CHAPTER III

PEASANTRY AND STRATIFICATION IN SOVIET SOCIETY

The Soviet Socialist system that was f~nned after the historic victory of the Russian

social revolutionary movement under the leadership of Vladimir Illianovih Lenin was a

watershed event in the 20lh century human history. This victory led to the fonnation of

first working class regime in recent human history. The success of the Bolshevik pat1y

in the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist Russia brought a message _to the working class

and peasant masses across the globe that, through the conscious action of the exploited

and oppressed classes mobilised by a revolutionary party with a clear ideology and

genuine leadership, could reshape the process of human history and thereby

fundamental social relations in any society. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik regiJ!le

provided a new imagination to the world's oppressed people for a new non-capitalist

socialist system through class-conscious political actions of the marginalised classes of

people in modem hierarchically-divided capitalist society.

The society in Tsarist Russia was characterised by the simultaneous existence of

both feudal and capitalist mode of productions with all its inherent contradictions (Lenin

1967; Trotsky 1935; Dobb 1967). In Russia, there was penetration of the semi-capitalist

mode of production both in industry and agriculture to the hitherto existing semi-feudal

mode of production with its resultant social fonnation which controlled and dominated

the Tsarist state apparatus and production relations in that society. The country's entry

into the First Worid War along with the conspicuous consumption of the upper

segments of the aristocracy further accelerated the prevailing poverty and social chaos

experienced by the majority of the population. It was in this context that the Bolshevik

party under the leadership of Lenin refonnulated the Marxian scheme of revolutionary

political action and introduced the concept of the communist party as the class agency of

the oppressed working class. This re-interpretation of the Marxian theory into the

concrete social realities of Russia incorporated the peasantry into the revolutionary front

by fonning the working-class peasant alliance. Introducing the peasantry into the

revolutionary front led by the Bolsheviks radical1y altered the minority status of the

Bolshevik party which was proved to be a tuming point in Russia's revolutionary

process. Nonetheless, an analysis of the participation of different social classes in the

Russian revolutionary movement and the nature, character of the ruling classes in the

Tsarist society, etc. are essential for understanding the entire processes and the resultant

81

post-revolutionary transformation of the Soviet social fonnation from a vantage point of

Marxian class analysis. It also requires the historic analysis of the pre-revolutionary

agrarian social relations which evolved in Russia after the emancipation of the Serfs in

1861.

The Russian Countryside after the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861

The act of the Emancipation of the Serf proclaimed by Tsar Alexander II was in many

respects a turning point in the trajectory of the country's socio-economic transition from

the remnants of the 'nostalgic' and 'romanticised peasant utopia' to a capitalist pattern

of development. In fact, it was necessitated by certain factors which were prevalent in

the countryside since the early decades of the nineteenth century. The exact nature of

the social realities which existed in that time evident from the Tsar's own remarks that

"serfdom had to be abolished from the above before it destroyed itself from the below"

(Blum 1961: 617). The emancipation law, as pointed out by Blum, wip~d out the powers

and the privileges that the lord had for long held over his peasants: compelling them to

move from one place to another, or having them shipped off to Siberia, or to the anny so

on and the list of powers were included in the seignior once had over his serfs (Ibid:

618). In fact, even after the emancipation of the serf act of 1861, peasants attached to

the traditional village commune were not granted full citizens' rights like free men. The

Tsar and the refonners argued that peasants were not ready for the privileges and

responsibilities of full citizenship until they settled their debt owed to the lords. The

former serfs and the state peasants were clubbed into a peculiar category by the

emant:ipation act, even though ret:ognised as free-men they were deprived of many of

the civil rights and other privileges.

Even after the emancipation act, most of the peasants across the empire were not

provided the right to separate from the village commune. Peasants were not given any

ownership right in land and instead the commune held title to the entire land of village

and distributed it to its member households. Every peasant belonged to a commune and

to a household whether he wanted to or not, and every household had to accept a land

allotment regardless of its own wishes. The peasants did not have the right to renounce

his membership in his household commune and he retained his membership even if he

left the village and spent his life elsewhere. All commune members were mutually

responsible forthe taxes and other obligations. To make sure, that no one would escape

his share of these burdens, the commune and the head of the household concemed had

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to give their approval before the peasant could leave the village for a lengthy absence

(Ibid: 618-19). Initially the new act offered that the peasants attached to the commune

that once they completed their redemption payment to the state. However, subsequently

the state preserved the subordinate status of the peasantry on the ground that they were

regarded as a unique class whose communal life contributed irreplaceable moral values

to Russian society. Therefore, peasants' communal life and practices should be the

heritage of the society and thereby required special attention and protection. Even after

the introduction of much celebrated act of the emancipation of the serfs, state enacted

new laws specifically meant for the peasants which intended to make sure that the

peasantry continued to associate with the commune system.

The literatures on emancipation of serf provide different reason for the abolition

of the serfdom and the declining power of the feudal nobility in imperial Russia. The

gradual economic transition experienced by the society resulted in a shift from the

natural economy and pre-capitalist feudal practices to the capitalist direction marked b~_

the spread of market, spread of money and growth of exchange economy. The

continuance of the serfdom was considered as the main obstacle tor the further

development of the market. The lack of capital, the low productivity of serf labourer,

and the nature of the entire structure of the feudal economy blocked the introduction of

technical improvement and efficient organisation (Ibid: 613). The dominant view was

that the serf owners themselves promoted the new act since in the early 19th century they

participated in the market and they realised that any substantial improvement in their

earning from the land required major increase in productivity and also required modem

free wage labourers. However the above views that serf mvncrs themselves initiated the

emancipation act were widely criticised. Jerome Blum pointed out that far from

regarding the serfdom wasteful and inefficient, most proprietors had a very high regard

for serfdom as both a social and an economic institution .. They tried to extented it to

other parts of the empire and resisted the attempts the government made to limit the

system or to improve the status of the serf. They even protested bitterly when the Tsar

asked them to draw up plans for emancipation and they procrastinated for as long they

could (Blum 1966: 614). P. B. Struve also challenged the argument that internal •

development of the serfdom led to its liquidation and pointed out that the serfdom was

not obsolescent in the mid 19th century. Instead, it reached the peak of its productivity in

the decade of the fifties. Nonetheless, economic necessity demanded the liberation of

the serfs. Struve further argues that the economic future in the fonn of the railroad had

83

thrown its shadow across serfdom and had condemned it despite its flourishing coition.

The introduction of the railroad affected a revolution in economic relationships and

Russia would not have been able to ensure the chains of an un-free labours system

(Struve cited in Blume 1966: 615-16). Some of the authors focused on the liberal

minded intellectuals and literary figures as the main force behind the emancipation act.

They pointed out that liberal Russian intellectuals from Radishchev on had laid the

foundations for the abolition of serfdom. These scholars had worked out the theoretical

bases of the emancipation and the writers and other literary figures among them acted as

apostles of freedom. Their work convinced the enlightened people of the era, who were

almost exclusively members of the nobility, that even though emancipation seemed

against their self-interest, they would benefit from it morally and spiritually (Ibid: 616).

Even some of the literature on the emancipation of serf highlights the role of the

Alexander II who proclaimed the act. In fact, most of these interpretations which

,_ provide undue importance to the behavioural changes of the certain dominant social

groups and individuals as the prime force behind such initiative had many drawbacks.

firstly, they undennined the structural basis of the change and the kind of the structural

asymmetries internally existing in the Russian countryside. Similarly, the profound

historical insight provided by the Marxian scholarship inform us that, if a society moves

to the capitalist path of deVelopment at a certain stage, there would emerge contradiction

between the advanced productive forces and obsolete relations of production and

thereby relations of production would be forced to alter its early character in terms with

the advanced productive forces. Finally, most of the historical scholarship on the

emancipation of serf also igllored the immense potential of the human being to mobilise

and collectively challenge the structural constraints imposed by the existing power

relations through their collective actions. In fact, the emancipation of serfs act could be

interpreted as the abortive attempt of the Russian nobility and newly-formed capitalist

elements within it, to rectify the wides spread social polarisation and contradictions

prevailing in the countryside thereby overcoming the internal stagnation and economic

backw.ardness faced by the Tsarist Russia. In the post-emancipation period, Russian

society witnessed the emergence of multiple social groups with diverse orientations and

goals which challenged the monarchy from different political and ideological terrains.

The section below focuses on the Russian social revolutionary movement which

emerged in the second half of the 19th and its eventual impact on the agrarian and

peasant question.

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The Formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and its Perspective

on Agrarian and Peasant Question.

The Russian social revolutionary movement which emerged in the second half of the

19th century manifested as the major platform for the articulation of the contending

revolutionary tendencies and progressive social visions of various segments of the

populations within Tsarist monarchy. In the course of its development and maturity, it

went different manifestations and in the process, within the movement there emerged

sharp ideological, political and tactical differences on the question of possible

trajectories it had undergone to radica]]y transform the semi-feudal and semi.:colonial

society like Russia, which eventually resulted in the bifurcation of the movement into

two political factions, namely 'Mensheviks' and 'Bolsheviks'. Both factions of the

social revolutionary movement agreed that Russian society was moving in the capitalist.

direction and they fun~a~entally differed on the question of how to attain the socio­

economic developme~t similar to the capitalist societies without necessarily going

through the capitalist stage of development under the dictates of the capital. Since both

Iaciions of the Russian revolutionary movement were dominated--oy overwhelmingly

urban educated people from the privileged social locations in the society, they visualised

the urban proletariat as the major agents of the social change in the society.

One of the specificities of the Tsarist Russia which differentiated it from the

most of the European societies were that more than seventy percent of the country's

population was rural dwellers and most of them were engaged in the petty-commodity

pro.uuction in the village commune. In the closing decades of the 19th century, both

. political fonnations increasingly focused on the agrarian and peasant question as they

realised that without it any goal of revolutionary transformation of the society would be

a meaningless endeavour. In the growth of agrarian capitalism in Russia, Lenin saw a

powerful force for the socialist revolutions however Plekhanov and most of the

Mensheviks considered the development and maturity of the industrial cap~talism to be

pre-requisite for the socialist revolution in the country. The Mensheviks looked upon the

peasantry as a conservative and reactionary force. It was totally just opposite to the

Narodnik view that the pe.asant commune provided Russia with a unique opportunity for

a direct transition to a socialist order (Alavi in Gough and Shamla'1971: 297-98):

In fact, even after the introduction of the 1861 emancipation of serfs act as

mentioned in the previous section, many clauses were formulated to preserve the control

85

of the landlords over the peasants. By the edict of emancipation the serfs had received as

allotment the land he had cultivated before, but with a portion of it withheld by the

landlords; such withheld portions were called 'cutoff lands'. For Russia as a whole the

proportion of cut offland is estimated to have been about a fifth ofthe peasants' original

holdings. The crucial fact, however, was that about 'the outland was not their relative

size, but the type of land that was taken away from the peasant and its role in the

peasant economy. The peasant was deprived of meadows, pastures, water courses, and

access to woods which were all essential to the peasant economy (Ibid: 299). There

existed many other similar clauses intended to extract resources from the peasant

producers to the interest of nobility. Since the publication of the Lenin's major work,

The Development of Capitalism in Russia in the closing year of the 19th century,

Bolshevik factions of the Russian social revolutionary movement consistently pleaded

for the increased' participation of the different classes of the peasantry in the future

socialist revolution in Russia. Lenin in fact even formulated a view that there would be

a dual strategy for the impending working class revolution against the Romanoff

dynasty marked by the proletarian socialist revolution in the urban areas which would

be supplemented by the Bourgeoisie democratic revolution in the countryside led by the

emerging landed class in hands with rural proletariat to abolish the centuries-old

domination of the feudal gentry to create the material basis for the completion of the

bourgeoisie under the auspicious ofthe working class regime (Lenin 1961: 424).

Lenin argued that the nature of penetration of the capitalist relation to the

countryside completely marginalised the village commune and it no longer remained a

viable basis for agrarian relations in the country. The state of th~ capitalist d,evelopment

resulted in the decline of the strength of the middle peasantry. In his view, sooner or

later, most of them would be pushed to the status of the marginal peasants or rural

proletarians. In the first decades of the 20th century the Tsarist monarchy witnessed

consistent unprecedented popular upsurges against its authoritarian rule.

The various factions of the social revolutionary movement in the country apart

from the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, social revolutionary party which have had

considerable support bases across the countryside than either of the urban centred

factions of the erstwhile Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), were in the

forefront of the militant fight against the feudal-monarchy alliance in the countryside.

The qualitative expansion of the anti-feudal anti-monarchic movements made the first

major massive revolutionary upheavals against the monarchy in 1905. Even though the

86

abortive revolutionary attempt by the different classes of the Russian people under

different political and ideological shades was not able to materialise their goals, it

became increasingly explicit that the structural basis of the Tsarist authoritarian rule in

the country had massively eroded its social base .. In fact, in the abortive revolution of

the 1905, the countryside witnessed a kind of spontaneous people's upsurge against the

obsolete feudal domination cutting across all the classes of the rural dwellers except the

gentry against whom the movement was channelesed (Hussain and Tribe1981: 223).

Since the failed revolutionary attempt of 1905, the Tsarist ruling classes in Russia

realised that they could not withhold the people's mobilisations in the countryside until

and unless some major changes were introduced in the agrarian land rela~ions and the

various constraints imposed on the peasants' population who constitute major chunk of

the population in the countryside were removed. In order to initiate radical break with

the communal fonn of social production in the countryside, the Tsar appointed one of

his ministers to fonnulate and implement the necessary refonns in this direction.

The Introduction of Stolypin ~_grarian Reform and its Impact on the Village

Commune

The new Russian prime minister, Peter Arkad'evich Stolypin introduced the new

agrarian refonn programme of the Tsarist regime just a year after the 1905 abortive

revolution intending to modernise and the Russian agriculture along with the capitalist

pattern of individual ownership which moved away from the centuries-old communal

form of production prevailing in the countryside. A leading authority on the pre­

revolutionary Russian countryside described that the Siolypin reform was "conceived as

a 'second emancipation', this time from the communal land use, to a lesser degree of

communal ownership. These refonns were designed to jump start a process of growth

and development in the agricultural sector. which still contributed more than 50 per cent

of Russia's GDP and employed some 80 per cent of the labour force; accelerate the pace

of marketisation and monetisation in rural Russia through the process of agricultural

individualisation and intensification; raise the rural standard of living; and ultimately,

contribute to the industrialisation of Russia's economy that was already underway"

(Macey 2004: 400). In fact, the new iefOlm implemented in the Russian countryside

acc1erated the development of capitalist social relations in the countryside. Likewise, it

also contributed to the further weakening of the village commune and the cUl1ailment of

their over-arching guardianship roles in the peasants' social life. Since the introduction

of the varieties of modem infrastructures and institutional mechanisms, there was new

87

revival in the countryside. In a recent piece, an expert on Stolypin agrarian reform,

described that it have intended to attain eight major goals:

• A process by which peasants in the villages with communal ownership of

land could, for the first time, claim title to the strips in their use, thereby

facilitating access to capital either through selling or mortgaging those strips;

• Procedures that would enable peasants to consolidate these strips into more

compact plots, known as otruba or khutora (family farms), designed to

encourage individual initiative as well as facilitate the introduction of the

agricultural improvements;

• A variety of other steps, known as zemleustroistvo(land reorganisation), the

goal of which was to help reduce the intermingling of strips with other

peasants and non-peasa~ts owners, achieve a more rational structure of

landholding and, thereby, increase labour productivity; ..

• The resettlement of the peasants in less populated l'egions beyond the Urals

and in the nOlih in order, in part, to make more land available in the centre;

• An expansion in sales of noble and state land to peasants to reduce land

hunger;

• An expansion of long-and short-term credit to facilitate purchase of such

land and the implementation of improvements to it;

• A decentralised programme of agronomical aid with the goal of fostering

the intensification of peasant agriculture and a rise in peasant and national

prosperity;

• Encouragement for the development of ail kinds of cooperatives (Macey

2004: 403-40).

Most Western authors on Stolypin reforms consider it as one of the most

effective policy measures initiated by the Tsarist regime after the historic emancipation

of serfs' act of 1861. They were of the view that even though the reform policies were

implemented only for a relative a short period mainly due to the First World War and

the subsequent overthrow of the Romanoff dynasty in the February revolution, it

provide a new momentum to the agrarian countryside and total agricultural production

along with the ~tandards of living of the common peasants' increased substantially

(Field 1976, 1990; Atkinson 1973, 1983; Macey 1987, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1998,

2001; Pallot 1984, 1990, 1992).

