Why was collectivization necessary? Was collectivization necessary? Reasons for the transition to a policy of mass collectivization.

Collectivization- this is the process of uniting individual peasant farms into collective farms (collective farms in the USSR). The peasants, having received land in 1917 by Lenin's decree, could not produce marketable grain for sale due to low labor productivity, but were only able to grow grain approximately enough to feed only their families. It turned out that there was practically no marketable grain. There was an acute problem of providing bread to the cities of the young Soviet republic.

An increase in agricultural productivity was possible only with the mechanization of rural labor. The peasants plowed with a plow, and the plow was not available to everyone. And whoever had a plow asked the neighbors for 3-4 horses for plowing. In Russia, with unstable weather conditions, one day of the sowing year feeds. Therefore, the speed of tillage and the speed of sowing and harvesting were and are important. And who in those days could buy a tractor to increase labor productivity?

Only the whole village could afford the purchase of a tractor, and even then on a leasing basis.

It was then that Stalin's plan arose to introduce leasing in the village of the collective farm. This is when the state transferred the tractor to the village (collective farm), and the payment for it was made by the village (collective farm) in the fall in commercial grain according to an agreement drawn up and approved by the parties in advance. And for those who have not studied this issue very well, I will explain that the very concept of "collective farm" did not fall from the sky and was not invented by the Bolsheviks, but was noticed by the peasants themselves!

Few people know that, having received land, the peasants of the RSFSR began to massively independently, on the basis of peasant communities, unite in Societies for the joint cultivation of land (combining land plots for the convenience of cultivating them) and create Trade and Purchasing Cooperatives to conduct trade and purchase operations. In essence, these were, in a sense, the predecessors of collective farms - agricultural artels.

At present, agriculture in Russia and Ukraine is practically destroyed.

Isn't it a couple to remember collectivization, to restore agriculture? After all, we have not been feeding ourselves for more than 15 years, but the Chinese, the West, and America are feeding us. When they talk about sanctions against Russia, we imagine with horror the times when Western bankers will block the delivery of food to Russia! What will happen then, hunger?

Russia receives food at many times the price of the European and American markets in exchange for oil and gas. And how will Ukraine manage without grain? The West will not feed Ukraine for thanks!

Only the help of the Russian Federation can save Ukraine from hunger, which may decide to redistribute the incoming food, taking into account the food needs of Ukraine.

How did collective farmers live in the 1930s?

To begin with, it is necessary to separate what period of the “Stalinist collective farms” we are talking about. The first years of the young collective farms are strikingly different from the mature collective farms of the late 1930s, to say nothing of the post-war collective farms of the early 1950s.

Even the collective farms of the mid-30s of the twentieth century are already qualitatively different from the collective farms of literally 2-3 years ago. The period of organizing any new business “from scratch” necessarily goes through a very difficult period, which not everyone manages to successfully pass. But so everywhere and always. The same is true everywhere under capitalism.

There are so many life stories that, for example, a farmer first lived poorly and starving, and then settled down and began to grow rich quickly. Or an entrepreneur who lived with his family in a miserable apartment with bedbugs and cockroaches, but invested all his money and effort in the development of his business. This topic is constantly sucked up in books and films - look at how badly he lived at first, then he got rich, so you need to work better, behave correctly and everything will work out.

It would be more than strange to throw a tantrum about how badly they lived "then" and on the basis of this blame, for example, America and capitalism. Such a propagandist would rightly be taken for an idiot. The same thing happened to the collective farms, and propaganda tirelessly hysteria for decades, about the difficulties of the organizational period. That which is accepted with puppyish enthusiasm "in countries with a market economy" as a model of reasonable and mastery behavior under capitalism.

Collective farms were not state enterprises, but were associations of private individuals. As in any such organization, a lot depended on the diligence and skills of the workers-owners themselves and, of course, on the leadership they chose.

It is obvious that if such an organization will consist of drunkards, loafers and incompetent people, and at the head of it will be a good-for-nothing leader, then the workers-shareholders will live very poorly in any country. But then again, what in countries from the “highway of civilization” is accepted with enthusiasm as a model of justice, in relation to the USSR it is presented as a model of a nightmare, although the reasons for the failure of such an organization are the same.

Some insane demands are made on the Soviet Union, invented from the muddy heads of anti-Soviet people, it is understood that absolutely all collective farms should be provided with simply paradise, regardless of the efforts of the workers themselves, and all collective farmers, according to their ideas, live not only better than farmers in the warmest, fertile and developed countries, and live better than the best farmers.

In order to compare the life of a collective farmer, one must have a certain model for comparison and the parameters by which such a comparison is made. Anti-Sovietists always compare some speculative worker of incomprehensible qualities from the worst collective farm with a pre-revolutionary kulak or, in extreme cases, a very wealthy peasant, and not at all with the poor man without inventory of tsarist Russia, which would be fair - they compare countries with lower incomes. Or there is a comparison of the poorest collective farmers with wealthy hereditary farmers from the United States, and not semi-bankrupts, whose farm is mortgaged for debts. The reasons for this cheap fraud are understandable - after all, then it will be necessary for the lowest stratum of peasants to take into account the benefits that they did not even have close to in the countries from the “highway”, such as free medical care, education, nurseries, kindergartens, access to culture and etc.

It will be necessary to take into account natural conditions and the absence of wars and devastation and other factors. If we compare wealthy peasants from capitalist countries, then we should compare their life with rich collective farmers from millionaire collective farms. But then it will immediately become clear that the comparison, even under unfavorable historical conditions for us, will not be in favor of the enemies of the USSR. That is, here, as elsewhere, anti-Soviet people are ordinary swindlers.

I emphasize once again that Soviet socialism never promised a paradise life to anyone, all that it promised was equality of opportunity and fair pay according to labor and abilities to the maximum achievable with the given development of society. The rest is delusional fantasies of inadequate citizens or manipulative propaganda of conscious enemies.

