Stalin, the Five Year Plans and the Gulags: Slavery and Terror 1929-53

process.

Holodomor

The Bolsheviks had little time for the Russian peasantry, and certainly less time still for the rural poor of the Ukraine and other nationalities under their control. Their mistrust of the peasantry dated back to pre revolutionary 19th Century Russia, when the revolutionary movement as a whole had witnessed peasant attitudes first hand.

The earlier, pre Bolshevik revolutionaries had harboured some naïve optimism about the peasants, looking to their village communes as a model for the organisation of society in the future. The uninformed outsider might well have learned that the land in the Russian Obschina or Mir was collectively owned and shared out equally between the families in the village, largely on the basis of need. They might well have observed that Russian peasants held a belief about land ownership that the only requirement for ownership of land was the ability to actually work it. If you could work your field, you were entitled to it, the idea that land should be owned to accumulate private profit was an anathema to the ordinary peasant. This was music to the ears of the Narodniks, the Russian student populists who went to ‘educate the peasants’ in the 1870s (for a full account of this, read volume one of this series), but they were soon to be disillusioned. Far from being a socialist paradise, they found squalor, alcoholism and violence rife in most peasant communities. The peasant was not the enlightened character they supposed he might be, but largely disinterested in politics, mostly illiterate, and highly suspicious of outsiders. An attempt to encourage revolution amongst the peasants failed, they handed the Narodniks over to the Czar’s secret police and returned to the day to day life of peasant Russia.

It could be argued that the Russian Intelligentsia and the rural classes were on a collision course ever since. Certainly, Lenin found himself under no illusions about the merits of the peasants. He doubted whether they could ever really be able to grasp the basic rudiments of socialist theory, and when Lenin and Trotsky failed to export revolution to Germany, and failed to gain access to German know how in order to modernise Russia, it meant that an altogether unexpected and more brutal approach to dragging the country into the 20th Century would be required.

Lenin believed that the peasants of Russia were in the process of a shift towards capitalism during the late 19th Century. He believed that after the emancipation of the serfs, which released Russian peasants from virtual slavery in 1861, that a two tier countryside was establishing itself.

On one had there were the new wealthy peasants, the ‘Kulaks’ (Kulak is the Russian word for fist, suggesting that the Kulaks were tight fisted), who in reality were for the most part far from wealthy, they had simply been more successful at farming than their neighbours, and probably less inclined to drink. On the other hand there were the less successful ‘poor peasantry’, identified by the Bolsheviks as potential supporters. Lenin fed off the envy and hatred of the vast sea of peasant poor, firstly directing its ire at the remaining land owner classes and the rural bourgeoisie. Lenin initially lacked the man power for a mass killing of his own in the countryside, and instead used propaganda and writing to enflame the hatred of the poor peasantry, a tactic that Stalin would later use against the Kulaks.

Using Bolshevik inspired ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ or Kombeds, Lenin started a bloody class war in the countryside, at the same time as starving peasant communities with a state created famine from 1918-21.

The poor peasant, the Bednyak, was little more than a serf in the eyes of the regime, a pliant agricultural labourer and rural equivalent of the industrial proletariat. Middle class peasants, or Serednyaks owned land but rarely hired labour, they couldn’t afford to, they simply worked the land themselves. The Kulaks, who hired labour and owned land were the evidence that Lenin needed that capitalism seemed to spontaneously reassert itself in the countryside wherever peasants tended to congregate. He wrote:

"Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions."

The Bednyaks were to make up the membership of the new peasant Kombeds, these committees would expropriate land in villages, find surpluses of grain and confiscate it, and would be allowed to practice in the Russian peasant village their own special brand of revolutionary vigilantism. Lenin claimed to be less interested in the affairs of the middle peasants, focusing generally on the Kulaks, he wrote:

"Our task in the countryside is to destroy the landlord and smash the resistance of the exploiter and the kulak speculator. For this purpose we can rely firmly only on the semi-proletarians, the ‘poor peasants.’ But the middle peasant is not our enemy. He vacillated, is vacillating and will continue to vacillate. The task of influencing the vacillators is not identical with the task of overthrowing the exploiter and defeating the active enemy. The task at the present moment is to come to an agreement with the middle peasant, while never for a moment renouncing the fight against the kulak, and firmly relying solely on the poor peasant, for it is precisely now that a turn in our direction on the part of the middle peasantry if inevitable,* owing to the causes above enumerated."[1]

However, in many villages, the simple distinctions that the Bolsheviks placed upon wealth and poverty, the idea that there actually were wealthy peasants was considered an anathema. In many villages all peasants thought of themselves as poor, and no one recognised other members of their community as Kulaks. The peasants, much to the ire of Lenin, subverted the Kombedy by voting on to it a broad cross section of community life (nearly every peasant village was dominated by groupings of large inter related peasant families, all with loyalties and friendships that were difficult to dissolve).