88

Lenin undertook a detailed review of the Bolshevik party's perspective on the

agrarian and peasant question and the various miscalculations and misjudgments of the

movements during the massive mobilisation witnessed by the countryside before and

after the 1905 revolution. In 1907, Lenin published his detailed review of the agrarian

policy of the social revolutionary movement and· the prevailing scenario in the

countryside after his 1899 work. Lenin titled his new book The Agrarian Programme of

SOcial-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution1905-1907; this was later manifested

as one of the finest pieces on the Marxian analysis of the agrarian and peasant question.

The first chapter of his book was devoted to a resume of the progress of differentiation

in the countryside and such forms of re-assessment of the economy based on the latest

statistics. In the remaining chapters, Lenin examined the theoretical principles of

involved in the debate between proponents of nationalisation and muncipalisation of

land, a general review of positions adopted on the agrarian question by social

democracy, and finally an investigation of the policies pursued by various parties in the­

Second Duma which is notable for the manner in which it dispensed with the apparently

. 'orthodox' Marxist reduction of the policy of a party to the class interests of its

members and supporters (Hussain and Tribe 1981: 230-31). In his early study on the

development of capitalism in Russia, Lenin identified two possible path of agrarian

capitalist evolution in Russia that of the land lord economy and that of the peasant

economy. However, in 1907, Lenin had altered the nature of these two broad

altematives. He argued that unless and until the peasantry took action to break up the

feudal estates and convert·them into peasant property, the future of the Russian farming

would be dictated by the landlord economy. Lenin described these respectively with the

American and the Prussian roads. In 1899, he assumed that the peasant economy would·

gradually oust the landlord economy through the economic collapse of the landlords'

class.

By 1907, the prospects undermining the landlord economy the peasant economy

became a remote possibility and Lenin considered refonning of the landlord economy as

the only viable path (Ibid: 231). Lenin pointed out that corresponding to the path, the

programmes followed to attain it also radically differs. The Stolypin reform he

considered was supported by the Right laJ~dlords and the Octoberists and also he treated

it as essentially landlord programme. The Liberals also supported this line by calling for

redemption payments and the preservation of landlord's estate (Ibid). The major

representatives of the peasantry mainly the socia] revolutionary pa11y and Trudiviks, put

89

forward an alternative to the landlord initiated Stolypin refonns. Even though the

Sto}ypin refonns had profoundly altered the agrarian relations in the countryside by

undennining the dominance and the omnipotence of the commune system, the nature of

the refonn initiated by the monarchy hardly contributed to any qualitative change in the

lives of the substantial majority of the rural dweUerswho played a prominent role in the

February and October revolutions which eventually resulted in the end of the centuries

I old Romanoff dynasty s authoritarian rule in the country.

The Role of the Peasantry in the October Revolution

From late 1916 onward, the discontent of the masses of workers and peasants, due to the

increasingly difficult living conditions, increased rapidly together with the anger of the

soldiers who were undergoing indefensible hardships in a war, the imperialist character

of which they realised more and more explicitly each passing day (Bettelheim 1976:

69). In the middle of February 1917, the discontent of the Petrograd workers and of the

soldiers stationed in the capital found open expression. Strikes and demonstrations

fol1owed each others pat1ly spontaneous and partly (and increasingly), organised by the

Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and spread to Moscow and the industrial centres. On

February 25, the soldiers in a Petrograd began to fraternise with the workers of the

capital and its outlying districts. On seventh February, mutinies broke out in the garrison

and workers and soldiers joined forces in the winter place and the Tsar was abdicated

(Bettelheim 1976: 69). The consolidation of different social groups cutting across class

barriers against the monarchy necessitated Tsar Nicholas to abdicate the throne on 2

March 1917 and the power vacuum that existed at the apex of the Russian society was

fined by two bodies: one fonned from below and the other from above, which existed in

uneasy partnership still the Bolshevik's victory in October 1917 (Gill 1976: 19). The

first of these bodies was the Soviet of the workers and soldiers deputies. This body

fonned as the Soviet of the workers deputies on February 27 and transfonned into the

Soviet of the workers and the soldiers deputies on ] March 1917 was an organisation of

the lower classes modelled on the celebrated Soviet of 1905 (Ibid: ] 9).The leading role

of the organisation of the Soviet was played by intellectuals from the major socialist

groups and it was these people who played a prominent role in the executive committee

of the Soviet. According to Gill, there was a clear division between the moderate

socialist intellectuals on the executive committee and the rank and file delegates of

workers and solders who fonned the body of·the organisation. This division within the

90

Soviet of workers and soldiers had a progressive radicalisation in the months which

followed and had major effects on the October Revolution.

The second body, the provisional government, was formed on 2 March by an

infonnal temporary committee of the state Duma .. The first provisional government,

\vhich ruled Russi~ until early May superficially, appeared more united than those

which succeeded it. The first provisional government headed by the non-party liberal

Prince G.E Lvovit, consisted primarily of representatives of the parties of the right.

Within the government, S. R. Kernsky was the only member whose views could be

classed as left-wing and moderate and all the remainders were moulded by the right­

wing ideologies. A researcher who studied the role of the peasants' in the 1917

revolutions of February and October reveals that in many villages, people were unable

to believe and convince themselves that the Tsar had abdicated the throne and even

drove away fro~ .the village people who had brought the news to them. However, in

many instance~,. the news was accepted immediately and joyfully and one official repOli

speaking of "universal joy at the Tsar's fall" (Ibid: 21). Initially the peasant greeted the

new government WltfJ widespread support, although such support was rarely

unqualified. The overthrow of the Tsar was interpreted in the villages as a symbol of the

collapse of old unjust property structures in the countryside and the end of the period

when they were denied their rights to lands currently held by non-peasants. However the

initial expectation of the peasants in the provisional government was not sustained even

for months.

-The provisional government's policies and programmes had hardiy any agendas

intended to address the peasants' concerns or any concrete proposals to ameliorate their

situation. Peasants were expecting fundamental changes in land and food policy from

the government. The government's refusal to carry out the land reforms and its inability

to persuade grain producers to surrender their grain in larger quantities set the tone of a

policy that was bound to evoke widespread opposition within the countryside. This

exacerbated the governmene s reliance on people who was seen by the peasants as

traditional exploiters to manage the newly established administrative structure. The

peasants' opposition was manifested in the increasing levels of unrest as the

government's life drew to a close. Yet in this situation, the"institutions developed by the

government were incapable of taking any positive actions to rectify the problems. Not

only were the institutional structures shrouded in ambiguity. but those at the uzed . . _ J

(local) and gubernia (regional) levels which tended to remain responsive to the

91

government generally wielded little influence in the village, meanwhile, the

organisations at village and vo/vost levels were more responsive to the peasants than to

the government directives. The first provisional government thus bequeathed to the

second not onJy a problem that would become of ever-increasing magnitude as the

months passed, but also an institutional framework that was incapable of coping with

the problem (Gill 1976: 73). In such a context, the provisional government made an

attempt to prevent further crisis by making some changes in the government itself As

result, a new coalition government was formed and some representatives of the socialist

parties were also incorporated in·it. However, this hardly had any impact on the

prevailing social crisis and chaos in the countryside.

The internal contradictions within the dominant social formation within Russia

reached its zenith in the months after February and after every passing month, it

manifested into antagonistic nature, if one draws Mao's views on the antagonistic and

non-antagonistic contradictions (Tse-tung 1959). These structural contradictions were

increasingly manifested on diverse forms in the eve of the October revolution such as

tile obsolete productive forces which were controlled and articulated by the ruling elite

and right-wing forces vis-a-vis advanced production relations a11iculated through the

medium of Bolshevik party and other social revolutionary groups in the urban areas and

peasants spontaneous formations in the countryside. In fact, in Russia, the twentieth

century began with the militant resistance against the Tsarist monarchy by most all

sections of the population in the country. These upsurges reached in its momentum in

the failed revolutionary attempt of 1905 and even after each passing year, it moved

further and further towards a militant and radical dimension. Moreover, the period

witnessed unprecedented mass-strikes organised by the different political and social

groups which culminated its intensity and frequency in the chaotic period of the First

World War and finally outburst in the revolutions of ] 917 (Trotsky 1936). While

analysing the increasing radicalisation of the Russian peasantry on the eve of the

Russian revolution, Maurice Dobb remarks:

peasantry's increasing radicalisations and their direct political actions in the form of seizure of the landed estates and selective seizure of the landlord's land who were the most reactionaries among their class was one of the powerful currents that were carrying even the soviet revolutions of November, the last two months preceding the October revolution peasants radicalisation towards revolutionary action reached zenith which was evident from the direct confiscation and seizure of the landlord estates were twenty and thirty times as numerous as they had been in April and this method of direct action spread across the country including the prosperous region of the European Russia. The politicisation of the Russian peasantry and their direct action, their changing perception were clear from tune in which they speak. In the days of serfdom,

92

there had been a peasant saying "we are the landlords, but the land we work is ours". Now the peasants were adapting it to the temper of the times and were declaring the landlord is our landlords we worked for him and his property is ours (Dobb 1948: 70).

One of the most striking features of the Russian revolution was the immense

proliferation of the voluntary organisations which spontaneously emerged from within'

society in the course of the revolution at all levels of society. The patterns of

organisations that emcrged during the late spring and summer actually effected the

disintegration of national economic unit and the increasing alienation of the urban based

government from the villages occurring at that time (Gill 1976: 1140).

The Volvost committee was the lowest layer and the base of a three-tiered

pyramid of committee in the countryside, with committee at the uzed and gobernia

levels comprising the upper two tiers. However, this pyramid was internally fractured

from the start, and the two upper layers were rarely firmly rooted in the base, in most

cases being almost completely isolated and alienated from the Volost committees. The

major reasons for this were the primarily urban nature of these bodies (Ibid: 114). The

history of the Russian revolution has become linked indissolubly with the concept of the

Soviet. Perceived as the spontaneous organisation of the oppressed in their struggle for

freedom, the Soviet has been depicted by many historians as the most impOliant

organisational form of 1917.

The Soviet movement initially emerged in the industrial centres of the country

and in its early period it was dominated by the Social Revolutionaries (SR) and

Menshevik and the Bolshevik presence was marginal. However, the Soviet gradually

moved further and further in the radical direction when the provisional government,

with the participation of the social democrats, followed the same policy of the previous

Tsarist regime and its reluctance to withdraw froni the war alienated the Soviet from

these parties. The massive ideological campaign carried by the Bolshevik party long

with the failure of the social democrats and the Mensheviks to properly address the

demands and aspirations of the common people who supported them paved the way for

increasing acceptance of the Bolshevik party within the common masses in crucial

period of the revolutionary turmoiL

However, the soviet movement which emerged in the industrial centres were the

proletatiat had a sizable population begun to transform it into an emerging centre of

power parallel the provisional government , the phenomenon of the Soviet movement

only gradually reached agrarian countryside were the majority of the people lived.

93

Since the fonnation of the first provisional government to the final overthrow of the

Bolshevik party, Russian peasants radically transfonned in their class views and

loyalties. Initially, the social democrats (SR) were the most popular force among the

revolutionary parties in the countryside. After the miserable living conditions along with

the hardships generated by World War I, the Russian peasants 'were expecting and

demanding from the successive provision government fundamental changes in land and

food policy which completely ignored b¥ the these regimes this material necessity

forced the peasants to undertake direct action in the fonn of confiscation of the estates

of the landlords and other exploitative elements in the countryside. Since July 1917, that

most of the peasants were expecting some friendly and liberal responses from the

provisional govemment and the social democrats (SR) was evident when the election of

the local soviet they overwhelmingly supported the social democratic party. In the

months after July, the pro-active r~sponse peasants expected from the government

eroded massively and they begin to further intensify their direct action through the

complete non-cooperation in the government .They also withdrew the food supply to the

cities and it was the most important turning point of the revolution. Even peasants in

rural areas in order to prevent the supply of wood to the cities cut trees and bumt it them

(Trotsky 1936: 883). Commenting on the unprecedented radical participator of the

Russian peasantry in the revolutionary process especially after the February revolution,

Trotsky remarks: Bourgeoisie historians have tried to put the responsibility upon the

Bolsheviks for the vandalism of the Russian peasants mode of settling accounts with the

'culture' of his lords. In reality the Russian Muzhik was completing a business entered

upon many centuries before the. Bolsheviks appeareq. in the world. He was fulfilling his

progressive historic task with the oniy means at his disposaL With the revolutionary

barbarism, he was wiping out the barbarism of the .middle ages. Moreover, neither he

himself, nor his grandfather nor his great grand father before him ever saw any mercy or

indulgence (Trotsky 1936: 887). In fact, centuries of domination and the virtual class

violence with all its cruelties along with the miserable material conditions forced the

Russian peasants to stand shoulder to shoulder with the revolutionary proletariat, led by

the Bolsheviks party in the formidable period of the revolution. As pointed out by

Charles Bettelheim, the political and ideological hegemony attained by the Bolsheviks

patiy vis-a-vis contending movements through the. working class peasant alliance led to

transcending of relations of power in the Russian society in favour of them and the

consequent fomlation of the Soviet state (Bettelheim 1978).

94

The fonnation of the working class peasant alliance and the resultant eventual

success of the Russian revolutionary movement offered an opportunity for the

Bolshevik party to effectively initiate a social agenda ever attempted by any state in

recent history and the way in which they addressed the agrarian and peasant question

had a profound impact on the working class state since they had the support of peasantry

who constituted the vast majority of the country's population and whose support and

participation were the essential requirement for any meaning full social transfonnation

in the society. The following section of the chapter reveals the perspective of the

Bolshevik party on the agrarian and peasant question.

The Formation of the Soviet State and its Perspective on the Agrarian and Peasant

Question

The Russian social revolutionary movement emerged as a reaction to the dominant

political economic relations prevailing in the Tsarist monarchic rule. The ~'oishevik

party adopted the revolutionary social agenda proposed by the Marxian theory as the

guiding principles in the process of socialist construction in post-Revolutionary Russia.

One of the first and most impOliant steps taken by the Soviet power on the very morrow

of its establishment was the decreeon land ratified on October 26, 1917 by the second

All-Russia Congers of Soviets. This decree annulled all private ownership of land; the

estates of the landlords, of the state and of the churches were placed at the disposal of

the districts committees and peasants' Soviets. By this decree, the Soviet government

proved concretely that it was a workers' and peasants' government. The Soviet state

showeu thus clearly that unlike the previous state, it did not protect the interest of

landlords and bourgeoisie, but on the contrary deprived them of their land. Soviet power

revealed to the peasants that it would encourage them to take the land themsclves in

order to regulate the use they made of it (Bttelheim 1976: 210). The post revolutionary

soCiety of Tsarist Russia in the morrow of the Bolshevik seizure of the state power has

been characterised as socially and economically polarised into different c1asses and all

arenas of social life of the people were stratified on the basis of their class locations in

the society. A substantial majority of the population was even denied of the essential

subsistence requirements of life. The Bolsheviks who headed the state that emerged

from the October revolution had no intention of building a complete socialist society in

the country. They shared the unanimous view of the Marxists of that time, according to

which such an undertaking required definite material pre-conditions, the pre-dominance

of the larger over the smaller one, and of industry over agriculture, a high level of

95

development of the productive forces, a corresponding high level of technical skill and

culture on the part of the workers. These conditions were largely absent in Russia when

the Bolsheviks party came to the helm of affair. Most of the Bolshevik leaders

considered victory of their nation as merely one link. in a chain of international

revolution. Victorious revolutions in the industrially-advanced nations in the West,

especially in Germany were necessary to create the starting basis necessary for a rapid

transition to a socialist economy (Mandel 1978: 548).