The first Charter of the agricultural artel was adopted in 1930, and its new version was adopted in 1935 at the All-Union Congress of Collective Farm Shock Workers. The land was assigned to the artel for perpetual use and was not subject to sale or lease. All workers who had reached the age of 16 could become members of the artel, except for former exploiters (kulaks, landlords, etc.), but in certain cases the admission of “former” workers to collective farms was allowed.

The chairman and the board were elected by the general vote of the members of the artel. In order to understand how the artel existed, one must understand how it disposed of its products. The products produced by the agricultural artel were distributed as follows:

“Of the harvest and livestock products received by the artel, the artel:

a) fulfills its obligations to the state for the supply and return of seed loans, pays in kind to the machine and tractor station for the work of the MTS in accordance with the concluded contract having the force of law, and fulfills contracting agreements;

b) fills up seeds for sowing and fodder for feeding livestock for the entire annual need, as well as for insurance against crop failure and lack of fodder, creates inviolable, renewable annually seed and fodder funds in the amount of 10-15 percent of the annual need;

c) creates, by decision of the general meeting, funds to help the disabled, the elderly who have temporarily lost their ability to work, needy families of Red Army soldiers, for the maintenance of nurseries and orphans - all this in the amount of not more than 2 percent of gross output;

d) allocates, in the amount determined by the general meeting of the members of the artel, part of the products for sale to the state or to the market;

e) the artel distributes the rest of the crop of the artel and its livestock products among the members of the artel according to workdays.

Note that everything is absolutely fair and exactly the same mechanism works in enterprises of all countries - first, contractual obligations, taxes, funds aimed at maintaining the functioning of the organization, development funds, social assistance, and the rest can already be divided among shareholders. An indicative fact is the concern for the disabled, orphans, the elderly, etc. lay on agricultural artels, the village perceived this as completely normal - taking care of the weak "with the whole world" (that is, with the community) was fully consistent with the mentality of the Russian peasant. It was precisely on hushing up that the artel took care of the dependents (as, for example, about the nursery) that the hysteria raised during perestroika that “collective farmers in the Stalinist USSR did not receive pensions” was based. They did not receive a state pension, because their native collective farm, which knew them very well, was obliged to take care of them, and abstract payments from pension funds were not issued. Collective farms in the time of Stalin had a very large economic and managerial autonomy, greatly curtailed in the time of Khrushchev. It was then that pensions for collective farmers had to be introduced, because the collective farms, undermined by the administrative dictate, began to experience financial difficulties.

From the history of my family - in the village where my grandmother was from in the Southern Urals in the mid-20s, one of the first collective farms was organized, to be more precise, it was originally a commune, then transformed into a collective farm. My great-grandfather, blinded by the beginning of the 20s after being wounded in the Russo-Japanese War, lived there. Both his sons and son-in-law (my grandfather) fought in the White Army. One son died, the daughter with her family and the other son left the village (by the way, no one did anything to them for the war on the side of the whites), and the great-grandfather was very prosperous (but not a kulak). The collective farm did this - the great-grandfather's house and his plot were transferred by the decision of the "peace" to two poor families (yes, the house was of that size), who lost their breadwinners in the First World War and Civil War, and the great-grandfather was taken by the commune (collective farm) for full life maintenance. He was given a room in the house, every day a collective farm girl came to him to cook and take care of him, whose family was counted for this workdays when they appeared (before that, food in the agricultural commune was distributed equally). He lived like that until he died from the effects of a wound in the early 30s.

The principle of workdays was very simple and fair. The average workday was regarded as the result of the work of not an average, but a weak worker. In order to standardize the terms of payment in 1933, the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR issued resolutions that recognized the practice of workdays already established on collective farms as the official form of calculating wages. Once again, workdays were precisely a popular invention, a practice already established in reality, and not a scheme invented by "Stalin's cannibals" to "torture the peasants to the collective farm gulag." Agricultural work was divided into 7 levels with coefficients from 0.5 to 1.5. More skilled or hard work could be paid a maximum of three times more than the lightest and most unskilled. Blacksmiths, machine operators, and the leading staff of the collective farm administration earned the most workdays. Collective farmers earned the least in auxiliary unskilled work, which is quite fair. For work from "dawn to dawn" and increased output, additional workdays were recorded.

A huge amount of lies have been piled up around workdays in recent years. The number of mandatory workdays for "disenfranchised slaves" was 60 (!) -100 (depending on the region) in the 30s. Only during the war, the number of mandatory workdays was increased to 100-150. But this is a mandatory norm, but how many peasants worked in reality? And here's how much:

the average output per collective farm yard in 1936 was 393 days, in 1937 - 438 (197 workdays per worker), in 1939 the average collective farm yard earned 488 workdays.

In order to believe that “they didn’t give anything for workdays”, one must be mentally retarded in the clinical sense - the average peasant worked 2-3 times more than was required by the norm, therefore, payment depended on the quantity and quality of labor and this was sufficient motivation to give multiple output. If they really didn’t give anything for workdays, then no one would work more than the prescribed norm.

It is significant that with the beginning of the destruction of the Stalinist system by Khrushchev in 1956, the number of mandatory workdays was increased to 300-350. The results were not long in coming - the first problems with the products appeared.

What did they do in the "Stalinist collective farms" with those who did not fulfill the norm for workdays? Probably immediately sent to the Gulag or straight to the firing range? Still worse - the matter was dealt with by the collective farm commission and if they did not find good reasons (for example, a person was sick), then they were shamed at the collective farm meeting and if they systematically violated the standards (usually more than 2 years in a row), by the decision of the meeting they could be expelled from the collective farm with the withdrawal of a personal plot . No one could deprive a collective farmer of housing. The human right to housing was guaranteed by the Constitution of the USSR.