Lenin tried to circumvent this problem by shipping into the peasant villages towns people who were disconnected from local politics. They dominated the Kombedy, in the face of resolute opposition from the peasants. In order to make their authority felt they had to back up their edicts with violent suppression.

Realising after the civil war that the Kombed had been a mistake, and realising also that the new model of running peasant life, the Village Soviet (which was simply the Mir with a new name) would have to vie for power with the Kombed, it was abolished.

Across Russia in 1921, the peasants waged an anarchic, and for Lenin a frighteningly effective guerrilla war, that eventually Lenin claimed was as dangerous, if not more so, than the threat presented to his regime by the anti Bolshevik forces during the civil war.

Lenin eventually had to come to terms with the uprising and replace the forced and brutal requisitioning of food from peasant villages with the New Economic Policy, which gave peasant Russia some breathing space. This, however, was not done before Lenin had waged a savage war against the peasants in 1920-21, advocating the hanging of hundreds of peasants on hilltops so that their fellow conspirators could see what became of traitors.

Throughout the 1920s, always in the background, loomed the spectre of collectivisation. The idea of created Kolkhoz, or collective farms across Russia, vast acreages of land devoted to industrial scale food production had always been an ambition of Lenin’s.

Russia’s backwardness had historically begun and ended in the countryside, primitive strip farming meant that Russia had often failed to produce surpluses, and it was exactly these that would be needed in the future to power industrialisation.

Collectivisation was inspired by 19th Century economic thinking that stressed the importance of economies of scale, but it also drew much of its inspiration from the Obschina.

The peasants had seized land in 1917 during the October Revolution and were naturally reluctant to return it. They had failed to support the Provisional Government in 1917 because it would not address the central question of who the land would in future belong to, they had stolen land, and they wanted someone to legitimise the theft.

When Lenin had appeared at the Finland Station in April 1917 and delivered his April Theses, which consisted of ‘Peace, Bread, Land and All Power to the Soviets’, he purposefully and explicitly mentioned land because he knew the peasants wanted to hear what he proposed to offer them. Lenin never intended to allow private land ownership for long, but hi death in 1924 left many issues such as land, and the future direction of the Russian economy unresolved, Stalin began the process of the collectivisation of agriculture in 1928, having reached a point of dominance in the Politburo that he could begin to impose his own answers.

Food shortages in the cities in 1928 were the excuse that Stalin needed to act, and at the heart of his desire to collectivise was the impulse to control the often anarchic and contrary peasants who had seemingly defied the Soviet State since its inception. The peasants had little interest in producing surpluses to feed the towns and cities, there was simply no incentive to do so. The over priced manufactures that urban Russia created, compared to the cheap produce of the land led to the Scissors Crisis in 1928. The rising prices of finished goods (owing to the backwardness of Soviet industry) and the falling prices that the government was willing to pay for farm produce, left the peasants more inclined to eat what they grew or to trade it locally. To the ever suspicious Stalin, this seemed like a deliberate attempt to undermine the Soviet state, and now that the peasants control over the land had radically increased, following the October Revolution, their intransigence presented itself to Stalin as an intolerable threat.

Stalin knew that the working classes in the towns and cities of Russia were far more important to his power-base than the peasants, and he believed that the workers were instinctively inclined to be Communist Party supporters. Party logic dictated that these were the people who had adapted to modernity and to the conditions of urban life and the work place, they understood the modern world and its rules and dynamics in a way the peasants couldn’t hope to, and therefore they were more likely to support the party that appeared to represent their interests. It would not be difficult, therefore, to direct their anger, ire and suspicion against greedy trouble makers in the countryside. It would be especially easy to do if it could be established