Earnest Mandel, one of the leading political e.conomic theorists of the Post

Second World War period pointed out that, "the delay and then the defeat of the

international revolution set the ruling party a series of problems that were quite new and

had not been solved by classical Marxist economic theory. The party found a series of

answers to these problems which differed according to many factors which influenced

the party's practice/factors among which the most important were in the last analysis,

the relation of forces between the classes on the international and national scales and the

predominance at different times of different social pressures which were brought to bear

on the party" (Mandel 1978: 549). The Bolshevik party being adherent to the .

revolutionary political philosophy of Marxism and its analysis of the state, with its

rejection of Western liberal assumption about the state and the relation between state

and society provided a theoretical framework for the Bolsheviks after 1917 when they

sought to grapple with the problem of state building. Lenin's classic study, The State

and Revolution offers a clear exposition of Marx's idea on the class nature of the state

and the more problematical question of the future of the state· in the transition to

socialism. Lenin envisnged the destruction of the state bourgeoisie state machinary and

its replacement by a new state apparatus, modelled on the Paris commune embodying

the dictatorship of the proletariat. He rejected Westembourgeoisie models of the state

organisation with their spectrum of power check and balances. Socialist democracy

would be a form of direct patiy-guided participatory democracy eradicating the

dichotomy between the state and society and transforming the specialist functions of the

professional administration instead of reling on the relatively simple tasks of control and

accounting which would be perfonned by all. All that was required was to introduce

measures to democratise the state machinary and to curb the bureaucracy (Reep 1987:

6).

The programme of the Bolshevik government did not envisage the immediate

expropriation of all the capitalists. It envisaged only the universal establishment of the

96

workers supervision of production, the workers' having as a tlrst stage to apprentice

themselves the task of management by checking on the capitalist managers. It further

envisaged the nationalisation of banks, the progressive nationalisation of the chief

monopoly-controlled sections of the economy, the non-recognition of the foreign debts

and the nationalisation of land and sub-soil together with the division of land among the

peasants (Mandel 1978: 549). However, the impetus for the development of the

workers' . initiative, non-cooperation and then sabotage on the part of the industrial and

administrative circles, the unleashing of the white terror followed by the red, the

outbreak of the widespread civil war which tore the whole country into pieces during

the first few years of the working class regime. The nationalisation of the banks of

wholesale trade, of all industry, and of all foreign property and establishment of a state

monopoly in foreign trade had effectively undermined the hitherto existing political

economic relations in the country. The Lepinist perspective on the social transfonnation

was based on its essential negation of the capitalist mode of ,.production and its

corresponding forms of hierarchies in state and social structure. Ii attempted to build a

society free of exploitation and private property and the sole purpose of production was

the collective satisfaction of the society'S needs rather than plivate profits. However, the

Bolshevik's leaders had finn consensus that in the process of attaining the above goal,

in the transitional phase, the society would continue to coexist with many characteristics

of the old order which it attempted to change. This is by Lenin immediately after the'

victory of the revolution fulfilled the promises made to the peasantry that the land

should be given to the real cultivators who were working on it. Bolshevik regime

fulfilled this promise through the decree on land. It also resulted in the consolidation of

the working class-peasant alliance and it manifested as the social basis of the Bolsheviks

power in the society. In fact the Bolshevik regime was forced by the internal and

external circumstances to retreat to the centralised fonn of power and to curb the

democratic dissent of the oppositional movements. Due to the influence of the light­

wing forces and the prevalent feudal values, a large number of middle and big peasants

had supported the white anny and other social forces that were declared open war

against the nascent working class state. This was the context in which Bolshevik regime

resorted to the strategy of war communism to effectively consolidate its control in the

economy and the society thereby defeating its intemal and external class enemies.

97

War Communism and the Alienation of the Peasantry from t~e Bolshevik Regime

The introduction of the new mode of social and economic organisation of the socialist,

system known as War Communism was in certain sense a radical departure from the

initial policy and programmes of the Bolshevik party, Initially, it promised and practised

a policy which permitted different social classes and groups a certain level of freedom in

both economic and political matters. The new policy virtually suspended all the rights

initially provided to different segments of the people and it nationalised all the

productive assets in the country, including land and even fann animals. In fact, this was

necessitated by the kind of threats the working-class regime faced from the domestic

and external enemies. Maurice Dobb pointed out that the very survival of the working

class peasant state was uncertain even after the two years of virtual physical survival

and initiating far-reaching changes in the political-economic relations of the country. All

the reactionary forces, both domestic and external, fonned a massive combined assault

against the Leninist regime from various parts of the country and the white anny was

able to control most of the crucial industrial centres and most of the grain-cultivating

region. These developments caused a severe shortage of both necessary and· the

Bolshevik regime's grips on it gradually reduced by each passing day. At one stage, the

Soviet government had lost possession of all but not 100 per cent of the fonner coal

supplies of the country and retained less than a quarter of its known boundaries, less

than half of its grain area and less than one tenth of its source of its sags beet (Dobb

1948: 98). This was the context in which the nascent working class state was forced to

implement new policies intended to consolidate the state through the monopolistic

control of the means of production in the society Due to the prevalence of the

traditional values practiced among the peasantry, large segments of it were brought

under the influence of the white army. Among the peasantry, the rural elites and middle

level peasants who were increasingly allied with the oppositional forces and the non­

supply of the grain and other essential agricultural goods led to the massive scarcity and

resultant sky-rocketing of the prices and inflation in the economy. The two social groups

who were most severely affected by the sky rocketing of inflation were moneylenders

and the peasants. The money lenders hoarded the money to leading massive fall in the

real value of currency and thereby reducing their real wealth. Those peasants who had

invested in their surplus money in individual commodities were also affected by the new

development. This resulted in a massive increase in the prices of the industrial goods in

relation to the agricultural goods they sold. The grain monopoly imposed on the eve of

98

the revolution to prevent the massive rise in the agricultural goods resulted in the

relative stability of the prices of the agricultural goods thereby affecting the imbalances

in the economy more adversely in the country~de than in the cities.

The economic crux of the new system known. as War Communism consisted of

relationship with the peasant agriculture. Due to the non-cooperation of the peasants

with the new regime, the latter was forced to adopt coercive measures for attaining

resources and centralised control and distribution of supplies. The surplus produce of

the each farm over and above essential needs of subsistence were forced to hand over to

the state organs. Forceful accumulation of the peasants' commodities by the new regime

resulted in the collapse of the working class-peasant alliance in the country, which in

fact alone contributed to the eventual success of the Bolshevik strategy over other

powerful contenders. The estrangement of the peasants was not merely political, an

"effect which was serious enough for the Soviet regime. Compulsory requisitioning

which had often had to enforce by the patch of the armed detachments of workers from

the towns to the villages very soon produced direct economic consequences which

further worsened the situation. As a result, peasants also massively reduced the farm

size by abandoning the large tract of the land they had cultivated earlier which resulted

in the decline of the sown area across the country (Dobb 1948: 103).

The agrarian landed class kulak and the middle classes were most severely

affected by this new policy. In the meantime, the poor peasants and the agricultural

labourers in the countryside manifested as the main source of the Bolsheviks' suppOli

base among the peasants: This in turn led to the increasing alienation of the left social .

revolutionaries who were part of the government. This further undermined the

legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime in the countryside. Moreover, the complete

suspension of the all forms of. the hitherto economic practices and resultant

nationalisation directly contributed to the virtual disappearance of the currency as a

medium oftransaction. The policy of War Communism profoundly influenced all arenas

of the nascent socialist society. However, through this policy, the working class regime

was able to withhold the kind of threats faced from the domestic and external class

enemies. The greatest impact of the extreme policy was the alienation of the vast

majolity of the peasants' from the wOfking class state who constituted a substantial

majority of the population and whose remarkable mobilisations and tactics such as

blocking the essential food transportation to the cities and war-front enonnously

influenced the outcome of the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917 (Gill:

99

1979). However, after effectively weakening the domestic and external anned resistance

against the working class state, the Leninist regime realised the centrality and

cooperation of the vast segments of the peasant population economically placed in

different social classes in the construction of the socialist society in Russia. As result,

the working class regime initiated many new policy measures and it gradually withdrew

all the arbitrary policy measures introduced in the War Communism era and that

resulted in the introduction of new set of policies to attain the confidence of the peasants

later known as New Economic Policy which would be examined in the following

section.

The New Economic Policy and the Restoration of the Working Class-Peasant

Alliance

The Soviet social formation which emerged after the October revolution

fundamentally altered the natur~ and character of the Old Russian state when it ,. introduced the programme of war communism. The proposed policy alienated a large

chunk of peasantry from the Bolsheviks regime. Even after the seizure of power by the

Bolshevik party, its social base still remained among the urban working class, and its

presence among the peasants were very marginal. However, peasantry's participation

was essential for any meaningful social transfonnation. Being consciousness of this

problem, the party formed an alliance of working class and peasantry which radically

altered the social equilibrium that hitherto existed in the country. The policies adopted

by the Soviet state in order to defend its working class regime disproportionably

affected the peasantry, especially the middle peasantry who constituted a major size of

the peasant population in the country.

The Bolshevik pat1y had a consistent approach to the peasant and agrarian

question and contrary to the prevailing notion held by different segments of the people

and among the academic circles that the peasantry in Russia was almost a homogeneous

category and the internal differences among them were due to the demographic changes.

The Bolshevik party on the contrary argued that like any other social segment/class with

a predominant peasant population, the peasantry in Russia also had all the hierarchies

and intemal economic differentiation ilTespective of the country's 10l)g history of

communal fonn of cultivation and ownership (Chayanov in Thorneret et a1. 1966;

Hanison 1970; Shanin 1970; 1971; 1974; Patnaik 1979, 1991, 1999,2006; Thorner

1962, 1965, 1966). The policy further argued that the penetration of the capitalist mode

100

of production in the agrarian sector after the emancipation of the peasantry further

accelerated the process of fragmentation which eventually led to division into different

classes. Moreover, the policy measures adopted by the Bolshevik regime immediately

after the ascendancy of state power radically altered the prevailing power relations that

hitherto exist.ed in the countryside.

The introduction of New Economic Policy (NEP) in a certain sense was a

reversal from the programme and policies visualised by the party before and after the

revolution. By welcoming private initiativ~ in the i~dustrial and agrarian sectors, it had

. realised once again that, the transition period was quite prolonged than had hitherto been

perceived and in transition period, the co-existence and participation of different social

classes was essential for the maintenance of hegemony of the Bolsheviks, tenned as the

dictatorship of the proletariat thereby preventing the consolidation of counter

revolutionary forces against the system. The retreat of the Soviet state from the policies

it had pursued in the time of War Communism once again created a situation in which

the peasantry increasingly associated Cind cooperated with the new system. Among the

peasantry, the middle peasantry who moved away from the working class state realised

that through the new policy they could regain whatever they had lost during the time of

\Var Communism (Lenin 1969; Bettelheim 1974, 1978; Dobb 1967). In other words, the

New Economic Policy reinstated the relevance and necessity of strengthening the

working class and peasant alliance in the country. The period of War Communism

proved that the uniform policy of socialist transition practices in the period hardly suited

the prevailing concrete realities of the country, especially when society was unevenly

developed with different modes of production that persisted in the in the rural areas.

Lenin clearly distinguished the dual character of the Russian revolution that is the

proletarian and the democratic nature of its practice by the proletariat in the urban areas

and the peasantry in the rural areas respectively. During the proletarian revolution, the

industrial working class, under the banner of the party directly confronted its class

enemy i.e. capital articulated through the capitalist class. This. leading role was

manifested in striking fashion in October 1917 arid it made possible the establishment of

the dictatorship of proletariat and the accomplishment of changes that are inherent in a

proletarian revolution (Bettelheim 1978).

The democratic revolution corresponded with the determining role played by the

peasantry fighting for aims that were not socialist, such as the generalization ·of the

individual peasant production through the destruction of large-scale land ownership.

101

Alongside this system of government control, the spontaneous movement for workers'

control which had arisen in 1917 continued to gain momentum, which was legitimised

by the Sovanrkom decree On Workers Control of November 1917. This movement was

organised through the factory committees and control commissions. In 1918, it was

brought progressively under trade union direction. In the spring of 1918, the movement

provided the driving force behind the wave of industrial nationalisation. Attempts were

also made to transform workers control in the sense of worker's supervision into a

syndicalist fonn of workers self-administration of industry. The seriousness of this

chal1enge to party policy was underlined with the emergence of the Left communists.

This group supported workers self-administration of industry that was organised through

the factory committees and the trade unions and also defended the rights oflocal Soviets

against the central authority (Ibid). The defeat of the left communists coincided with the

intensification of the civil war in summer 1918.

War Communism from 1919 to 1921 saw an unprecedented extension in the

power of the state. Trade was brought under strict government control and industry was

subject to wholesale nationalisation. The supreme council of the national economy

(vesenha) took over the managemerit of industry though the cumbersome and highly

centralised body called glavki. The experiment in workers' control was cast aside. One­

man management was introduced in industry, bourgeois specialists were re-employed,

and the influence of trade unions over management decisions cUl1ailed (Rees 1989).

Internal contradictions existed within the Bolshevik party regarding the question of the

role of party vis-a-vis government; the status and the role of the Soviets in the social

transition process; the policy towards the trade unions and the class character of the state

apparatus, etc. Most of the time, Lenin's positions were manifested as a minority view

and the views of other leading members of the party such as Leon Trotsky, Nicholai

Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky's were quite contrary to the latter's position. It

has been argued that many times those leaders took mechanical interpretations of

Marxist doctrine and it was hardly reflective of the concrete reality prevailing in the

society (Day 1975: 194-197). This view was clearly visible from the position they had

been taken regarding the peasant question. While interpreting the classical Marxian

position on the peasant question without taking its dialectical spirit, they argued that the J

peasantry could not play any contributory role in the process of socialist transition and

the Soviet working class state should take a more militant policy towards the agrarian

question. In the time of \Var Communism, they argued that the forceful nationalisation

102

of the peasant fann and the maximum extraction of resources from agriculture were

essential for the industrialisation of the country. For them, the policy of War

Communism was not only a policy, rather it was the core of the Bolshevik party's

programme and the party should vigorously practice it further instead of retreating from

it. The economic atmosphere of War Communism is best characterised by Trotsky's

demand in 1920 for the mobilisation and militarisation of labour including a planned

systematic, steady a!1d stem struggle with labour desertion; the creation of a penal work

command out of deserters, and their interment in concentration camps. To relieve

starvation in the cities, the Bolsheviks relied upon the inflationary expansion of the

money supply and the outright requisitioning of foodstuffs through use of committees of

poor peasants and anned detaahments sent out from the urban centres. The continuing

inflation soon created the need for rationing and eventually for the system for wage

payments in kind. Unprecedented scarcities caused acute problems in the allocation of

goods and resources reinforcing the government's authoritarianism in a way no socialist

had previously anticipated. Even so, three full years after the end of the War

Communism, Kritsman the economic historian of the revolution, was still harshly

critical ofthose who dismissed these measures as temporary aberrations imposed by the

necessity upon a besieged proletarian fortress. 'In reality, he argued, 'so-called war

communism constituted the first great steps in the transition to socialism (Day 1975:

197). Most of the Bolsheviks leaders quoted the writings of Marx to substantiate their

position. When Karl Marx spoke about the possible character of the economy in the

process of transition towards the socialist society; he observes in volume 1 of Capital

that the manner in which the economic activity might he structured during the first stage

of social reconstruction: We will assume ... that the share of each individual producer in·

the means of subsistence is detennined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that

case, playa double role. Its appointment in accordance with a definite social plan (the

allocation of workers) maintains the proper proportion between the different kind of

work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also

serves as a measure of portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of

his share,·in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social

relation of the individual producers, with regal'd both to their labour and its products, are

in this case perfectly clear and intelligible ... (Marx 1973: 78-79).

In the case of socialised production, Marx wrote in Vol. 1 of the Capital 'the

money capital is eliminated society distributes labour power and the means of

production to the different branches of production. The'producers may, for all it matters,

receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer

goods a quantity corresponding to their labour time. These vouchers are not money

which they do not circulate'. Finally, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx

commented that in the transitional society:

the individual producer receives back from the society-after the deductions (for depreciation, investments, insurance, administration and benefits for those unable to work) are made exactly what he gives to it. When he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour .... He receives a certificate from the society that he has furnished such and such amount of labour. ... And with this certification he draws from the social stocks of means of consumption as much as costs, the same amount of the labour. The same amount of the labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another ... The right of the producers of proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with equal standard of labour (Marx cited in Fuer ] 967: ] ] 7-118).