Naturally, in reality, a person, rejected by the rural community, left the village, as happens everywhere in the world. It is only in the heads of citizens divorced from reality that life in the village community is a popular pastoral, in fact it is very tough with very clear unwritten rules that are better not to be violated.

How much did the collective farmers earn on workdays, otherwise for a quarter of a century all sorts of crooks in the media go into hysterics, talking about “starving collective farmers”, and when the crooks are pressed by facts, the stories of unnamed grandmothers who “remember” that “there is nothing for workdays” are pulled out as an argument didn't give." Even if we exclude completely invented characters, then in order to more or less realistically assess the surrounding reality and directly earn workdays (16 years) in the most difficult period for the collective farms of the early 30s, the average storyteller grandmother had to be, at the latest 1918 -1920 years of birth. No matter how you listen to anyone, before the Revolution they all had two cows, a huge house covered with iron, two horses, the most modern equipment and a couple of acres of land. I wonder where all these citizens came from, if before the Revolution in the village there were 65% of the poor, in almost 100% of cases they plowed the plow and 20% of the middle peasants with few land, who could not even talk about two cows? The wealthy middle peasants made up only 10% of the population, and the kulaks 5%. So where did these "grandmother's tales" come from? If we assume her honesty (although not counting the false information given out by the “grandmothers”) and the honesty of those who retell her stories even in the 90s, then the adequacy of the described picture can hardly be called high.

A lot of questions will remain unanswered - in what family did the person live, how well did the family work, how many workers were there, how successful was the collective farm itself, what years exactly are we talking about, and so on. Obviously, everyone wants to present their family in a favorable light, because few people will say “dad was an armless lazy person, and the whole family is like that, so we weren’t paid a damn thing”, and “the chairman who was chosen by my parents was overzealous and a drunkard, but he was a sincere man, dad and mom liked to drink with him, "" he himself stole and gave to others, only because of hunger they did not die."

In this case, it is obvious that the causes of material difficulties in the family have nothing to do with the collective-farm organization of labor. Although for such citizens, of course, the Soviet Power is to blame for everything. By the way, what is her “fault” is that such citizens generally survived, grew up and often learned. In the God-saved-which we-lost, the fate of families of clumsy and lazy people developed, as a rule, in a very sad way. But in tsarist Russia, this is enthusiastically accepted as a model of justice, and a much better life for the same citizens in the Stalinist collective farms causes fits of hatred.

But there is a lot of testimonies of stories that paint a completely different picture, both from family stories and testimonies of collective farmers of those years, collected by scientists as expected. Here is an example of such testimony about how collective farms lived in the early to mid-30s:

“Most of the Kharlamov peasants considered the collective farm to be a cell of a just social order. The feeling of unity, joint work and the prospects for improving the culture of agriculture, the culture of life in the conditions of the collective farm system inspired. Collective farmers in the evenings went to the reading room, where the hut read newspapers. Lenin's ideas were believed. On revolutionary holidays, the streets were decorated with kumach; on the days of May 1 and November 7, crowded columns of demonstrators from all over Vochkoma with red flags walked from village to village and sang ... At collective farm meetings they spoke passionately, frankly, the meetings ended with the singing of the Internationale. They went to work and from work with songs.

What is indicative is that the excerpt is not from "Stalinist propaganda" - but these are the memories of collective farmers, collected by honest and independent researchers, who are very hostile to the Stalinist period as a whole. I can add that my relatives said the same thing. Now it will seem surprising - but people went to work on a collective farm or factory with joy and sang along the way.

But all personal memories, even those recorded properly, have their limitations - they can be superimposed on the memories of subsequent ones, emotions, superimposed interpretation, selective perception, propaganda from the time of "perestroika", the desire to tell something that does not go beyond public opinion, and so on. Is it possible to objectively assess how collective farmers actually lived? Yes, quite, statistical data and serious scientific research are more than enough to talk about this as an established fact.

The gradation of collective farms in terms of wealth and, accordingly, the average standard of living in them obeys, on average, the famous Gaussian distribution, which is not surprising, this was well known back in Stalin's times. Averaged over the years, 5% of collective farms were rich, successful collective farms, they were joined by about 15% of strong, wealthy collective farms, on the other hand, 5% of poor collective farms, which were adjoined by a slightly more successful 15% of poor fellows, and about 60% were middle-peasant collective farms. It is probably even a hedgehog of average intelligence that the level of income and life of peasants of rich collective farms was much higher than the standard of living of peasants of poor collective farms, and to talk about how they lived on the average on a collective farm would significantly distort the picture, as in the expression "average temperature in a hospital." The average data will show the standard of living of the average collective farmer in about 60% of the collective farms and no more. Let's see how much higher was the standard of living of the peasants in various collective farms than before the Revolution and why. After all, we are assured that in the USSR there was an equalization and people were "absolutely not interested in working." Yeah, “not at all interested”, but nevertheless, on average in the country, the norm for workdays (50-100) was overfulfilled by 3-5 times.

The average collective farm yard by 1940 was 3.5 people, against 6 in tsarist Russia - the fragmentation of farms began immediately after the Civil after the division of landowners and tsar lands. , and in 1932 the average peasant family consisted of approximately 3.6-3.7 people. The critical famine limit in tsarist Russia was approximately 245 kg per person (15.3 poods) - excluding fodder grain for livestock and poultry, but by tsarist standards it was not even considered a hungry line, tsarist Russia reached this level only in a few years at the end of its existence. The brink of mass starvation by the standards of tsarist Russia was 160 kg per person, this is when children began to die from malnutrition. That is, on average, a collective farm peasant in the USSR received about as much bread for workdays in 1932 as it was literally enough not to starve to death (162 kg). However, the royal peasant, apart from grain, grew little else in the grain-growing regions - almost all the land available for sowing grain went under grain, the energy value of wheat in our climate is the highest in relation to productivity. So, the average peasant in tsarist Russia in the most favorable years of 1910-1913 consumed 130 kg of potatoes per capita per year, vegetables and fruits 51.4 kg.

