After years of pandering to the kulaks, the Stalin/Bukharin leadership was taken completely by surprise by the crisis of 1927-28. All the warnings of the Left Opposition were proved entirely correct. Stalin panicked and ordered a complete turnaround in policy. After eliminating the Left Opposition, Stalin leaned on the workers to launch a series of blows against the Right Opposition. By 1930, Stalin had the Right Opposition leaders Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov removed from the Party leadership. These individuals – the head of the Communist International, the head of the Soviet government and the leader of the Russian trade unions – were now all denounced as agents of the counter-revolution! Taking up some of the points of the Left Opposition, but in a twisted and bureaucratic fashion, Stalin swung in an ultra-left direction. Had it not been for the campaign of the Left Opposition, Stalin would have continued his pro-kulak policy, leading to the liquidation of all the gains of the October Revolution.
Without the Opposition’s bold criticism and without the bureaucracy’s fear of the Opposition, the course of Stalin-Bukharin toward the kulak would have ended up in the revival of capitalism. Under the lash of the Opposition the bureaucracy was forced to make important borrowings from our platform. The Leninists could not save the Soviet regime from the process of degeneration and the difficulties of the personal regime. But they saved it from complete dissolution by barring the road to capitalist restoration. The progressive reforms of the bureaucracy were the by-products of the Opposition’s revolutionary struggle. For us it is far too insufficient. But it is still something. (Trotsky, Writings 1935-36, p. 179.)
Lenin always advocated the collectivisation of agriculture gradually and by voluntary means. But he certainly never entertained the mad idea that millions of scattered peasant holdings could be forced to collectivise overnight at gunpoint. Collectivisation was to take place through example. The peasant was to be convinced by patient argument and through the setting up of model collective farms and the introduction of the latest modern technology, tractors, fertilizers, electricity, schools, etc. Such a perspective was obviously linked to the development of Soviet industry through five-year plans. The idea of collectivisation on the basis of wooden ploughs was self-evident nonsense. As Trotsky explained, this problem “is far from settled by these general historical considerations. The real possibilities of collectivisation are determined, not by the depth of the impasse in the villages and not by the administrative energy of the government, but primarily by the existing productive resources – that is, the ability of the industries to furnish large-scale agriculture with the requisite machinery. These material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were set up with an equipment suitable in the main only for small-scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivisation took the character of an economic adventure”. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 38.)
To safeguard and entrench itself as a privileged caste, the Stalinist bureaucracy was forced to lean on the workers to smash the incipient bourgeois counter-revolution. Armed detachments were now sent into the countryside to release the grain stocks to feed the cities. The Stalinists veered from opportunism to an ultra-left position. This led to the insane policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and the complete collectivisation of agriculture “at the earliest possible date”. As a consequence, the proportion of collective farms rose in 1929 from 1.7 per cent to 3.9 per cent. In 1930 it increased dramatically to 23.6 per cent, in 1931 to 52.7 per cent, in 1932 to 61.5 per cent, in 1933 to 64.4 per cent, in 1934 to 71.4 per cent, in 1935 to 83.2 per cent, and in 1936 to 89.6 per cent. The percentage of crop area collectivised rose from 33.6 per cent in 1930 to 94.1 per cent in 1935.
The methods used by Stalin to collectivise the peasantry had nothing in common with the ideas of Lenin. “They collectivised not only horses, cows, sheep, pigs, but even new-born chickens,” noted Trotsky. “They ‘dekulakised,’ as one foreign observer wrote, ‘down to the felt shoes, which they dragged from the feet of little children.’ As a result, there was an epidemic selling of cattle for a song by the peasants, or a slaughter of cattle for meat and hides.” (Ibid., p. 39.) By 1932 grain production fell by nearly 250 million hundredweights; sugar beet fell by half; the number of horses by 55 per cent; horned cattle fell by 40 per cent; the number of pigs by 55 per cent; and sheep by 66 per cent. “Stock was slaughtered every night in Gremyachy Log. Hardly had dusk fallen when the muffled, short bleats of sheep, the death-squeals of pigs, or the lowing of calves could be heard,” writes Sholokhov in Virgin Soil Upturned. “Both those who had joined the kolkhoz and individual farmers filled their stock. Bulls, sheep, pigs, even cows were slaughtered, as well as cattle for breeding. The horned stock of Gremyachy was halved in two nights.” (Quoted in Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p. 174.)
The human and economic consequences were appalling. Millions perished in the ensuing famine. The death-toll for the period 1931-33 has been estimated at around seven million. Unlike 1921, there was no relief for the starving. In fact, the existence of the famine was officially denied. Victor Kravchenko, then an officer in the GPU[1], recalls the position:
“I will not tell you about the dead,” she said. “I’m sure you know. The half-dead, the nearly-dead are even worse. There are hundreds of people in Petrovo bloated with hunger. I don’t know how many will die every day. Many are so weak that they no longer come out of their houses. A wagon goes around now and then to pick up the corpses. We’ve eaten everything we could lay our hands on – cats, dogs, field mice, birds – when it’s light tomorrow you will see the trees have been stripped of their bark, for that too has been eaten. And the horse manure has been eaten.” I must have looked startled and unbelieving. “Yes, the horse manure. We fight over it. Sometimes there are whole grains in it.” (Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, p. 67.)
Part of this insane collectivisation were measures to liquidate “the kulaks as a class”. According to N. Ivnitsky roughly 300,000 kulak households were deported. (Quoted in Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p. 167.) The whole of agriculture was reduced to a state of acute crisis. The bureaucracy was forced to beat a disorderly retreat. Consequently, they were forced to grant the peasantry, alongside the collective farms, small personal farm holdings. Nevertheless, Soviet agriculture was never fully able to recover from this debacle. This was a terrible consequence of the bureaucratic commandism of the Stalinist regime.
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The name of Stalin’s secret police was changed several times – GPU, OGPU, NKVD, etc. For the sake of simplicity we have used GPU throughout, until the more recent period where it is referred to as the KGB.