Of all the theorists in the Bolsheviks party, none adhered more faithfully to Marx

prescriptions than Preobrazhensky. While Marx had de-mystified the market in theory

showing that commodities were objectified human labour and economic relations are in­

fact human relations, Preobrazhensky believed that revolution could achieve a similar

de-mystification in practice. He dedicated his first major book, Paper Money in the

Epoch of Proletarian Dictatorship (Bumazhneyeden 'gi v epokhu proletarskoidiktatury)

to the printing press of the People's Commissariat of Finance. By inundating the country

with paper cUlTency system and thereby shot up the bourgeois order in its rear.

Communist society he argued: "had no need of money, human relations would

henceforth be direct and natural, not requiring capitalist forms of market mediation. The

health ana stability of capitalist society had been measured by the increase of

commodities available for sale; but 'for the transitional epoch ... the thermometer that

determines the success of new society is the increase ... in the quantity of products (not

commodities) that are handled by the distributive organs of the proletarian state" (Day

1975: 197). The collapse of the monetary wage system and its replacement in rationing

seemed to provide full confinnation of the thesis that the Soviet Republic was

progressing towards a planned, moneyless economy.

Although Preobrrazhensky attempted to follow Marx's analysis down to the last

organisational detail, one critical difference remained. Marx had expected economic,

planning to emerge as an historical altemative to the generali.sed crises of fully

developed capitalist market, whereas in Russia by 1917 such a market did not exist. By

comparison with Preobrazhensky, Lenin always tended to view Russia's prospects with

104

a good deal of scepticism. In 1917-1918 he had normally argued-that capitalism could

not be replaced at once by a planned economy, but would instead give way to a system

of 'state capitalism' (Ibid: 199). The transition period itself was thus seen as a unity of

opposites rather than as a final dissolution of dialectical contradictions. Plan and market

element were expected to co-exist and interact for a long time, thereby providing the

historical dynamic needed to carry the revolution towards its final objectives. Lenin's , view appeared to be that the immediate universalisation of state planning was both

impossible in practice and incorrect iri theory. Indeed, if the plan were immediately

universalised, there would be no transition at all only a leap to communism. In the

atmosphere of war communism, Lenin subsequently shared some of the aspirations of

his more impetuous coIleagues, but by the spring of 1921, he returned to the view that

the dialectics of transition period had been widely misconceived. In doing so, he

grasped for a compromise that would mitigate the threat of civil war with the peasantry;

and in ,effect, he repudiated all the premises upon party policy and Preabrazhensky's

reaso~lng had thus far been based (Lenin 1967: 247-269).

Denouncing War Communism as 'a rriistake' and demanding a 'strategic

retreat', Lenin did not accept the idea of substituting a tax in kind for requisitions in the

efforts to establish a viable integration between town and country. Peasants were given

the right to trade post tax surpluses in exchange for manufactured goods. To assist in the

restoration of the industrial production, the government decided to de-nationalise and

lease the majority of small enterprise either to local entrepreneurs or to cooperatives

(Ibid: 257) The problem with War Communism, Lenin maintained, was that the Soviet

govcrnment had attempted to 'go over directly to communist production and

distribution'. The current objective was to find the correct method of directing the

development of capitalism (which is to some extent and for some time inevitable) into

the channels of state capitalism, and to determine how to hedge it with conditions to

ensure its transformation into socialism in the near future. Late in 1921 Lenin

announced a further retreat 'from state capitalism to ... money system.' The original

attempt to restrict the intemal trade to bm1er was abandoned, as Lenin warned the party

to adapt itself to capitalist methods or be 'overwhelmed by the spontaneous wave of

buying and sellingo by the money system. Bukh3lin and a handful of other like critics

Preobrezhensky considered Lenin's choice of'the teml 'state capitalism' to be

dangerously misleading. In pm1icular, he was fearful that Lenin's ideas might lead to a

105

recovery of commercial markets at the expense of the large-scale industry (Day 1975:

195-219).

As Lenin wrote in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government: "The present

task could not' be defined by the simple formula:, continue the offensive against the

capital. Although we have certainly not finished off capital and although it is certainly

necessary to continue the offensive against this enemy of the working people, such a

formula would be inexact, would not be concrete, would not betake into account the

peculiarity of the present situation in which in order to go on advancing successfully in

the future, we must 'suspend' our offensive now (Lenin 1973: 245).

Contextual ising the new economic policy by trying to locate it into a historical

dialectical perspective, the strategic retreat from the programme of War Communism by

the Bolshevik party was the material inevitability of a socialist state moving on the

directions of creating a just and egalitarian social order with many structural

deficiencies along with powerful internal and external enemies (Rees 1989). The Soviet

Working Class regime attempted to create a new social fonnation, which was radically

and qualitatively different from the hitherto existing social fonnations, which were

dominated by capitalist and feudal values.

By challenging the prevailing notion that only the industrially-advanced Western

capitalist societies with the structural characteristics of highly developed economy

having huge unemployment with large industrial working class living in the margin of

the capitalist social order were the essential m::lterial requirements for the development

of class consciousness and thereby the success of the revolution, the Bolshevik paIiy

demonstrated that the conscious agency of the working class i.e. the communist paIiy

moving hand in hand with the peasant masses would be able to overcome the

teleological interpretations of the Marxian theory of social revolution. Nonetheless, they

also realised from the initial stages of the socialist construction that predominantly

agrarian societies like Russia with differentiated levels of developed modes of

production; the mechanical reading of the prevailing concrete reality could hardly reach

the socialist road that they imagined. Lenin was ahead of any other Bolshevik leader in

realising this. On many occasions, he single-handily fought within the Bolshevik party

against the mechanical interpretations of the Marxian theory to convince them about the

defence of the working class peasant alliance. He also con~ected the erroneous views

held by many leading members of the Bolshevik party that the technical abolition of the

]06

private property and its corresponding institutional structures was in itself a great leap

towards a socialist society.

The NEP was very much more than an economic"policy. It was also very much

more than a policy of "concessions" made to the peasantry and to some Russian and

foreign capitalists. Actually, the NEP was something other than a mere retreat, the

metaphor that was first used to define it. It was an active alliance between the working

classes and the peasantry: an alliance that was more and more clearly defined by Lenin

was intended not just to ensure the "restoration of the economy", but also to make it

possible to lead the peasant masses along the road to socialism, through the aid­

economic, ideological and political-brought to them by the proletariat (Bettelheim

1978: 22). The NEP as an active al1iance between the peasantry and the proletariat in

power was a special form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a fonn corresponding to

the specific conditions prevailing in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.

The special features of the class alliance that the NEP aimed to establish should

not cause us to forget that this alliance was in strict confonnity with the fundamental

principles of Marxism. Marx opposed Lassalle for whom the relation to the working

class, the other social classes constituted "one reactionary mass". In a passage written in

June 1919 long before the fonnulation of the NEP-Lenin stressed that the dictatorship

of the proletariat does not mean a dictatorship of the working class over the masses in

general, but is an al!!an~c ::'etween classes. He declared that whoever 'has not

understood this form of reading Marx's Capital has understood nothing in Marx,

understood nothing in socialism ... (Lenin 1970: 3iSO). After recaliing that the

dictatorships of the proletariat is the continuation of the class struggle in new fOlms,

Lenin added: The dictatorship of the proletariat is a specific form of class alliance

between the proletariat, the vanguard of the working people and the numerous non­

proletarian strata of the working people (petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors, the

peasantry, the intel1igentsia, etc.) or the majority of the strata, alliance against capital, an

alliance whose aim is the complete overthrow of capital, the complete suppression of the

resistance offered by the bourgeoisie as well as of attempts at restoration on its part, an

al1iance for the final establishment and consolidation of socialism (Lenin 1967: 381).

The necessity of this fonn under the conditions of Soviet Russia was one of the lessons

that Lenin drew from 'war communism'. That experience had shown that it was

imperative to replace the attempted '"frontal attack" characteristic of the years (1918-

1920) by a war of position. This "war" could lead to the triumph of socialism provided

107

that the ruling party clearly perceived that the terrain it stood upon at outset was one of

real social relations which were still capitalist and provided that it set itself the task of

helping to bring about the conditions needed if these relations were to be controlled and

transfonned by drawing the peasant masses into this new struggle, which was a struggle

for socialism (Ibid: 23).

In January j 923, Lenin gave concrete definition to one of the fOims that this

advance toward socialism should assume so far as the peasantry was concerned: "If the

whole peasantry had been organised in co-operatives, we would be now have been

standing with both feet on the soil of socialism". In the same passage, Lenin stressed

again that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a general development of

cooperatives could lead to socialism provided that it resulted not from economic and

political coercion, but from the will of the peasant masses themselves which accounts

for this remarks: The organisation of the entire peasantry in co-operative societies

presupposes a standard of culture among the peasants ... that cannot, in fact, be

achieved without a cultural revolution. (Lenin 1973: 474). Ever since the experience of

the policy of War Communism, Lenin was once again convinced in his position vis-a

vis a vast majority of the party leaders that mere legal abolition of the individual

property rights and nationalisation of the productive forces hardly in itself reached into

the socialist society. Rather he believed that for achieving the real socialist path, it

essential1y requires the political, ideological and cultural education of the vast segments

of the peasant masses. The Bolshevik party should try and learn to seriously engage and

work with them and thereby liberate them from their traditional beliefs and values. This

also essent1ally requires long years of ardent and consistent political and ideological

struggle even after the victory of the socialist revolution. In other words, the political

defeat of the class enemy by itself does not eradicate all the contradictions existing in a \ .

society rather the new form ofthe contradiction that would gradually emerge in the post

revolutionary society between different classes and different occupations.

The Economic Impact of the New· Economic Policy

The most important aim of NEP was to rescue the country from the famine and

economic chaos in which it was sunk after the four years of the First World War

followed by three years of civil war and foreign intervention. What mattered for the

Soviet government was first and foremost to take the measures needed if the essential

branches of p1"Oduction were quickly to recover their pre-war levels, and then to surpass

108

these levels, taking account of the new social and political conditions resulting from the;

October revolution. By achieving this aim the Soviet government scored a political

victory. It showed its power to save the country from tremendous difficulties into which

it was plunged at the end of the civil war. Thanks to the measures taken, and above all to

the immense effort and labour put in by the workers and peasants, the results obtained

were exceptionally great.

In 1926-1927, agricultural production took a leap forward. Its value in pre-war

prices reached 11.17million roubles, which meant an advance of over 100 percent on

1921-1922 and 6 percent on 1913 in comparison with 1925-1926, the previous year,

when the advance was 5 percent. In 1926-1927, the gross yield of grain was more than

25 percent in excess of that in 1922-1923: it came to about 76.4 million metric tons, as

against 74.5 in 1925- 1926. At that moment however, the level of the prewar grain

harvest (86.6 million metric tons was the aver~ae for the years 1909 to 1913) had not

been fully attained: but a number of other hranches of agricultural production were

progre!,sing, despite the inadequacy and obsolescence of the equipment available on

most farms. The years between 192 I -1922 and 1926-1927 thus saw a remarkable

advance in agriculture. However, this advance was very uneven between one region and

another and between different branches of agriculture. Furthermore, after 1925-1926,

agriculture production tended to stagnate. This slowing-down brought significant

political consequences (Bettelheim 1978: 28).

During the NEP, industrial production too made remarkable progress.

Production in 1926-1927 increased three times in tenns of volume of that of 192 I -1922. -

However, the progress achieved made up mainly for the previous decline; and industrial.

production in 926-1927 was only 4 percent more than prewar, whereas it was 15.6

percent more than in the preceding year.

While comparing the progress made by the different branches of industry

(manufacturing and extractive), we find that the rates of progress were highly uneven. In

1926-1927, production of coal and oil surpassed the prewar level to a marked degree.

Iron and steel lagged behind. As for the production of cotton goods, it exceeded the pre­

war figure by 70 percent.

The progress in industrial production of consumer goods did not show the same

signs of slowing down as apparent in agriculture. When we compare this with the

109

increase in population, it is evident that it had progressed at a faster rate. Between 1913

and 1926 the population grew by 7 percent, reaching the figure of 147 million, 18

million of whom lived in towns; whereas the index of industrial production of consumer

goods reached 120 in 1928 by referring 1914 as base year (Bettelheim 1978: 34).

One of the immediate aims of the NEP was a rapid development of exchange

between town and country (a development which formed the material basis for the

alliance between the workers and peasants). It was an aim to be attained not only

through increased production but also through the establishment of economic relations

satisfactory to the peasants who under War Communism had finished supplies to the

towns while receiving hardly any products in return. The NEP was in fact marked by an

extensive development of commodity exchange, by restoration of the role of the money,

by the existence of a vast "free market," and by the influence of price movements upon '.

the supply of and demands for goods and by the influence on the, q,rientation of some

investments (Bettelheim 1978: 157)

The NEP and the Socio-Cultural Changes of the Soviet Population

The introduction of the New Economic Policy had a radical impact on the emerging

Soviet social fonnation. Ever since the fOImation of the Soviet working class state, it

had implemented many programmes which had made a profound impact in the hitherto

existing social relations in that society. Yet due to constant external and domestic threat

from the capitalist and other hostile forces, the Bolshevik party was constrained by

fonnulatingand implementing any systematic programme both at the material Rnd

cultural realms, which aimed at creating a new human being thereby liberating human

history from the pre-history as Marx visualised in German Ideology and the Gotha

Programme. But no one could ignore the fundamental. changes that are taking place in

the Soviet society (Ibid: ] 69) Amongst the radical changes brought by the working class

regime, the most profound one was bringing politics and class struggle to the centre of

social development and thereby undernlining the centuries old- privileges possessed by

the dominant classes in the society:

In the sphere of education, there was an unprecedented increase in the number of

people attending schools. The figure for pupils in the plimary and secondary schools

increased, in round figures from 7.9 million in 1914- 1915 to 11.5 million in 1927-

1928. As compared with 1922-1923, the increase in numbers was 1.4 million in towns

110

and 2.8 million in the countryside. True the content and methods of teaching given were

far from corresponding fuJIy to what was needed for building socialism and to what was

implicit in the roles workers and peasants were' supposed to play in that task.

Nevertheless, the quantitative progress achieved was remarkable, and real efforts were

made to establish a system of education linked with practical work in production. In the

sphere of reading, great progress was realised (Bettelheim 1978: 29). Thus, the number

of books in the public libraries in 1927, was 43.5 million in the towns (as against 4.2

million in 1913), and 25.7 million in the countryside (as against 4.2 million inI913).

This progress was all the more significant because, on the whole, what was 'published

after the October ~evolution was marked by a new revolutionary spirit, and because the

controversies of that peliod were wide-ranging enough to permit the expression of such

diverse trends of thought, dogmatic tendencies and a stereotyped style were largely

avoided. A11 the same, we must not lose sight of the fact that despite what had been

achieved, only a little over one-half of the inhabitants between 9 and 49 years of age

could read and write when the census of 1926 was taken (Ibid: 30-31).

In the sphere of health, the number of doctors increased from 20,000 in 1913 to

63,000 in 1928 despite the substantial emigration of doctors between 1918 and

1923.The number of practitioners present in the rural districts increased rapidly, but in

proportion of number of inhabitants sti11 remained much lower than in the towns.

Improvement in material and sanitary conditions brought about a fall in death rate from

21.7 percent in 1924 to 18.8 percent in 1927 (Ibid: 32).

The c~)J1solidation of Soviet power and the strengthening of the workers peasant

alliance gradually contributed to the expansion of the Bolshevik party's strength in the

rural areas. As a result, the mass organisations of the working class (mainly, trade

unions) ahd of the peasantry (mainly, the rural Soviets and' the agricultural

cooperatives), expanded in the rural areas. Charles Bettelheim is of the view that "the

consolidation of the Soviet power and of the working class peasant alliance took place,

inevitably, under contradictory conditions. It is the way in which these contradictions

developed, became interconnected, and were dealt with that provides the explanation for

what the NEP was, how it was transformed, and why it culminated in a 'crisis'

expressing its abandonment'-' (Ibid: 147).

The basic contradictions were one opposed to the bourgeoisie. During the NEP,

this -contradiction presented itself particularly in the fonn of the contradiction between

III

the private sector and the state and cooperative sector, for the latter was, in the main,

directed by the Soviet state, itself directed by the Bolshevik party, the instrument of the

dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1928, this sector contributed 44 percent of the national

income, 82.4 percent of the turnover of the retail trade enterprises. On the other hand,

only 3.3 percent of the gross value of the agricultural production came from this sector.