And what about the Soviet collective farmer? In the worst years of 1932-1933, the average peasant economy received from the collective farm 230 kg of potatoes and 50 kg of vegetables, that is, 62 and 13.7 kg per person.

However, the output received by the peasant is by no means exhausted by what he earns from his workdays. The second, and in some cases, the first income of the collective farm peasant in terms of importance is the product of a personal farmstead. However, we are still talking about the "average peasant" of the average collective farm. In 1932-1933, collective farm peasants received an average of about 17 kg of grain per capita, 197 kg of potatoes, 54 kg of vegetables, 7 kg of meat and fat, and 141 liters of milk. (ibid.)

That is, if we compare Russia in the most prosperous years and the USSR in the most unfavorable years of 1932-1933, then the picture of average food consumption in the countryside will be as follows:

Products Russia 1910-1913 USSR 1932 C. Russia middle.

Meat and lard 28 7 15

Milk 133 141 107

Potatoes 130 268 78

Vegetables and fruits 51 104 - without fruits 25 - without fruits

Cereals 312 178 256, before 1910 -212

The first column is Klepikov's data on the best years of tsarist Russia, the last column is tsarist Russia of the 20th century, on average according to data.

That is, the peasants of the USSR 1932-1933. began to eat much more potatoes, but less bread, compared to tsarist Russia. The average calorie content of wheat varieties of those years is about 3100 kcal / kg, potatoes 770 kcal / kg, that is, about 1 to 4. If we take the difference between the USSR in 1932 and the best years of tsarist Russia in potato consumption and recalculate into effective calories for grain, then this of conditional grain, the average collective farmer would consume just 212 kg - exactly as much as the tsarist peasant of the beginning of the 20th century ate.

Plus, the Soviet peasant received other products and agricultural products from the collective farm - milk, hay, etc., but I could not find data on this for 1932-33. Also, the Soviet collective farmer received an additional 108 rubles for workdays per year, which slightly exceeded the average monthly salary in industry in 1932. The average Soviet collective farmer in 1933 (data not available for 1932) received 280 rubles from seasonal work and other cooperatives. in a year. That is, in total, the average peasant earned about 290 rubles a year - almost a quarter of the annual income of the average worker, and the tsarist peasant, in order to receive money, had to sell part of the crop.

As we see from the given data, there was no universal catastrophe in the countryside in the early years of the collective farms. It was hard, yes. But the whole country lived hard after the Civil and "skillful" tsarist rule. In general, the situation with food in 1932-1933 in the collective farms was approximately the same as the average for tsarist Russia, but noticeably worse than in Russia in 1913 or the USSR during the best years of the late NEP.

That is, on average, no catastrophic famine looms, despite the "grandmothers' stories" and the tantrums of all sorts of scammers from history. Also wrong are the fans of the USSR of the Stalinist period, who claim that everything was fine and serious problems in the countryside are the slander of enemies. This is not true. In the medium-sized collective farms of 1932-1933, they lived from hand to mouth for two years; this is indeed confirmed by a simple analysis. Alas, life from hand to mouth has been commonplace for Russia for the last couple of centuries. It is impossible to call the years 1932-1933 a good life in the material sense, a nightmare and poverty - the same.

We must absolutely not forget that the Soviet peasant received free medical care and education, kindergartens and nurseries, which even very wealthy peasants could not dream of in tsarist times, and we must also not forget about the sharply increased level of culture in the countryside. In moral and spiritual terms, in terms of social security, the village of 1932-1933 began to live simply incomparably better than the royal village and much better than the Soviet village of the late NEP.

It is not difficult to guess that teachers in schools, professors in institutes, doctors in hospitals, librarians in libraries and all other workers had to be paid, and moreover, to train them, and not only for free, but also paying a scholarship, as was the case in the USSR . It’s just that the Soviet state redistributed the taxes, surplus value and other funds not among a narrow handful of rich people, but returned them to the people in one form or another, and for those who wanted to appropriate the people’s goods there were the Gulag and the NKVD.

We missed one more "small" detail - the peasants "robbed" by the Soviet Power for the first time in history received absolutely the same rights as other estates or, more correctly, social groups - not to count the peasant children who made not just a dizzying, but a fantastic career under the Soviet Authorities. Some have achieved that in any state beyond fantasy - young peasants have grown to the level of the state elite of the highest level. Absolutely all roads were open for the Soviet peasant - the peasants became doctors, engineers, professors, academicians, military leaders, cosmonauts, writers, artists, artists, singers, musicians, ministers ... By the way, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin - came from peasants.

If we take into account the sharply increased level of mechanization and the much more reasonable organization of labor, life in the countryside has become somewhat easier than before collectivization, given both the much more reasonable collective-farm organization of labor, as well as the services received on the collective farm for the same workdays, for example, the delivery of building materials or plowing a personal plot. Those who believe that this is a trifle, I strongly recommend that you personally dig up half a hectare of arable land with a shovel for a more adequate perception of reality. The falsifiers who describe the "horrors of the kolkhoz gulag" and "kolkhoz slavery" are trying to make it appear that what they got for workdays was the only source of food for the kolkhoz workers. This is very wrong. We have already shown the great contribution of private farming, which was an integral part of collective farm life. But even that is not all. There were a few other fairly prominent food sources that didn't exist before. Almost everywhere on collective farms during the period of field work, food was organized at the expense of the collective farm for all able-bodied workers - collective farm canteens for teams working in the field. This was very reasonable - the average labor costs for preparing a meal for 50 people are many times less than if everyone cooks individually. There were preferential or free lunches in schools, meals in kindergartens and nurseries were practically free and came from collective farm funds, and in their absence, from district, regional, republican and, further, state funds.

