and mines and the development of a chemical industry were all features of the ten years between 1929 and 1939.  By the latter date, Russia was still behind her capitalist rivals, Germany and the U.S.A., in the production of coal, iron, steel and electrical power, but the gap between them had been narrowed significantly.