The decisive role played by the private sector in agriculture and the considerable one

played by the private trade partly explains the crisis that marked the years 1928 and

1929. However, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie assumed

other forms as well, especially those which opposed the working class to the managers

of enterprises, both private and state owned in particular when the latter obstructed the

workers' initiative. These contradictions became acute in the second half of 1928.

The Grain Procurement Crisis and the Weakening of the Worker-Peasant Alliance

. The term procurement refers to the operations for purchasing agricultural produce

carried out by the state's economic organs and by the officially recognised network of

cooperatives. The regular functioning of procurement was decisively important.

Politically, its smooth progress constituted the outward sign that one of the material

foundations of the worker-peasant alliance was being consolidated. Econoinically, its

smooth progress ensured the supplies needed by the towns and industry.

This policy contributed to a certain degree of price stability and to the balance of

payments in foreign trade. In the last mentioned connection, the grain procurement

played a role of central importance, for export of grain was one of the principal sources

from which foreign exchange was obtained for financing imports, especially those that

could help industry to develop.

During the NEP, procurement was carried on in competition with the purchasing

activities of the "private sector". In principal, this was an essential aspect of the NEP

from the standpoint of the working class peasant alliance procurement had to be effected

on the basis of the prices at which the peasant is willing to seII, and had to involve only

such quantities as the peasant were ready to deliver. The principles of the NEP implied

that procurement must be a foml of marketing and not a form of requisition or taxation , at the expense of the peasantry based on this plinciple, that, in fact; how is procurement

worked down to the end of 1927.

112

Procurement was highly important for the peasantry, to whom it guaranteed

stable outlets for their produce. It also constituted one of the bases for economic

planning, since correct realisation of the economic plans largely depended on the

satisfactory functioning of the operations of purchase of agricultural produce

(Bettelheim 1978: 34). In principle, the intervention of the procurement agencies on a

sufficiently large sc~le enabled these agencies to exert overall control over the prices at

which this produce was marketed which meant also controlling the prices that prevailed

in "private" trade. This intervention thus constituted, if it was carried out under the

proper conditions, an instrument for implementing in a price policy in confonnity with

the needs of the worker peasant alliance. During the first years of the NEP, the Soviet

govemment tried to practices such a price policy (Ibid: 34). Finally, it should be added

that the development of procurement was conceived not merely as an instrument to

secure increasing control over the market, but also as means of gradually ousting private

trade. The struggle to oust private trade was one of the forms of the class struggle during

the NEP was aimed at strengthening the direct economic ties uniting the peasantry with

the Soviet government. At the Eleventh party congress in 1922, Lenin had stressed that

in orqer to strengthen the worker-peasant alliance, the communists appointed to head the

central state and cooperative trading organs must beat the capitalists on their own

ground. "Here is something we must do now in the economic field. We must win the

competition against the ordinary shop assistant, the ordinary capitalist and the merchant

who will go to the peasant without arguing about communism" (Lenin 1973: 275).

Lenin explained that the task of the commercial and industrial organs of the

Soviet government was to ensure economic -linkage with the peasantry by showing that

it could satisfy the peasants' needs better than private capital could. He added: "Here the

'last and decisive battle' is 'impending; here there are no political or any other flanking

movements that we can undertake, because this is a test in competition with private

capital, or we fail completely" (Ibid: 277).

On. the eve of the final crisis of NEP (1926-1927), wholesale trade was largely

concentrated in the state and cooperative sector. The state organs dealt with 52.2 percent

of it, as .against 5.1 per cent covered by the private trade; co-operative trade handled the

balance of 44.7 percent, which was itself subject to the directives from the state's

organs. In· retail trade, the position held by the state and cooperative agencies was less

clearly dominant than in the wholesale trade, but in 1926-1927 they were responsible for

the greater part of this, too. At that time, they contributed 13.3 percent and 49.8 percent

113

respectively of the retail trade turnover, leaving 36.9 percent to private traders. In 1928

and 1929, the share held by the latter fell to 22.5 percent and then 13.5 percent

(Bettelheim 1978: 36). Despite the big role played by state and the cooperative trade, it

did not succeed in accomplishing all the aims assigned to it by the Bolshevik party and

the Soviet government, especially as regards prices and quantities that it was expected to

buy or sell. There emerged a considerable contradiction between the private trade and

the state and cooperative trade in the matter of prices. Private traders resold at prices

higher than that charged by the state and cooperative organs, and so were able to offer

the peasant better prices-for their products; then had harmful effects on the procurement

operations that the state endeavoured to carry out on the basis of stable prices. This

contradiction stimulated the adoption of administrative measures directed against

private trade, but such measures often seemed to the peasants to be reasons why they

were losing money or being deprived of opportunities to make more money.

The procurement crisis that began in 1927-1928 concerned, first and foremost,

grains a group of product that played an essential role in the feeding of the town people

and the Soviet exports at that time. There was a reasonably-high level of grain

procurement in 1926-1927 that involved 10.59 million metric tons. Like the harvest of

that year, it was much bigger than that of the previous year (which had been 8.41

million metric tons) and had been carried with some difficulty. In the year 1927-1928,

the harvest was less than abundant than in the previous year, amounting to 73.6 million

metric tons, or 2.8 million less than in 1926-1927 and less than in 1925-1926

(Bettelheim 1978: 37).

The major prevailing notion about the procurement crisis was provided by the

Bolshevik party and Soviet scholars who attributed the main factor behind the crisis to

the non-cooperation of the "kulak" and the "middle peasant" which the procurement

agencies. It had dual impacts; on the one hand it resulted in shortage of grain supply to

the towns and on the other hand it also affected the Soviet states plan of grain export,

which was a major source of foreign currency earnings. The Bolshevik party treated this

decline in the procurement of grain as the impact of the strike consciously plan by the

kulak and other rich peasants in the villages. As a result, the party decided to take some

extraordinary measures to fulfil the estimated target by strengthening the procurement

. agencies. It also assured· the peasantry that it in a way violated the norms of NEP and

method of requisition and forceful transfer of grains would not be applied even in the

case of the rich peasant if they cooperated with the procurement agencies. Nevertheless,

1I4

the assurance offered but Soviet leaders, the way in which procurement was carried out

by the agencies concerned had a far-reaching impact on the transformation of the Soviet

social fonnation. In many regions, the procurement process turned violent and many

cases reported that even middle and ordinary peasants also fell victims to these

developments. Due to the reports of harsh measures adopted by the procurement

agencies to collect grains, even Stalin directly warned the culprits that those following

the policy of force against the peasants against the nonns set by the Soviet state should

be properly punished. Meanwhile the Bolshevik party also adopted a policy of bringing

together the poor peasant and agricultural labourers against the kulak and the other rich

peasants in the rural areas. In many places, they assisted the procurement agencies in

collecting the grain from the capitalist elements in the rural areas. In certain cases, the

Soviet state even offered the poor peasant 25 percent of the grain they collected from

the rich peasants. Many alternative versions of procurement crisis were put forward by

many scholars who rigerously analysed the available documents of the period. The

reason they highlighted as the major factor behind the procurement crisis clearly showed

that a massive chasm existed between the Bolshevik party and the realities of the

peasant life in the villages. Even at that time the Bolshevik party was pursuing NEP)

intended to strengthen the Soviet state's ties with the peasant population who constituted

the majority of the population in the country.

The alternative explanation has been provided by the French scholars namely

Grosskopf and Charles Bettelheim who were factually countered the argument provided

by the many of the Soviet scholars (Bettelheim 1978: 168). For them, the main factor

which immediately caused the sharp fall in procurement was to the massive decline in

the agricultural production along with the non-sale of grains by the poor and middle

peasant who produced more than 70 percent of the grain production at that time. The

scarcity of infrastructural goods essential for increasing agricultural productivity along

with the shortage of fertilizer, etc compelled the poor peasants and the middle peasants

to 'nonnally sell most of their stock of grain in the months of October or after, it, which

-was -the lime for the new cultivating season, that could utilise the money to purchase the

tools and other farming instruments badly needed for the next season. The procurement

crisis of 1927-1928, was in fact contrary to the Soviet state's explanation that the strike ..

by the kulak and other capitalist elements in the rural areas was directly responsible for

the decline in the grain collection, they argued, was that most of the grain collected in

that year by the procurement agencies were sold by the capitalist elements in the

115

villages. This was mainly because the kulaks and rich peasant in the rural areas were

aware that the middle and poor peasants normally sell their grains during that time in the

next cultivating season. This massive flow of goods to the market necessarily led to the

massive decline in the prices of grains. They also calculated the possibility of

speculation and direct purchase of grains from the peasants at lower prices if they had

already sold a substantial portion of their products. Ever since the procurement crisis

manifested itself in the form of direct confrontation of the Soviet state vis-a-vis the

kulak and other rich peasants, the use of requisition and other forceful means especially

alienated major segments of the peasants from the Soviet system. It also provided the

space for the kulaks and other capitalist elements in the villages to increasingly

influence the poor and marginal peasants.

The procurement crisis and subsequent policies followed by the Soviet regime

vis-a-vis peasant masses provided the. k~ulaks and other capitalist elements in the rural

areas a golden opportunity to retain the in"fluence and the kind of role these groups had

played in the pre-revolutionary period. One of the fundamental weaknesses of the Soviet

regime in relation to the agrarian policy was its failure to take into account the peasant

masses into its fold. Due to the urban origin of the majority of its leaders and cadres

the penetration of the influence of the Bolshevik party in the Russian villages was very

marginal despite the fact that the programme it carried out in the first one decade of its

rule fundamentally changed the social status and the power relations in the rural areas.

Although certain policies implemented by the Soviet regime especially during the war

communism period created lot of hardships to the peasant way of life, the policies

fo1l0wed by them had radically transformed the standard ofliving of the huge masses of

the peasant population in the Russian villages. The agricultural production and other

related occupations ill which the majority of the rural population were engaged found

the New Economic Policy implemented by the Soviet regime helped them to reach their

production' capacity they had attained before the First World War, to have reached in the

middle of 1920s. By and large, the New Economic Policy introduced by the' Soviet

regime in the early 1920s not only contributed to the stabilisation of the economy, but it

also enonnously strengthened the vast majority of the peasant masses' faith in the

Bolshevik regime. One of the major problem encountered by the new policy in its initial , period was the scissors crisis experienced by the Soviet economy in the first half of

1920s which requires more close focus before moving to the discussion of the final

reversal of the new economic policy in the late 1920s and the subsequent transfonnation

of the Soviet social fonnation in the 1930s.

The Scissors Crisis

One of the major problems encountered by the Soviet economy after the introduction of

the New Economic, Policy and the consolidation of the Bolshevik regime was the

widening gap between the industrial and agricultural prices, which reached its zenith in

the year of 1924-1925. With the introduction of the New Economic Policy in the 1920s -

. keeping in mind the havoc situation created by the programme of war communism in

relation to the social foundation of the Bolshevik regime, Lenin's immediate priority

was bring back the unity between the working class and the peasantry. TIle ternl

"scissors" was used with reference to the picture by the graphs showing the movements

of industrial and agricultural prices. It was said that "scissors are opening "when these

prices are diverged, whereas when they came closer together, "scissors are closing". TIle

scissors were regarded as having "closed" when the relative prices in 1918 were reached

(Bettelheim 1978: 16I).~he relative movernent of agricultural and industrial prices was

an essential factor in the changes affecting the reproduction of agriculture.

During the New Economic Policy period, the agriculture produce purchased

were, in principle, "market prices" in the sense that the peasants were not legally

obliged to surrender part of their production to the procurement agencies at price fixed

one-sidedly by the government. In fact the conditions ·under which the purchase price

WClS paid by .the procurement organs established were subjected to considerable

variation. Generally speaking, where the principal agricultural products (cotton, flax,

sugar beet, etc.) destined for the industrial processing were concerned, the state organs

were the only purchasers. These organs thus held ~ sort of monopoly in purchase of

these products. However, agricultural policy at that time aimed at developing technical

crops and so relatively high purchase prices were fixed for them so as to encourage their

development and this procedure did indeed result in a rapid increase in the production of

technical crops. In a number of regions, -this proved beneficial to the rich peasants who

were in the best position to cultivate these crops.

The procurement agencies not only had to fulfil their plan with r~gards quantity,

they also had operated in such a way as to contribute to keeping prices as stable as

possible. This task was especially important as far as grains \\'ere concemed since !,7fain

117

prices had a serious bearing on the cost of living and the level of real wages. Due 10

these concerns of the procurement agencies, sometimes the prices fixed by the

procurement organs were lower than the prevailing market prices and the poor and the

middle peasant were the major victims of this policy. Along with the adverse terms on

which poor and middle peasants were forced to sell their food grains to the procurement

organs, the huge ris~ in the price and the massive shortage of the industrial goods in the

rural areas further accelerated the rural crisis. According to a scholar who had

undertaken an in-depth study of the agrarian social relations of the period pointed out

that in totality, the policy fo11owed by the Bolshevik party in the matter of the evolution

of agriculture in comparison with the industrial prices was, in principle, one aimed at

reducing the prices of industrial goods and closing of the scissors crisis. Such a policy

was necessary if the worker- peasant alliance was to be consolidated, and if agriculture

was to develop on the basis of its own forces. A judicious application of this policy

would enable the poor and the middle peasants to strengthen their position in relation to

the rich peasants, to equip their farms better, and to organise themselves, with the

party's aid. The following figures show that this policy appears to have achieved

considerable positive re~;ults between 1923 (a year when scissors were wide open, in

favour of industrial prices) and 1928:

Table 1: Ratio of Agricultural Prices to Retail Prices of Industrial Goods

Year Value 1913 100 1923-1924 33.7 - .-.- p "-1925- 1926 71.8 1926- 27" 71.1 1927-28 79.9 1928-29 90.3 1929- 30 76.9

(Source CaiT and Davies cited inBettelheim J 978: J 5 J)

These figures demand 'the fo]]owing comments: In 1923-1924 the "purchasing

power" of agricultural products had been reduced to about one third of what it was

before the war. It also shows between 1~23-1924 and 1927-1928, the purchasing power

of agricuHural products appears to have multiplied by 2.3. Similarly, the same line of

progress seems to have continued in 1928-1929, when the ratio shown by the index was'

only 10 percent short of what it had been pre-war. One could also draw the conclusion

from the data that in 1929-1930, the situation had sharply overtumed, with the index

118

falling below the level it had reached in 1927-1928 (Bettell}eim 1978: 150-151).

However, the figure mentioned hardly explains the kind of qualitative changes took

place in the rural areas after the formation of Bolshevik regime.

The way through which the situation of poor and middle peasants evolved

cannot be.judged from these figures alone. Most of them enjoyed a situation that was

definitely better than before the war since they had more land. After 1923, they

improved their situation still further by increasing the proportion of land they held.

While grain production was crucially important, the peasants who produced mainly

grain were particularly disfavoured by the evolution of the ratio between the prices for

grain delivered to the procurement agencies and the retail prices of industrial products.

This evolution proceeds as follows:

Table 2: Ratio of Prices of Grain Procured-by the State to Retail Industrial Prices

Year Value 1913 100.0 1923-1924 29.1 1925-1926 68.7 1926-1927 56.6 1927-1928 65.2 1928-1929 76.1 1929-1930 76.9

(Source I.arr and Davies cited in Bettelheim 1978:152)

The major victims of the highet-level industrial prices were those peasants who

had to buy from the private traders since the latter charged especially high prices. Thus,

in December 1927, the retail prices of industrial products exceeded the 1913 level by the

88 percent in the official sector, but it was 140 percent in the private sector. The

following figures show the relative price level in which quantities of various products

obtained by the peasants in 1927 in exchange for price that the procurement agencies

paid for one hundred weight of rye .