Also completely ignored are aid funds that were put in place when the food situation became dangerous. The collective farm was given grain loans or gratuitous assistance, as, by the way, individual farmers were also given food to the collective farm canteens, schools, nurseries and kindergartens. However, at the very beginning of its formation, this system was ineffective in a number of places, for example, in Ukraine in the early 1930s, where local authorities concealed the real catastrophic state of affairs and aid from the state reserve began to be allocated too late. It is to these funds that the famous hysterical “memoirs of grandmothers” on the topic, “they didn’t give out anything,” but the question of how you survived, they answer the question “somehow survived.” This “somehow” refers to the state and inter-collective farm assistance organized by the Soviet Power, which is not noticed point-blank by unworthy people.

In general, if we take into account the sharply increased level of mechanization and a much more reasonable organization of labor (canteens, kindergartens, collective plowing of plots, etc.), then living in the countryside has become noticeably easier than before collectivization, even in 1932-1933.

But this is all an “average collective farm”, it is obvious that they were not the only ones in the USSR. Consider the rich collective farms of those years: 2.7% of the collective farms gave the collective farmers more than 7 kg of grain per workday. If we add to this what was received on the personal plot, considering that in the rich collective farms the peasant received from him as much as the average (although in reality he received somewhat more), then the average material standard of living of the peasants of the best collective farms in terms of directly received food exceeded the standard of living in 1913 by about 3-4 times. 20.8% of the collective farms gave out on average about 5 kg per workday (of which 5% were from 6 to 7 kg). The level of food security there somewhat exceeded the level of the best years of tsarist Russia or the New Economic Policy. Obviously, there can be no talk of hunger or malnutrition on such collective farms.

Naturally, the morale of the collective farmers on the collective farms of these 20-25% of successful collective farms was exceptionally high. These were, as a rule, collective farms using MTS. In the course of a year, before the eyes of the peasants, there was a leap from the Middle Ages to large-scale modern production, and they were active participants in a great cause. It was the best time of their lives. Natives of these collective farms usually angrily reject any negative reviews about the collective farms of that period, and this is not surprising - they saw fundamentally different things than the inhabitants of the collective farms of the lower group. The collective farms of the highest group (approximately 20-25%) were the showcase of the Stalinist collective farms, it was about them that newspapers wrote, they were cited as an example, which is as natural as the bourgeois media write stories about successful, and not about ruined or dragging out a miserable existence of entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, life in such collective farms was very tough - the collectives mercilessly expelled lazy people, incompetent people and those who did not fit into collective farm life. They worked very hard on such collective farms, which, in general, is typical of all successful farms everywhere in the world.

With rich and medium-sized collective farms, everything is clear, but how were things in the least successful collective farms? There were also about 25% of them (depending on the method of calculation, up to 33%). An analysis of the food received by collective farmers shows that from one quarter to one third of the collective farms of the USSR in 1932-1933 faced serious malnutrition, and some of them faced hunger. These were collective farms, mediocrely managed, inhabited by lazy people and saboteurs, or hit by a local drought or an epidemic of fungal diseases of crops. The situation was especially difficult in 4-5% of collective farms, which gave out about 100 grams per workday. There was a famine in these collective farms. The only hope for survival for them was aid funds and a personal plot. These were villages that survived until the next harvest on potato peelings and quinoa. It is these collective farms that are now presented as typical collective farms of the Stalin era as evidence of the "horrors of the collective farm system", which is far from being the case. These collective farms were not a typical picture even in the most difficult years.

But there are fundamentally other victims of hunger - conscious saboteurs. The most important factor in the famine in the affected area, even frank Sovietophobes and fierce anti-Stalinists (for example), is called "peasant resistance", that is, sabotage. Former kulaks and anti-Soviet peasants tried their best to disrupt the sowing campaign, and in a small number of places they succeeded. In a number of regions of the country, "bagpipes" began - disguised disruptions in work. They are often called "peasant strikes", which is not entirely true, because the strikers openly come out and put forward their demands, and here was the usual sabotage. In the spring, acts of sabotage were insignificant - only 50 thousand peasants took part in them, half of them in Ukraine. On a national scale, this is practically nothing. It must be assumed that everyone understands that sowing is disrupted in order to create famine, to undermine Soviet power, and for nothing else. The goal of the saboteurs was to cause a famine with massive loss of life. The Soviet Government approached the criminals with unusual gentleness. The organs of the GPU and the party organizations were ready for this blow, and they managed to beat it off quite successfully. The assessment of the already risen bread showed that it was more than enough for the country and the authorities relaxed. They can be understood, cases and so it was up to the throat. Any normal person will say that if a peasant has planted a crop, he will definitely harvest it. He's not an idiot, really. But it turned out not to be so, the Soviet Power underestimated the degree of baseness, meanness and stupidity of some of its citizens. Although it is not clear what they could have done in that situation without the urgent use of emergency measures - the involvement of the army, the mobilization of cities for cleaning, demonstrative mass repressions of saboteurs, because the cattle do not understand another language. Local authorities did not dare to raise such a wave, even after receiving the first news of sabotage during cleaning, hoping that everything would work itself out. Well, the peasants themselves and their country are not so enemies? They were gravely mistaken. Sabotage of grain harvesting in a number of areas was very successful. Ukraine has been particularly hard hit.

