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(ii) The problems of agriculture were dealt with by the process known as collectivisation. The idea was that the small farms and holdings belonging to the peasants should be merged to form large collective farms jointly owned by the peasants. There were two main reasons for Stalin's decision to collectivise: - The existing system of small farms was inefficient, whereas large farms, under state direction and using tractors and combine harvesters, would vastly increase grain production. - He wanted to eliminate the class of prosperous peasants (kulaks or nepmen) which NEP had encouraged because, he claimed, they were standing in the way of progress. But the real reason was probably political: Stalin saw the kulak as the enemy of communism. 'We must smash the kulaks so hard that they will never rise to their feet again.' The policy was launched in earnest in 1929, and had to be carried through by sheer brute force, so determined was the resistance in the countryside. It was a complete disaster from which. it is probably no exaggeration to claim. Russia has not fully recovered even today. There was no problem in collectivising landless labourers, but all peasants who owned any property at all, whether they were kulaks or not, were hostile and had to be forced to join by armies of party members who urged poorer peasants to seize cattle and machinery from the kulaks to be handed over to the collectives. Kulaks often reacted by slaughtering cattle and burning crops rather than allow the state to take them. Peasants who refused to join collective farms were arrested and deported to labour camps or shot; when newly collectivised peasants tried to sabotage the system by producing only enough for their own needs, local officials insisted on seizing the required quotas, resulting in large-scale famine during 1932-3, especially in the Ukraine. Yet one and three-quarter million tons of grain were exported during that period while over five million peasants died of starvation. Some historians have even claimed that Stalin welcomed the famine, since, along with the 10 million kulaks who were removed or executed, it helped to break peasant resistance. In this way, well over 90 per cent of all farmland had been collectivised by 1937. In one sense, Stalin could claim that collectivisation was a success; it allowed greater mechanisation, which gradually increased grain output until by 1940 it was over 80 per cent higher than in 1913. On the other hand, so many animals had been slaughtered that it was 1953 before livestock production recovered to the 1928 figure and the cost in human life and suffering was enormous.
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