119

Table 3: Quantities of goods procured by Cooperative & Private Sectors ill 1927

Cooperative In the private sector In 1913

sector

Textiles (meters) 12.99 10.91 23.72

Sugar 7. 65 7.45 14.60

(kilograms)

Kerosene 44.25 38.75 41.53

Salt (kilograms) 135.5 86.5 165.8

Nails (kilograms) 16.90 13.77 24.36

(Source cited in Bettelheim 1978: 152)

The Reversal of the New Economic Policy

Although on many fronts, the soviet economy regained its production level, the Russian

economy achieved 'on the eve of the First World War in the mid 1920s. Nonetheless,

within the Bolshevik party a major tendency had been operating after the demise of

Lenin to move away from the NEP programme. Those leaders identified with these

tendencies considered the NEP as a compromise and unnecessary concession to the

peasantry at the cost of the working class interest. The procurement crisis of the late

j 920s along with the confrontation of 'kulak' segment of the rich and middle peasantry

provided a space for the anti-NEP tendency within the party to press for a radical

reversal of the programme. A minor tendency in favour ofNEP continued to exist in the

party. For those who shared the Leninist view of the working-class peasant a1iiance, the

preservation of the New Economic Policy was the essential requirement of that goal. For

them, peasant masses constituted around the 70 percent of the Soviet population and any

meaningful success of the programme required the cooperation and the support of the

rural masses. With the failure of the War Communism programme, the perception of

these segments of the party, rather than the mechanical view of the social process and

the role of the agency party should rely on the potential of the peasant masses and

should learn from their concrete experience to rectify past mistakes. Thus the policy of

mass line proposed by Lenin was hardly practised in the party after his death.

120

The Nature of Social Stratification in the Russian Villages during New Economic

Policy

The Soviet countryside witnessed an' unprecedented revival and resurgence in

agricultural production in the period of New Economic Policy initiated by the Soviet

communist party in the early 1920s. In fact, this period was marked by the gradual

stabilisation of the Soviet society and return to normalcy after prolonged years of crisis

and social chaos in the form of Tsarist misrule, first World War, revolutionary turn10il

and the post-revolutionary civil war etc. which along with the programme of War

Communism introduced by the Leninist state had, completely paralysed the social and

economic life in the urban and the rural population in the Soviet Russia alike. It was

only with the introduction of the New Economic Policy that people found a certain level

of normalcy in their lives and within few years, most of the crucial sectors of the

ec?~pmy recovered to the state it had attained on the eve of the second World War.

In fact, as far as the countryside was considered, the New Economic Policy was

a complete reversal from the policies followed by the Soviet state during the period of

War Communism. With the removal of all the restrictions imposed on the various

aspects of the agratian production and transactions in the previous era, the Soviet

countryside witnessed the unparallel enthusiasm and unleashing of energy and labour

power by the various strata of the petty producers. However, in the countryside,

peasants were ever homogeneous masses of people with equal level of control over the

productive assets and other social resources which were essential for the social lives in

the countryside. Since, the continued existence of the social asymmetries in tenns of

access to ownership of productive resources, mainly land and fanTI animals and such

other farm infrastructure in the countryside, the period of New Economic Policy

witnessed widening economic differentiation among the peasant population. Big

peasants often known as kulak and the medium peasants who had remarkably expanded

their sphere of operation and benefited substantially from the many liberal concessions

provided by the working class state, and the major chunk of the common peasants and

the rural laborurers hardly witnessed any qualitative change in life compared to the

preVIOUS era.

The noticeable differentiation that emerged among the peasants in the period of

NEP invited the attention of many officials within the Soviet state. Moreover, a new

group of scholars emerged in the early 1920s whose pre-occupation was mainly to

121

expand the Leninist theory of peasants' social di fferentiation while utilising it into the

study of the emerging economic differentiation taking place in the Soviet countryside

during the NEP period. L. N. Kritsman and his colleagues came to be known as the

Agrarian Marxists who formulated some specific tools to measure and map out the

agrarian differentiation emerging in the post-revolutionary period. Since we have

already mentioned this in the previous chapter, here we restrain from going to the

specificities of it again (Cox ) 978; Rahman 1986). The same period also witnessed the

emergence of adverse exchange relations between the agricultural goods and the

industrial consumer goods and it substantially reduced the peasant's surplus income

generated from the fann production. Even though the Soviet population, especially

peasantry was substantially enriched by the NEP period, the second half of the 1920s

witnessed the increa·sing confrontation between the Soviet state and the country folk on

the question of the grain procurement. The industrialisation debates took place within

the Soviet communist party on the possible trajectories of the industrialization and the

how to mobilise th'e necessary capital towards that ended abruptly end in the fifteen

party congress in 1926 in favour of the position taken by the Nicolai Bukharin who

pleaded for the continuation of the NEP policy and argued for a balanced approach

between both industry and agriculture vis-a-vis the position of Prezhensky who

consistently argued for the maximum extraction of surplus from the agriculture sector of

the economy. Since Prezenhsky was identified with the left opposition within the party

led by Leon Trotsky, Stalin tactically supported the Bukharin who was considered as the

pro-rich peasantry voice in the party (Munting 1982; Mitra 1978; Bettelheim 1978,

1994; Lewin 1967). However, after defeating the positions of the left opposition in the

party and thereby marginalising them effectively within party, Stalin turned his sword

against Bukharin's view and completely ignored earlier party stand of the balanced

growth and the continuation of the NEP policy and finally suspended the NEP in early

1928 . and initiated the strategy of five year plan and the collectivisation of the

agriculture.

With the introduction of the five year plans and collectivisation of agriculture,

the Soviet State profoundly transformed from its earlier manifestations and it

increasingly oliented towards some form of large-scale industrialisation and in the

course of that trajectory initially alienated the peasants from the working class state and

in the process of its maturity, the working class itself got alienated from the proletarian

state supposed to be create by them and claimed to be managing and shaped by them

122

rather than some external social agencies articulating for them (Bettelheim 1978, 1994;

Mandel 1967; Marcuse1969).

In fact, the fundamental character of the Soviet state was shaped by the

development which took place with the communist party in the hectic days of the 1920s,

when the fractional and ideological struggles attained its full momentum. It's eventual

abrupt end in the late 1920s was marked by the consolidation of the Stalinist leadership

within the party and resultant suppression, purges and execution of all the dissent voices

. and fractions within party and society at large against the new leaderships alienated not

only the working class and peasants from the party but also led to the implicit denial and

negation of the real potential of the revolutionary Marxian politics to whom Soviet State

claimed to have adhered. In such a context, the remaining part of our present discussion

rather goes on to focus on the chorological description of the developments that took

place in Soviet society since the collectivisation of the agriculture, provide a detailed

examination of the developments in the 1930s and how it fundamentally structured the

social status and role of the soviet peasantry within the Soviet social fonnation. The

succeeding part offered a broad generalisation of the developments that took place in the

post-Stalin period. Thus, to a certain extent, the political economic relations which

evolved within the Soviet social fonnation in the late 1920s and early 30s more or less

remained unchanged throughout the Soviet period irrespective of minor alterations in its

priorities and perceptions in the early Post-Stalin period.

The Introduction of the Five-Year Plan and the Nature of the Soviet

Industrialization Strategy

Since the early I 920s; there emerged a consensus within the communist party

irrespective of the fractional and ideological differences that the future model of

socialist construction in the country would be based on economic planning. In 1923,

Gosplan drafted a perspective plan covering a five year period for industry as whole,

and there were otl1er five year plans made by the industIial commissariats and even local

authorities (Munting 1982: 70). In 1926, Gosplan prepared various drafts for the

. prospective five year plans. In fact the fifteenth party congress which was held in the

1926, had finally decided to depart from the NEP strategy and opt for the planed model

of'development as the viable alternative to the market-centred strategy of NEP and

many other such models. Before the fonnal suspension of the NEP, a large portion of

. the people within party considered NEP as an unviable strategy by which workers' state

123

was forced to provide unnecessary concessions to the middle and rich peasants at the

cost of the socialist development.

The main extrapolation draws from the industrialisation debates and many

discussions and deliberations that took place within the communist party and outside

were that even though the peasantry were considered as economically differentiated

classes, most of the above debates and discussions tended to reduce the agrarian

dwellers as traditionally moulded, non- socialised and politically reactionary etc. and in

short not at all a reliable social strata for any source <,?f alliance and participation in .the

socialist industrialisation process despite a few sensitive and balanced voices raised by

the Nicholai Bukharin and a few others. Thus, before the procurement process witnessed

various non-cooperation and resistance from the peasants in the late 1927-28, the

Stalinist leadership had already decided to cancel the strategy of NEP in the early 1928.

Just before the formal introduction of the five year plan and the strategy of large-scale

accelerated industrialisation strategy, most of the leading officials in the party viewed

the process as gradual and took many years to get proper momentum and proper

cooperation from different sectors of the national economy. It was in September 1928

that Bukharin published his Notes of an Economist criticizing VSNKh (supreme

economic council) proposals. In the following months, Bukharin' s position was sharply

criticised first in the press and later in the party itself. In November 1928, Stalin

defended the rapid rate of industrialisation to the cent~al committee of the communist

party. After Stalin's speech there were evident an explicit shift from the early decided

policy of balanced and gradual transition to a faster pace of industrialisation without any

further delay (Munting 1982 : 73). Gosplan replaced a draft of two variants of five years

plans and submitted them for approval of the party central committee. They are: the

basic variant and the optimum variant. The model proposed a feasible or realistic but

nonetheless ambitious estimate of growth potential. The second optimum variant was its

name implies baseo on the most optimistic assumptions, being the maximum possible

achievement. The basic variant proposed increase in total investment of 250 percent;

whereas the optimum variant demanded rise of investment of 320 per cent. Finally, it

was the optimum variant that was approved and recommended as the official five year

plans by the sixteenth party congress in April 1929 (Ibid: 73). While drafting the

optimum variant of the five year plan, the Gosplan officials assumed a scenario in

which they foresaw harvest failure; a general growth of foreign trade with more foreign

credit forthcoming; no change in international terms of trade; rapid improvement in

124

crops yield and in general industrial productivity to reduce costs; and armaments

expenditure to be no higher than in the basic variant. Few of these conditions were to be

met. There was a famine of disastrous proportions; the tenns of trade moved markedly

against the Soviet Union in the depression after 1929; crop yields and labour

productivity did not increase as expected; and industrial costs rose (Ibid: 73).

There still eXist diverse views among scholars on the question of agriculture's

contribution to the first five year plans which would be discussed in the course of our

analysis. One of the major problems encountered by the Soviet regime in the NEP

period was its inability to effectively bring the agriculture sector under its control,

something it successfully carried out in the industrial field. The entire debates on the

industrialisation and the procurement issues revolved around the relations between the

agriculture and the industry. Due to this fact, the Soviet state was unable to plan

properly the nature and priorities, ~f the agricultural production and the proper

distIibution of it especially in the prban areas. For the first time after the formation of

the working class state,in 1925, the agricultural production recovered to the pre-war

average yields. Due to the compartmentalised nature of agricultural production and

viliual dominance of the big landlords and middle peasants in the grain production, the

state was restrained from maximising the benefit of good harvests by providing essential

food to the urban popUlation and the army. It was expected to export the remaining part

in order to gain to eam much needed foreign currency. The inability of the Soviet

regime to effectively impose its control on the ab)"[icultural sector especially on grains

sales, explains its apathy and reservation against the policy of NEP. In fact, after the

harvest of the 1926, the main concern of the government was no longer the shortage of

the food production in the country, rather how to procure it from the individualised

peasants to distribute it according to the plans. The state was able to procure sufficient

food grains as per plan. However, in the succeeding years, it faced multiple constrains in

the procurement process. Stalin and most of the Soviet authorities attributed the lack of

the progress in the procurement process were due to the direct confrontations of the rich

peasants. However, most of the literature on the period infonns us that it partly might

have had some factual base, but the real reason was the policy failure of the state to

properly grasp in the concrete reality in the villages. The state had consciously imposed ,

deflated plice in grains procurement from the peasant's sales for higher prices in the

urban market. Likewise, the state fixed inflated prices for the consumer goods and due

to the sholiage of it mainly in the rural areas many restrained prospective peasants from

]25

selling their food grains in the local market because they were hardly able to purchase

any essential goods in return. This general lack of the consumer goods in the urban and

rural areas was alike also due to the policy of the VSNKh which was increasingly

diverting the industrial investment into capital goods and heavy industry in accordance

with the long-term industrialisation policy of the state. The major reason for the

shortage of food grain procurement by the state agencies were thus the simultaneous

existence of different markets in the rural areas. The state and cooperative agencies were

able to account for a part of the over-all market in grain and other foods. In part, this

was because a large proportion of total sales never went beyond the village or locality.

The non-rural market accounted only for part of the total sales, but had substantial

influences on the peasants' perception of towards the procurement agencies.

The simultaneous existence of numerous markets for grains in the countryside

also resulted in the prevalence of varied prices in these markets. As. a. result, peasants

with surplus food grains always prefer to sell in those markets wh~re they got highest

price. On average, private traders were prepared to pay more for the agricultural

products than the state agencies. The price gap widened between 1926 and 1929

provided by the private and state agencies. An index of prices (1913=100) paid by

official agencies moved from 146 in 1925-26 to 157 in 1928-29. In the same years, the

private market price index moved from 159 to 183 (Carr and Davies 1974: 122). At the

same time, overall demand for foodstuff was raising as population grew, especially in

. the urban areas and urban income also witnessed marked increase (Munting 1982: 77).

Despite the price differences prevailing between the private state purchases of the food

grains every successive years since 1923 marked by the increasing share of thc state

agencies in the internal food distribution. In 1923, about 60 per cent of all bread had

been sold by private traders and 16 per cent by co-operatives, By 1926 the respective

figures were 30 per cent and 56 per cent (Arskii cited in Munting 1982: 77). However,

Stalin had consistently argued in the succeeding years that the increased role of the

private traders was responsible for the procurement crisis and food grain shortage in the

urban areas which could no longer sustain in the light of the above statistics. Thus, the

acute crisis of food procurement along with the alleged conspiracy and non-cooperation

of the rich and middle peasants created the context for the suspension of the NEP and

the introduction of the programme of collectivisation of agriculture in the late 1920s.

126

The Collectivisation of the Soviet Agriculture

The relation between the Soviet state and the peasants' producers, especially rich

, peasants (kulaks) and well-off middle peasants reached an unprecedented low when the

Stalinist state decided that it could not moves on the with the planned industrialisation

strategy without resolving the contradictions prevailing in the agricultural sector. The

Soviet state increasingly began to treat kulaks and other rich peasants as directly

sabotaging the food grain procurement strategy of the Stalinist regime. In the year 1928,

it found it hard to mobilises the minimum food grain's essential. for the urban

population's requirements imd due to the non-cooperation of the rich peasants, the

government was forced to purchase food grains at open market prices. This was the

socio-economic milieu of the late 1920s and the Soviet state finally decided to impose

its control on the countryside even with the oppressive apparatus of the state machipery.

The Soviet state was the first state to introduce the system of direct procurement of

grains from the peasants by suspending the previous dependency of the market

mechanism. In 1928, initially it was implemented in' the Ural-Siberian region and

thereafter it came to known as Ural-Siberian model. The basic notion was that grain was

to be delivered to the state as a fonn of voluntary self-taxation. In fact, it meant that

local officials coerced or forced unpaid deliveries from the peasants. As legal backing,

article 107 from the penal code was used. This had been introduced in 1926 to guard

against hoarding and provided for prison sentences for those causing prices to rise

(Munting 1982: 79). Even though the seventeen paliy congresses concluded its

deliberations with the condemnation of all forms of force and excesses in the name of

collectivisation and promised to protect the interests of the poor and middle peasants

who were treated as the major social groups in the countryside.

Charles Bettelheim who made extensive research on the period by using

innumerous archival sources reveals the kind of the oppression and mental and physical

agonies encountered by an classes of the peasantry. Bettelheim remarks: "however, just

before the summer 1929 harvest, despite all the previous assurances, the government

fixed compulsory deliveries similar to those of war communism. Local authorities

themselves evaluated the grain surplus of the village and fixed the delivery nonns of

each producer: it was the question of compelling the peasants' to fulfill the local

delivery plans. Given the levCl at which the majotity of these norms were fixed, this

meant confiscation from the majority of the peasants the resu1t of their work, in other

words a brutal piHage of the peasantry. Special commissions checked the fulfillment of

]27

the delivery plans. The village Soviets (in actual fact controlled by the party) was given

the right to inflict heavy fines and to change the apportionment of the compulsory

deliveries. In order to reduce the insupportable burden that these deliveries imposed on

them, the poor peasants managed to get the quotes increased for the rich and better-off

peasants. These quotes reached such levels that they could not be fulfil1ed: Peasants

taxed in this way had to not only to sell their livestock and their equipments, but also

their domestic utensils, furniture, and even residential and fann building in order to

purchase (illegally) from the market the grain that they had to deliver to the state"

(Bettelheim, 1994: 6-7). It was introduced across country mainly intended to reduce the

power of the kulaks in the countryside.