What was the reason for the behavior of these peasants, so strange for a normal person? Everything is very simple - the collective farms received the norm of the mandatory delivery of bread at fixed prices, the rest remained at their disposal, in fact it was a form of the food tax, well known to the peasants since the abolition of "war communism". By the way, the purchase of products from farmers at pre-fixed prices is now widely used in the West. The norm, by the way, was completely feasible - judging by the results of the fact that almost 75% of the collective farms complied with it quite adequately and gave the collective farmers at least the minimum necessary amount of food for workdays. The logic of stupid, greedy scoundrels that made up the population of the "resisting" districts was elementary and unpretentious - to destroy the sown grain, and to steal and hide the grain for "myself loved ones", in the autumn to cry and complain loudly like an orphan. According to their understanding, the authorities should have crawled on their knees to the grain growers, sharply reducing, and even God willing, completely abolishing the obligatory rate of delivery of bread for the next year. Yes, the authorities will have to remove the last thing from the townspeople, only to buy bread from the peasants. Well, great, then we'll live! Izh what the city thought up, to ride on a peasant's neck. The stupid, vile cunning people believed that they would live on hidden bread until next year, and the Soviet Power, which faced the starvation of cities, would go to any of their conditions. In fact, it was the same thing that the kulaks tried to do at the end of the 20s, arranging grain sabotage. In autumn, everything was much more serious - the theft of bread and its consumption in part of the collective farms became massive. It is difficult to accurately estimate their number - approximately 1/10-1/6 of the total. There is between ¼ and half of the crop left in the field. Anti-Sovietists openly admit that peasant sabotage has become the dominant factor in the death of bread and a sharp reduction in the amount of food in the country, and, very interestingly, they accuse Soviet power of peasant meanness. It turns out that the peasants were engaged in sabotage, the peasants stole and purposefully rotted bread, and Stalin is to blame for this! In the same way, the Whites started the Civil War, but the Bolsheviks were to blame for it, the Nazis attacked the USSR, and Stalin was to blame for the victims of the war, the West started the Cold War, but the Soviet Union was to blame, and so on. Approximately the same as with a vile hypocritical woman, a man is always to blame for any of her shortcomings.

The Soviet Power did the only right thing, as it could have done in that situation - it took away the bread that was due to it from negligent collective farms and began mass seizures of stolen bread from thieves, in the sense of "peasants who suffered from the Stalinist regime." If the government followed the lead of the saboteurs, it would mean one thing - the disruption of Industrialization and the death of the country in a rapidly impending war.

The stupid and vile peasant cattle deservedly got what they deserved - the famine that it prepared for all its people. He was much less scary than all sorts of scammers draw in their hysterical creations. Quite successfully surviving descendants of these scoundrels are now squealing, blaming the Soviet Power and Stalin, just as the descendants of Bendera, policemen and other traitors are screeching. Of course, it is very unpleasant for them that their ancestors turned out to be scoundrels, but is the Soviet Power to blame for this? I immediately recall a well-aimed proverb about an apple tree and apples that fall not far from it.

How, according to the idiots, was the seizure of food from the peasants and for what purpose? They went from house to house and took away what had just been given out for workdays?! Why?! This is the same as trying to pick up the bristles from a pig, pulling it out hair by hair. Collective farms were just created as large sources of bread, so as not to collect crumbs from yards. Peasants rarely grew grain on their plots and in such insignificant quantities that it made no sense to take it. So why walk around the yards, as we are assured, with the police and the GPU, looking for and taking grain, if you could do the same without problems, taking it simply from the collective farm barn?! After all, the efforts and resources involved are simply incomparable. Why was “all the grain” taken from the peasant in the house, but not touched, for example, lard, which is much more nutritious, leaving potatoes and other products, as crooks like Kulchitsky write? How can one explain such a selective love of the “commissars” specifically for grain? After all, if they wanted to starve, they would take absolutely all the food. Obviously, this is a lie, but there is a lot of evidence that the grain was really taken away? Why?

Everything is very simple. In the phrase “in a number of localities all the grain was taken from the peasants” one word is missing, which completely changes the whole meaning of what was happening. The word is "stolen". Indeed, in the collective farms, which catastrophically did not pass the plan for grain and did not issue it in noticeable quantities on workdays, they went from house to house and checked whether the peasants had grain. If the peasant could not explain the origin of the grain - it was seized, which is completely fair, and the rest of the products - lard, potatoes, beets, onions, etc., which he grew, or at least could grow himself, and not just steal - They just didn't have the right to take it. That is why the peasants did not complain to the police and the prosecutor's office that they "took away everything" from them - they took away what was stolen. That is why the peasants cried into Sholokhov's vest so that he would write to Stalin, but they did not complain to law enforcement agencies. You will complain, and as a result you will go with a song according to the “law of seven and eight” to Kolyma like a thief. The fact that the stolen grain was simply taken away, and the thieves were not brought to justice, is a great favor of the Soviet Power.

How many such “innocently injured” figures were there? Most likely, about one tenth of all collective farms. They deserve no more pity than members of gangster gangs who have received a prison sentence or a well-deserved bullet.

By the mid-30s, the situation in the countryside began to improve rapidly - both the authorities and the collective farmers gained experience in a new life. The saboteurs were convinced that they would take the bread anyway and set to work. Famine left the Russian countryside virtually forever, except for the post-war cataclysm of 1946, which does not depend on people.

It is obvious that there can be no malnutrition with such results. Compared to 1913, the peasant began to eat somewhat less cereals, but many times more vegetables and potatoes, which he, in general, could not even eat himself, but sold on the market. In 1935, the money income of collective farmers for working on the side also increased. In 1933, these incomes were calculated in the amount of 2,806 rubles. (per 100 souls), in 1934 - 4,227 rubles, and in 1935 - 4,958 rubles.

Taking into account the production of household plots, the average material standard of living of a peasant has increased approximately twice compared to pre-revolutionary times. This significantly exceeded the income of the peasant, not only in tsarist times, but also the income of the individual peasant. Moreover, individual farmers were taxed by 25%, more than the personal economy of collective farmers, because part of the taxes was paid by the collective farm.

It is not surprising that individual farmers voluntarily joined the collective farm somewhere from 1935 at such a rate that after 5 years there were almost none left.