The state characterised Kulaks as the cIassenemy of the working class regime.

often those rich peasants who were categorsied as kulaks were the ones who possessed

hors,e§ and carts and were capable of directly carrying grains to the market for better

p6Ges the ones with sufficient land to live well even in the worst agricultural season; the

ones with money to lend at usurious rate of interest, one whose voices were heard at the

village gathering, who were able to exercise influence over the neighbours to his own

advantage (Ibid: 79). However the ways, in which peasants were branded as kulaks

varied across the period and places. Initially, landholdings were treated as the main

criterion to identify the rich peasants' strata in the countryside. Throughout the

procurement crisis Stalin alleged kulaks as the major reason for the failure ofthe Soviet.

regime's agrarian policy. In fact, according to some agrarian commentators of the Soviet

countryside kulaks proportion of the total population in the countryside was less than

five per cent. In many regions, all those peasants who were hoarding grains were treated

as kulaks, and at many times they were the middle peasants and who held on their

surplus grains with the calculation that its price would rise in the off season (Lewin

1968: 220). However, in the course of the revenge against the kulak elements in the

countryside, a large number of peasants of non exploitative class location were also

severely harassed. Large-scale mass collectivisation measures began in early 1929. It

was mainly intended at expanding the agricultural production and thereby channellising

maximum resources for the socialist industrialisation of the country. Initially, when the

first five ye.ar plan was drafted, collectivisation was not visualised. It envisaged that

only ten per cent of the peasants would be in collective fanns and the remaining ninety

per cent would be in the individualised plivate fanns. In fact, it was huniedly

implemented in the early 1929 to oyercome the procurement crisis and some of the

militant resistance made by the some peasants against the forceful procurements. It was

quickly implemented in late 1920s to break the peasants' resistance and thereby to gain

complete control over the grain production and distribution. Mushe Lewin who

extensively documented the history of the period in his classic work Russian Peasantry

and the Soviet Power suggested that decisions were made hurriedly and in panic, with

Jittle thought of the ()utcome, apart from the immediate objective. Thus, Lewin argues

that mass co11ectivisation was a panic measure taken to cope with the strains in tum

imposed by the effects of the Urals-Siberian method of grain ~eizure (Mushe Lewin

1968: 515-19). In fact, Lewin might have right and there were valid reasons' to reach

such a conclusion on the way in which Stalinist regime launched the mass

co11ectivisation campaign. But one cannot neglect the fact that the Soviet regime since

the early 1920s onwards looks for appropriate context to promote the col1ectivisation of

agriculture in the countryside. In the early days, it was decided that the process would

be voluntary one rather than forcing the peasants to join the co11ectivised farm. in fact,

till the 1920s, the Soviet working class state hoped that once the peasants realised the

benefits of co11ectivised farming, they would voluntarily join such fanns and most of the

leaders publical1y stated tiI1 the eve of the co11ectivisation campaign that it was a gradual

process and would take years to reach its logical conclusion. Even though the state and

cooperative farm existed in the country before the forceful mass coI1ectivisation of the

late 1920s, the proportion to the total fann land and the contribution to the net

agricultural production in the country were very marginal. In September 1924, a statute

was published to give more aid to the co11ective fanns. On 24 October 1924, the

NarkQmzem (Commissariat for Agriculture), issued a local circular designed to reduce

the number of independent fanns and open the way for co11ectivized landholding. In

June 1927, there were 14,832 collective fanns, a. later already 33,285, or a total of

416,700 households on 5,383,200 hectares ofland (Danilov cited in Munting 1982: 80-

81). During the co11ectivisation campaign, the agricultural cartel was adopted as the

nonn. A11 co11ective farms were cooperatives, and not strictly therefore part of the state

sector. In the cartel most of the productive capacity was in the collective ownership and

could be subjected to control, while at the 'same time member-households could retain

some land to maintain themselves (Munting, 1982: 81).

129

Table 4: Crops Yields on Private, State and Collective Farllls (centners per hectare: all grains)

Year USSR average Private farms State/arms Collective farms (Sovkhozy) (kolkoz)l)

1927 7.6 7.6 10.4 . 8.6 1928 8.0 7.9 10.3 8.7 1929 7.5 ' 7.4 8.6 8.0 1930 7.8 7.9 8.5 7.6 1931 6.5 5.7 7.3 6.1 1932 6.7 7.4 6.9 6.5 Note: In 1927 state and colleclIvefarms together accounted for 1.7 per cent of the area sown to grams; by 61932 it had risen to 78.5 per cent. Source (Wheatcroft cited in Munting 1982: 82).

The collectivisation, of agriculture completely undermined the remnants of the

commune system existing in the Russian countryside. It also eventually contributed to

the consolidation of the Soviet power in the rural areas. Even though rural Soviets were

created immediately after the revolution as the basic grassroots organs of the working

class state, it was unable to effectively penetrate to the country folk due to the

predominance of different traditional village. bodies existing in the rural Russia. The

effective reorganisation of the agrarian production under the state-regulated cooperative

farms along with the complete suppression of the kulaks and other rich peasants in the

countryside enabled the working class regime to have the vil1ual control over the rural

areas and thereby the effectively utilize the agrarian sector to the requirement of the

planned large-scale socialist industrialization of the country. In the section below, we

examine the internal characteristics of collectivised agriculture in the Soviet Union.

The Nature and Character of the CoUectivised Agricultural Farms in the Soviet

Countryside

With the introduction of the"collectivisation of Soviet aglicultural production the entire

countryside were organised under two forms: the cooperative farm (kolkhozy) and the

state farms (sovkhozy). The cooperative farms were not directly under state control and a

substantia] majority of the rural producers were brought under the cooperative farms.

State fanns were state enterprises employing wage labour and had fixed wage costs.

Most of the state fanns were conceived originally as specialist 'grain factories', but as

the decades progressed they were more successful in livestock fanning or in specialised

crops like sugar-beet. Many, however, operated below the cost so that, in effect, the

state sector was subsidised by the cooperative sector in agticulture (Munting 1982: 98).

130

Since the state fanns were directly under the state, its employees received equaJ

treatments and benefits similar to the urban industrial proletariat and therefore,

throughout the Soviet period a substantial majority of the workers attached in the

cooperative farms aspired to be part of the state fanns to get equal considerations to that

of the industrial working class. The coiIective fanns were on the other hand, according

to the Soviet state's characterisation voluntary association of the peasants with the

assistance of the state to accelerate the agricultural production to enhance the working

and living conditions of the rural producers. This spontaneous association of the

peasants transfonned into cooperative fanns which in many respects, perfonned the

similar tasks once carried out by the traditional peasants' cooperative producing units in

the pre-revolutionary era. The coopera'tive fanns had at its colIective disposition

"agricultural equipment, livestock, forages for the collective livestock and the working

premises needed for the proper operation of the collective animal husbandry"

(Bettelheim 1994: 30). The management of the collective fanns was entrusted to the

general assembly of the' collective fann members (kolkhozniks), while the central

administration was entrusted to an elected chairman and controlled by the same general

assembly. For the principal cropping operations, the kolkhozes benefitted from the

cooperation of the MTS (machine tractor stations), which was the main provider of fa1111

machineries and other technical services to the collective fanns. The sole source of the

income of cooperative fanns was generated from the collective labour perfonned by

peasants in the collective fanns. The payments to members of the collective fanns were

made on the basis of the number of labour days in a year. Various tasks had different

values so that difficult or skilled works were rewarded more highly than routine tasks.

The average working days in a year in labour days (not necessarily corresponding to the

ordinary days) was 118 in 1932, 166 in 1934 and 180 in 1935 (Zelenin cited in Munting

1982: 101). The payments for these labour days had the last call on the resources of the

col1ective (after obligations to the state, MTS, provision of seed, food for the old and the

sick, prov~8j(ln for the cultural facilities, insurances, etc.). It was thus a residual payment

rather than a wage in proper. Payment in the 1930s was usually in kind, on average 2.3

k.g of grain in 1932 and per labour day 2.9 kg in 1934. There were regional variations in

the payments and the poor fanns were sometimes left with nothing to distribute (Ibid) .

. In many occasions, households in the collective fanns virtually depepded on personal

private plots to maintain their subsistence requirements.

131

Table' 5: State Procurements of Grain from State, Collective & Individual Farms (million centners)

Total From state Collective farms Individual farms farms

1929 160.8 3.9 15.1 1930 221.4 13.4 65.3 1931 228.4 18.0 141.1 53.9 1932 187.8 17.0 128.4 27.5 1933 232.9 20.6 169.4 23.2 1934 260.7 22.2 170.1 18.1 1935 296.6 30.2 202.2 10.2 Source: Moshkov clIed m Munlmg 1982:101

From the above table, it is explicitly evident that cooperative farms manifested as

the major forms of agticultural production in the first five year plan period itself. In

spite of the overWhelming dominance of the collectivised communal production in the

Soviet countryside, most of the people att~~hed to the famls continued their private plot

cultivation and most often it alone satisfied their household requirements. A resolution

on 20 May 1932 by the central committee and sovnarkom permitted the sale of

agricultural product in collective [anTI markets (and local bazaars and railway stations)

by collective fanns and their members selling the products of their private plots after

meeting their obligations. These sales at the free market provided the essential food

supplies. As late as 1940, private sales (which were principally from the private plots)

accounted for 54 percent of all potatoes consumed, 18 percent of other vegetables, 61

percent of milk and 55 per cent of meats (Munting 1982: 102). At the end of the 1930s

collective faIms (Koikhoz) on average disposed of more than 600 hectares of cultivated

land (against 72 in 1928), on which worked about 80 kolkhoznik families (Bettelheim

1994: 44). While commenting on the intemal relations of production emerging in the

collective famls, Charles Bette1heim observes: <'the work was organised in an industrial

way, following the capitalist forms of organisation oflabour, in teams and in specialised

brigades put under the authority of supervisory personal .,. a small number of managers

allocated the direct workers and means of work to definite tasks (and the latter in

principle corresponded to orders coming from the organisations placed "above" the

kokhoz). The direct producers were thus reduced to the role of simple executants put at

the lower level of a structure in which certain features of the capitalist organisation bf

labour were combined with military command fOTITIs; this encouraged the reproduction

of a partic:ular type of agrarian despotism" (Ibid: 44-50). 1n fact, the most ironic

dimension of the massive forceful col1ectivisation was that it. was carried out by a state,

112

which seems to be the first regime in modem era which pledged to engage in creating a

society without any form of direct exploitation among human beings. The Soviet state

initiated the mass collectivisation of agricultural production which was also an attempt

in that direction, but it led to the forceful expropriation· of the vast masses of the

peasants from their livelihood. It also contributed ·to increased internal incomes and

occupational stratification within the peasantry in the collective farms, which is the

focus·ofthe following section.

Nature and Character of the Internal Social Stratification Existing amon.g

Agrariari Dwellers in Post-ColJectivised Soviet Countryside

Collectivisation of agricultural production, as the tenn implies, conveys a notion that it

is characterised by the total absence or the abolition of all forms of resource

asymmetries and class differentiation among the agrarian producers generally prevailing

in the individualised or family-oriented agrarian production across societies. It also

implies that the collectivisation of the agricultural production directly led to the

disappearance of the practice of splitting of fam1 land into innumerable small tracts

according to the individualised ownership or the nature of the households. Moreover, it

also qualitatively differed from the large-scale mechanised commercial farms existing in

the capitalist societies carrying thousands of hectares of land and wherein the rural

labourers were employed as regular wage labourers, like to the workers in the urban

industries.

The collectivised agricultural production in a transitional socialist society apart

from the nationalization of the meant of production also means resultant progressive

changes in the relations of production which therein implied substantial autonomy of the

original producers in all aspects of the decision-making process in the farms, including

the nature and character of the utilisation of their own labour power in the farms. In the

collectivisation of the agriculture, things unfolded in a perverse way by which peasants •

were placed in the receiving end of the process. The forceful collectivisation of the

Soviet agriculture not only undermined the numerous gains they had attained in their

socio-economic life in the NEP period, but in many respects, it also pushed the Russian

peasantry to the pre-emancipation era marked by the virtual slavery. The internal

organisation of the soviet collective farms hardly provide any space for the substantial

chunk of the rui"al population any freedom in exercising their labour power even the free

mobility of the peasants were 'Severely restricted by the internal laws in the farm. The

133

Bettelhei'm characterises this as the state of 'quasi-serfdom' marked by many

similarities to that of the feudal period (Bettelheim 1994). The state of the Russian

peasants in the early post-collectivised era had many similarities to that of the French

peasantry in the post 1789 period. Marx observes in the Eighteenth Brumair.e oj Louis Bonaparte:

The tradition orall past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living ... A whole people that imagines it has imparted to itself accelerated powers of motion through a revolution, suddenly finds itself transferred back to a dead epoch and (then) there tum up again the old calendars, the old names, the old edicts ... (Marx 1914: 9-10).

Thus, working conditions of the peasants in the collective farms were arbitrarily

determined by the fann management and the technical experts in each farm who often

arbitrary allocated the work assignment to the peasants which in many occasions was

beyond the capacity of the worker to complete within the time allocated. Part of these

tasks corresponded to 'nonns' fixed in advance by the technical services. Ordinary farm

workers did not have control of the way in which these nonns were fixed nor of the way

the authorities evaluated the success rate, with which they had accomplished the imposed

nonns. However, it was on the basis of such nonns and such evaluations that the

remuneration of each kolkhoznik was fixed (Bettelheim 1994: 51). Since the collective

farms were not directly part of the state machinery and functioned as cooperatives,

therefore state laborurers were not applicable to the farm workers. As a result, the fann

management acquired the power of the courts and often inflicted harsh punishments on

the peasants who violated the laws of the fanns. In principle, every decision of the

mrulagement could bc subjected to the approval of the fann general assembly -and

peasants had the right to raise their reservation against any arbitrary actions. However,

the way in which fanns functioned reveals that the general assembly h~rdly met and

even in the assembly, peasants were often restrained from raising any opinion against

the fann management due ,to its dominant location in the fann hierarchy and the

dependency of the workers on the latter for each aspect of their lives. This

discriminatory situation in which the kolkhozniks found themselves placed included

numerous other aspects: they could not be unionised (because they were not wage

eamers); they have no rights to social security (for the same reason); they received no

state aicl for housing; they were liable for various obligatory works (for the upkeep of

roads, for example) which did not burden other citizens; the price of merchandise sold

in the farm was higher than in the towns; finally and above all, they had no right to fixed

wages, because the income which was distributed to them by the kolkhoz was a branch

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what 'remained for the distribution' after the kolkhoz had allocated its resources to all

kinds of uses imposed by the states, beginning with the procurements and the

compulsory deliveries which went to the state and had absolute priority (Bettelheim

1994:52). In the collective farms, there was clear differential treatment between the

mental and manual labourers. Collective farms throughout year recorded the work of

each labour in a unit of account known as "labour days" (or trudodni). This unit account

corresponded to the achievement of certain tasks. However, the nature of the achieved

task, a work-day entitled the attribution of a smaller or greater number of trudodni.

Normally, manual works were treated as easy category and only represented 0.75

rudodnei; but for work described as difficult normally skilled and mental labour, it

represented 1.5 trudodnei. This principle assumed that the different items of work were

classed according to category.

In January 1931, on the basis of recommendations from vanq,us institutes,

kolkhoz conference classed work into four groups in which equivalen~ ,in trudodni of a

work-day varied between .75 and L5. and again in 1933, work was divided into seven

groups in which the equivalent of a work-day varied from .5 to 2.0 trudodni (that is ratio

of 1 to 4) (Ibid.: 62). In fact, this kind of the assessment of the work requires high

technical expertise and often peasants hardly had any role in formulating rules and

peasants were often unable to comprehend the ways in which their work was calculated.

The average income of a worker from the collective fanns was far less than that

of the employees of the state farms and the incon.le differentiation between the

collective worker and the urban proielariat was very large. In i 940, the average income

received by a kolkhoznik fi'om kolkhoz rose to 12 roubles per month. This figure may be

compared with the average income of the 22 roubles for a worker in a sovkhoz and of 34

roubles for a wage-eamer in industry (Ibid: 64). In fact, by the end of the 1930s, several

thousands of kolkhozes either could not pay any monetary remuneration to their

members or the remuneration, which they paid was far less than the average payment,

mainly due to their vulnerable economic conditions Thus, in 1939, around 15,700

kotkhozes had been subjected to such burdens that they were unable to pay any

monetary remunerations to their members, and 46,000 others could only pay, at the

most, 0.20 roubles per 'worker-day' (Ibid: 65). Even though the modemisation and

mechanisation of the Soviet agriculture through the collectivisation reduced the internal

social differentiation existing among the peasantry on class lines, it contributed to the

emergence of a new form of· social differentiation in the countryside. In the post-

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collectivised Soviet countryside, the social and hierarchical relations of different

segments of the rural population were detennined by their direct ties with the party­

bureaucratic hierarchy. As a result, a newfonn of stratification emerged between state

and collective farm, between industrial proletariat and the collective farm worker,

between urban and rural areas and between the employees in the collective farms who

perfonned mental labour and those agricultural workers in the farm who used to

perfonn manual labour.

Charles Bettelheim identifies the following elements which contributed to the

internal stratification within collective fanns: (I) The distinction made between work of

execution and work of direction. The fonner was "remunerated" exclusively on the

basis of the accounting in trudodni. The second was remunerated, in addition, by fixed

wages and various bonuses. (2) The fixing of nOlms that was more or less easy to

achieve. Any over fulfillment of the nonn created the light to a proportional increase of

remuneration. Conversely in the case of non-fulfillment of the norm, the remuneration

of the kolkhoznik was reduced. This brought about differences of effective remuneration

in a range of 6 to 1 between the best-paid manual worker and the worst-paid. For

example the first could eam more than 28 roubles monthly in an average kolkoz of 1940

and the second only 4.8 rubles. (3) In 1940, income inequalities between kolkhozniks of

the same kolkhoz were made even greater by the establishment of a system of bonuses

that were to be added to what was paid by virtue of the trudodni. The bonuses were paid

to members of bridges (or teams) who "exceeded their production plan or their

productivity plan. As a general rule, it was fixed in the form of a payment of a

percentage of what was produced above the brigade plan; the distribution of these

bonuses was itself subjected to various regulations. (4) to the inequalities in the

remuneration of manual workers connected with the classification of tasks, to the fixing

of nonns more or Jess easy to fulfil, to the nature of the tasks allocated to the lower

kolkhozniks by the chief of brigade and teams or by the managers of the livestock fanns,

and to inequalities resulting from the higher rates of remuneration allowing to the

managing personnel of the kolkhozes and the skilled cadres of the latter. Moreover, part

of this remuneration was fixed directly in money tenns (which were not the case for the

ordinary kolkhoznik (Bettelheim 1994: 65-66). In the coI1ectivised farms in the Soviet

Union, the nature and character of the production process were in pervasive of the

general socialist notion of the material production. Even though in the Soviet Union

means of production were nationalised and brought under the state control, the nature of

136

the socialist construction they intended was based on the large-scale heavy industries

and mechanisation of agriculture through collective farms created new forms of relation

between worker and the forces of production, wherein workers were mere executors of

the demands of the productive forces. In order to attain the optimum production set by

the managerial strata, workers were provided economic incentives and other individual­

based differential treatments to enhance their efficiency. The contradictions of the soviet

model of large-scale industrialisation and its inherent possibility of technocratic

determinism and the resultant domination of the managerial and technocratic experts

over the manual labourer power over the original producers were analyzed by the Mao

Tse-Tung in his weB-known citric of the Soviet model The Critic of the Soviet

Economics (Tse-Tung 1974).

On the eve of the World War II, the chairman of a kolkhoze received a fixed

salary varying from 25-400 roubles monthly (the average being 150 roubles). This

cSalary may be compared with the average total remuneration of a kolkhoznik, which, as

quoted above, were 12 roubles. In addition to this salary, the chairman received an

attribution which varied from 45-90 trudoni monthly (however on ordinary kolkhoznik

who received no wage was usuaIly credited with about 15 trudodni monthly often less).

The remuneration of the kolkhoz chairman depended on the extent of the cultivated area

of his kolkhoz during the year. In addition to this salary and this attribution of trudodni,

the kolkhoz chairman received a bonus equaling 15-40 per cent of his total salary, by

virtue of plan over-fulfiIlment. FinaIly after three years of service, he received a

. supplementary bonus of 5-15 per cent for each year of service (Bettelheim 1994: 66-67).

Agronomists, skilled livestock workers, plant and livestock specialists (usually members

of the council of administration) received high contractual credits in trudodni and, for

the over fulfiIlment of their plan, a bonus equal to 70 per cent of that received by the

chairman. The brigadiers and other cadres were automatically credited with 1.5 times

the member of trudodni achieved by the average kolkhoznik, plus various bonuses. Thus

important part of the available resources of the kolkhozez was absorbed by the managing

cadres, the specialists, the brigadiers and administrative cadres which correspondingly

reduced the income of the ordinary kolkhozniks (Ibid: 67). Likewise, in the Soviet

countryside, one would able to locate a family's occupational location in the collective

farms by looking to their accommodation;. In the Soviet countryside, almost all the

accommodation of non-manual skilJed wo:rkers had proper floors whereas 30 percent of

the manual workers dweIling had earthen floors. Comfortless dwellings, usually situated

137

in small villages or hamlets, belonged essentially to unskilled manual workers. Most of

the manual workers' household also not did not possess any cow in 1940. While

analysing the Soviet agrarian policy, Alec Nove observes: "the party and state interest

was divided between three main objectives, which were sometimes inconsistent with

one another: to get out of agriculture (procurement, accumulation), to control and

change the peasants' and lastly, to increase output and efficiency" (Nove 1964: 5). In

short, the collectivisation of the agriculture in the Soviet Union rather than eradicating

the internal differentiations and various asymmetries existing in the rural areas among

the peasants, generated a new form of stratification in the countryside marked by the

subordinate status of the vast majority of the agricultural producers vis-a-vis other

privileged segments of the rural population. Since the fundamental characteristics of the

Soviet countryside were detennined by collectivisation and nature of the internal

differentiation it generated in the early 1930s more or less continued in the later decades

with minor alterations. The relatively inferior status of the collective fann workers and

their diverse' forms of marginalisation and deprivation in relation to the industrial

workers and labourers in the state fanns continued throughout the later decades.

Continuity and Change in Post-Stalinist Phase: Soviet Countryside during

Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's Tenure

Khrushchev emerged at the centre-stage of the affairs of the Communist Party of Soviet

Union (CPSU). In the early 1950s, he attempted many initiatives to improve the living

conditions of the agrarian dwellers. He had renewed the procurement prices of the food

grains which were last increased by S~aiin in the hectic days of the cullectivisatiun

period in 1933. A special plenum of the central committee called in September 1953

agreed to raise prices, especially for meat, milk andvegehibles. Outstanding debts were

cancelled and taxes on income from private plots were reduced. None ofthese measures

resulted in any increase in state retail food prices. Khrushchev setout both to increase

peasant income and to increase production (Munting 1982: 142). Increases in the total

production and food supply were spectacular in the early years of refonn, but since

1958, the momentum could not be maintained. Most of this increase was attributable to

bringing new areas into cultivation for food crops and extending fodder production

elsewhere to improve animal-product output. The best known initiative was the 'virgin

lands' 'scheme, which involved ploughing up previously unexploited land or land which

had been left fallow for thirty years or more. These areas were in Kazakhstan and the

eastern region of the RSFSR (Siberia, the Urals). The original intention to put these

138

areas under the plough was to achieve a short-tenn boost to production while freeing

some western areas to produce more fodder, and to allow time for intensification and

increase productivity in the traditional wheat-growing regions of the Ukraine (Ibid: 142-

43).

Khrushchev made attempts to reduce the contradictions prevailing in collectivised

agriculture in the Soviet countryside. One of the main dichotomies of the countryside

was the explicit division of the [anns into state and collective farms and the subordinate

status of the coll~ctive farms in the policy priorities of the state since it was placed . outside the state structure. Khrushchev initiated to incorporate more of the collective

fanns into the state's sector by increasing the number ofthc state farms and some of the

collective farms were merged with the existing state fanns. Khrushchev also increased

the capital investment in the countryside for various infrastructure projects. The amount

of the machinery in use doubled between 1950 and 1958 and combine-harvesters

numbered 18,000 in 1958 against 30,000 in 1950. Under the seven year-plans, state

fanns were to receive more investment than any industry in the period except the

chemical industry. The latter was to serve agriculture with the provision of artificial

fertilizer, the application of which was planned to increase from 10.3 million tones in

1958 to 31 million in 1965. However, most of these funds were allocated to the state

fanns rather than the collective fanns which encountered severe financial crisis.

One of the major policy departure initiated by the Khrushchev era was the

abolition of the MTS (Machine Tractor Stations) which were the central nodal agencies

of the countryside during Stalin's period. Since its [omlation in the early 1930s, it

manifested as the major regulative agency of the state in the collectivised agriculture

and state collected the grains procurements through MTS since its formation in the early

1930s. The political wings of the MTS had a major role in the overall agrarian social

policy fonnulations in the Stalinist period. The goal of scraping the MTS was to reduce

the direct capital allocation and to hand over the duty of the resource mobilizations to the

concemed collective farms itself. Collective fanns in the countryside were also forced

to purchase the old machineries of the MTS and to employ some of the technical expel1s

attached to the former further accelerating the crisis of the collective farms. The new

leadership a]so broadly encouraged the increased private plot cultivation by reducing

taxes and prices .of the agricultural goods increased. In fact, in many ways,

Khnishchev's many of the initiatives were in a certain sense, a gradual move away from

the Stalinist era of extreme concentration and centralisation of power to marginal

139

devolution of it to the lower levels. However, the increased stress on the economic

calculations in the policy formulation revealed a gradual shift towards increasing stress

towards the policies of the market forces. Nevertheless most of the literature on the

agrarian life during the Khrushchev's period revealed that the standard of living of the

majority of the collective farm workers had substantially improved when one compared

with that of the Stalinist period. In fact the fundamental character of the rural social

structure remained more or less same to that of the previous era except increasing

migration of the rural youth to the urban centers.

Since the collectivisation of the agricultural production in the countryside in the

early 1930s, for the first time, peasants substantially improved their living standards and

rural areas in the countryside revealed a state of normalcy in the early 1970s. The same

period also witnessed the gradual decline of the rural out- migration to the urban areas

for the first time since it started in the late 1930s. This was mainly due to the' improved

social conditions in the countryside. Most of the agrarian literature of the period reveals

that unemployment grad~ally disappeared from the countryside. Most of these changes

were the result of the increased attention provided by the Soviet leaders to the

countryside. Throughout the Stalinist period the major intention of the state was to

extract as many resources as possible from the countryside for the industrialisation of

the economy.· The consolidation of the economy through large-scale industtialisation

along with the recovery from the World War II enabled the new leadership to allocate

necessary capital investment to the countryside. Brezhnev provided increased freedom

and autonomy to the farms to decide which crops to c,ultivate and how to utilise their

fat;n l.ands, etc. He also allocated capital resources to the social amenities and improved

the housing facilities of the collective farm peasants'. In fact, tili the early j 980s, the

Soviet countryside witnessed consistent expansion of agricultural production with slight

deviations. In spite of the marginal improvement ill the living standards of the rural

peasants in the post-Stalin era, conditions in the rural areas remained extremely

primitive in most regions of the country, rural life was harsh and dull and many

collective fanns operated at levels indistinguishable from abject poverty (Wegren 2004:

378).

State ofthe Soviet Countryside in the 1980s

The Soviet economy witnessed unprecedented cnSlS m the1980 mainly due to the

overall stagnation of the economy. Industrial and agricultural production remained more

or less the same level to that of the previous decade. The period also showed rapid rise

140

in demand for consumer and industrial goods due to the rise in population. The Soviet

countryside witnessed a relative revival and consistent· growth in the food grain and

other agricultural goods throughout the 1970s and witnessed the consecutive decline in

the food grain production in the mid 1980s. The state of Soviet countryside in the 1980s

was aptly described by former USSSR president Mikhail Gorbachev, who also served as

party secretary for agriculture during 1978-85: the traditional concept of the peasant as a

second class citizen had a further negative effect ... The countryside, with 100 million

people, received 10 per cent of the electric power ... a gas net work was introduced in

urban areas but fanners were deprived of it, and there were no plans in prospect to make

gas available to them ... Rural areas were badly off for roads, schools, medical services,

public services; newspaper and magazine supplies, cinemas, and cultural entertainment

... Statements calming that agriculture was unprofitable were found to be wrong. All

data pointed out to the fact that much more was siphoned off from agriculture than

investe? in it. And, of course, the nation's economic development had been achieved at

the eypense of the countryside (Gorbachev 1995: 18-20). In fact, after the gradual

expansion and consolidation of the agricultural production in the 1970s it again

encountered a period of prolonged stagnation which was in a certain sense, the replica

of the overall stagnation witnessed by the Soviet economy in the 1980s.

Conclusion

Russian society witnessed unparalleled socio-economic transition throughout the 20th

century. The specificities of the social formations prevailing in the Tsarist imperial

Russia and nature of the historical and structural departure experienced by the semi­

feudal and semi-capitalist relations of production in the post revolutionary period.had

profoundly altered tl)e internal class relations in society. The main specificities of the

predominantly peasant society of Tsarist Russia was its communal-forms of production

and land ownership. Due to the centrality of the village commune in the countryside

and absence of individual ownership in land, the nature of the social relation exi~ting in

the countryside in many ways differed from the peasant societies elsewhere in the

world. However, contrary to the expectation of the communal forms of production and

social relation, in Tsarist Russia, a substantial portion of the peasants experienced all

forms of exploitations and social exclusions similar to other peasant societies around the

globe. In fact the ri1ajority of the Russian peasantry throughout the past couple of

centuries witnessed varying forms of exploitation and dominations. Even after the

emancipation of serfs in 1861, peasants experienced multiple forms of restrictions and

surveillances in their social lives. The' victory of the Russian revolutionary movement in

141

1917 and resultant dominance and hegemony of the Bolshevik party in the post

revolutionary era marked a qualitatively new phase in Russian history. The Soviet

regime, irrespective of the early radical changes initiated in the countryside, gradually

m.anifested into new form of modernising and disciplining force of the peasants in the

countryside. The Soviet state's disciplining process of the peasant masses reached its

zenith when the collectivisation programme was implemented in the countryside in the

late 1920s by ignoring a large chunk of the peasants' reservation against it.

Though the collectivisation of the agriculture resulted in the complete

nationalisation of means of production, the social relations existing in post-collectivised

. countryside revealed that social hierarchies and differentiation persisted in new fornl

throughout the Soviet period. In Soviet society, peasants and workers attached to the

collective fanns remained as lower social strata in the countryside. The managerial and

·technical staff in the collective farms and other wage labourers in the industrial sector

received many privileges to fhat of the manual peasants. The fundamental nature of the

Soviet countryside was detemlined by the collectivisation process introduced in the

1930s .. The structural and occ!lpational hierarchies created in the course of the

collectivisation programme profoundly stratified the soviet rural dwellers into different

social categories depending on one's location in the collective and state farms.

Moreover, throughout the Soviet period, peasants and other workers attached to the

collective fanns were often treated as the lower grade citizens in comparison to the

industrial proletariat in the urban areas. Since collective farms were not strictly under

the direct CCnit;-C! of tIt;:, state workers attached to these farms were excluded from all

fOnTIS of protection and assistance provided by the state. In spite of the several

discriminations encountered· by the peasants in the collective farms, the latter

accelerated the process of rural outs migration in the countryside. The post-second

World War period witnessed the unprecedented growth of the urban population and on

the eve of the Soviet disintegration around 7J percent of the citizens were urban

dwellers. In fact, rural social conditions qualitatively improved in the post-Stalin era.

The 1970s witnessed the decline of the popUlation out-migration from countryside and

relative decline in the unemployment in the in rural areas. Social relations in the Soviet

countryside hardly witnessed any profound changes in the 1980s. In fact, despite the

several discrepancies experienced by the rural population in relation to the urban

dwellers and the initial apathy t~wards the forceful collectivisation policy, over the

years, the collective and state fanns were manifested into the inevitable part of the

agrarian social lives in the Soviet countryside.

142