The income of the collective farm peasant grew very rapidly, approximately trebling in 5 years. In 1937, the average income of a collective farm household for workdays was already 1,741 kg of wheat and 376 rubles. per year, excluding other products. By the mid-1930s, the collective farms had finally proved the advantages of the new type of management, possessing the flexibility of market mechanisms and the power to plan and support the entire country-corporation.

But this is in medium-sized collective farms, the most successful collective farms in 1937 (10% of the total) gave out more than 7 kg per workday, and 5% of collective farms - 9-10 kg per workday. The average income in bread terms per family was about 5 tons. However, at the same time, about 12% of collective farms gave out less than 2 kg per workday, which, taking into account the increased number of workdays worked out, still led to the fact that in about 10% of collective farms in the USSR, a collective farmer who received income only from workdays would be on the verge of physical survival. However, the collective farmer in such farms received a comparable income from a personal plot. That is, even in the poorest collective farms, the average peasant lived one and a half to two times better than the average peasant of tsarist Russia during the fruitful years. But besides this, help was organized for lagging collective farms. We emphasize once again - and this is without taking into account the fact that he received free education, medical care and the services of cultural institutions. In the rich collective farms, the standard of living of the average peasant, compared with pre-revolutionary or pre-collectivization ones, increased by more than an order of magnitude. On average, the standard of living of an average peasant on a collective farm increased by 3-4 times by the end of the 1930s.

It is not surprising that infant mortality under "collective farm slavery" from the beginning of collectivization for 10 years to 1939, infant mortality decreased by 3 times, and overall mortality fell by almost a quarter. In general, it is not at all surprising that in those years the peasants themselves easily opposed the collective farms, as they say, "beat their faces."

Even more rapidly grew the level of cash income in the rich collective farms. The most advanced collective farms really surprised, even in the not very successful year of 1935. Thus, in the Uzbek SSR, the March 8 collective farm issued an average of 19,563 rubles per household for workdays; "Labor laborer" - 7,151 rubles. In Georgia: collective farm named after. Voroshilov issued 7,035 rubles, to them. Molotov - 4776 rubles. In the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Iskra collective farm issued 3,119 rubles, Bolshevik - 2,684 rubles.

Millionaire collective farms had a queue for many years ahead of those who wanted to join even in the 80s, I remember them well. A young family entering the collective farm was immediately given a house. All that was needed for this was an honest and qualified chairman and hard-working non-drinking collective farmers. But they worked a lot on those collective farms, loafers and drunkards were not tolerated, they were expelled ruthlessly.

And in the 1930s, individual farmers disappeared for many kilometers around such collective farms as a natural phenomenon, and the word “individual peasant” in those places became an insulting curse, a synonym for the words “stupid, greedy half-wit, deceiving himself” and “stupid asocial person”. Individual farmers were made fun of on the streets, they were not married, they were not invited to weddings and holidays. As a result, someone still joined the collective farm, someone moved.

The state in the time of Stalin did not really care about lazy people, they were provided with a hungry minimum. That is, the state created by Stalin is blamed for exactly what is enthusiastically accepted in countries "with a market economy."

At first, they worked for workdays so that the family would not starve to death. Compared to tsarist times with regular crop failure every ten years, and sometimes more often, this was an incredible progress. As we can see, subsequently, wages for workdays increased not only very significantly, but many times over. I emphasize that in fact, under Stalin, it was the peasant who received payment for workdays not only from the collective farm, but also from the Soviet State - not only in goods at low fixed prices, but also in the form of free medicine and education, which the vast majority of the population under the tsar and it was impossible to dream. It was a mutual social obligation of the authorities and the peasant.

Having worked out the 80 workdays stipulated by the unwritten, but very understandable civil contract, the peasant could continue to earn workdays or work the rest of the time, the peasant worked on his personal plot or engaged in any business that he considered necessary. If the peasant wanted and knew how to work, then he quickly they became rich by selling butter, sour cream, meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables, honey, etc. on the market. For example, my grandfather had a vegetable garden larger than one hectare at the disposal of the family. At the end of the 40s, they built a new house for one potato crop from this garden. Especially skilled beekeepers earned a lot.

The size of a personal plot in the personal use of a collective farm yard is from 1/4 to 1/2 ha (in some areas up to 1 or more ha). On average, a peasant could keep 1 cow, up to 2 young animals, 1 sow with piglets in his personal farmstead , up to 10 sheep and goats, poultry and rabbits - no restrictions, beehives - up to 20. In agricultural areas with developed animal husbandry, it was possible to have 3 cows and young animals for personal use, up to 3 sows with piglets, up to 25 sheep and goats. - there.

Peasants often participated in the work of various kinds of cooperatives that were not related to the collective farm - cab drivers, agro-industrial, trade, and others, of which there were a huge number. My grandfather, being on a collective farm, was engaged in carting in the mid-30s - he raised a foal, no one took him to the collective farm, why a horse if there is a tractor? At first, my grandfather earned quite good money on a cart, but at the end of the 30s, the supply began to lose in a completely obvious way to rapidly appearing cars. Even for plowing small plots, keeping draft animals has already become pointless. It was possible to plow a garden (he had more than 1 hectare) by ordering plowing at the MTS through mutual settlements with the collective farm for workdays. I could also order a lorry-lorry for workdays on the collective farm (or through mutual settlements at the MTS), it turned out cheaper and faster. In the end, the grandfather sold the horse in 1940 with rather great difficulty - it lost all meaning for the peasant.

This is in the fantasies of the fans of “Russia-which-we-lost”, where the crunch of French rolls and beauties at balls with the junkers, the peasants only did what they drank fresh milk, the reality was somewhat different - a cash (alas, by the standards of Russia) cow was a sign of luxury and cost the Revolution not 3 rubles, as some unscrupulous inadequate citizens claim, but starting from 60, and highly profitable - significantly more.

A cow's milk yield of 90 buckets (about 1100 liters) per year was considered very good and was achieved by a small number of cows, mainly in landowners who could afford good feed. No more than 70% of the peasants could afford a cow, even a low milk yield, the main problem was lack of land and an acute shortage of feed due to the extremely low yield in Russia. Simply put, bread was sown on any more or less suitable piece of land. In poor peasant farms, the usual milk yield was 1-2 liters per day - at the level of a good goat. In reality, before the Revolution, a third of the peasants practically did not see milk at all, and most of the remaining could only afford it for children, some poor households, in order to somehow survive, sold all the milk in general. In general, the situation with milk in Tsarist Russia was the same as with grain - butter was exported to England and Denmark for a pittance (ibid.), the majority saw real milk occasionally, and a third did not see it at all.

The lack of cows of poor peasants (30%), inherited from the tsarist regime, was sharply aggravated by the massive hysterical slaughter of cattle by the peasants themselves in the process of collectivization. Now the peasants themselves had to pay for this - there were not enough cows either on the collective farm or on the personal farmstead, and there was nowhere to take them quickly. Peasants from 1932-1933 began to have cows again, but they do not grow up overnight, so in 1934, despite the fact that the restoration had already begun, the number of cowless peasants was almost the same as under the tsarist regime (27%). This was seen as a big problem at the highest level. So the June Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1934 decided to "eliminate the lack of cows among collective farmers as soon as possible." The same decision was made by the VII Congress of Soviets of the USSR in February 1935.

As a result, the number of livestock in the personal farmstead of collective farmers from 1932 to 1938 increased from 10 to 25 million cattle, in fact, whoever wanted to have a cow had it. Interestingly, over the past decades, everyone has heard hypocritical cries about how a cow was taken from the peasants to the collective farm. Who could say, what else was there to form collective farms under those conditions, if not from cattle socialized into a cooperative? Interestingly, at the same time, not a word is said about how the lack of cows of the peasants was eliminated - they were provided with calves and cows from state funds for helping collective farms and the multiplying collective farm herd. Cows were given on credit at preferential prices, given out for workdays or generally free of charge, and the best productive breeds of livestock were given out. It has become a common practice to reward the best collective farmers with a cow. But you will not hear a word about this from the mourners about the horrors of the collective farms.

Dozens of chickens appeared among the peasants precisely in Stalin's times, in tsarist Russia a peasant 2.8 grams of a chicken egg per day - that is, one in twenty days. The peasant was simply not able to feed a larger number of chickens. A large number of poultry in peasant houses became commonplace precisely in the 30s. The peasants kept dozens, and some - up to two hundred chickens. My grandfather's family kept 70-80 chickens and this was not the largest livestock in the village, there were quite a few like them. The collective farm provided fodder for workdays. It was difficult to eat such a quantity of eggs, so they were successfully sold in the market. Then they began to complain - the prices for eggs in the market before the War had fallen sharply due to competition. Speaking of correctly applied market mechanisms and the "administrative-command economy" under Stalin. There were also taxes on private households. For chickens, they were about The taxes were "terrible" - about one egg per 10 chickens per day.

But a private household was not at all a private little world of a peasant, where he could rest in manual work on his piece of land from collective farm slavery, as we are now told. Collective farming helped and greatly strengthened the personal. A qualified agronomist helped to plan plantings on a personal plot in such collective farms, the collective farm helped (that is, gave it free of charge or wrote out at its own expense from breeding stations) seeds and seedlings of the best varieties, at reduced prices or for workdays supplied pedigree peasants for a personal farmstead, much more productive livestock, poultry feed, plowing personal plots with collective farm equipment or organizing it through the MTS, allocated fertilizers, plant protection products, vehicles for organizing trade on the collective farm market, and so on. Naturally, the collective farmers began to work on their plots much more rationally.

During the Gorbachev-Yeltsyn perestroika, a lot of custom-made articles about the "slave labor of the Soviet peasant" appeared. However, during the Patriotic War there were many cases when a peasant alone paid ("buy") an aircraft or a tank for the Soviet Army. More than a strange act for a disenfranchised slave, isn't it? So, a peasant who wanted to earn money could save up enough money to buy an airplane? The collective farmer - Ferapont Golovaty, who bought two whole new combat aircraft with the money earned from beekeeping, and the collective farmer A.S. Selivanova and collective farmer M.A. Polyanichko - three combat aircraft, and their families did not go around the world from this. Only in one Saratov region 60 collective farmers contributed to the defense fund from 100 rubles. up to 300 thousand rubles Such was the "slave" labor in the Stalinist village. Do you speak to farmers in the West better? Okay, show me for comparison an American farmer who can buy a combat aircraft? At least one. At cost? Okay, so be it. By the way, having learned about the act of Ferapont Golovaty, a doctor from Edinburgh wrote him a bewildered letter:

“Our newspapers printed a message about your act. But my friends and I do not understand what made you give your personal capital to help the government. And we will tell you sincerely: we do not believe that you will have followers.”

Only in the Saratov region, the peasants donated more than 100 combat aircraft, in more than 70 cases of which the aircraft was paid for by one family. The Korean S. Tsoi from Uzbekistan contributed a million (!) Rubles, on which the newest bomber was built, he brought two suitcases of money to the regional party committee with the words:

« That's what a rich collective farm life gave me. Now the Motherland needs money more…”

Bashkir peasants, Armenians, Georgians, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kirghiz and many others donated huge amounts of money, you can’t list them all. This is the difference between the people’s power, which they consider their own, and the power in a “democratic country” from the “highway of civilization”.

In general, society had few resources and the stratification was quite serious, basically the people then lived in poverty (by the way, they lived very poorly even under the tsar), but those who earned a lot earned this money, not appropriated it. Prosperity was given to the peasants by hard work, as it is given everywhere in the world.

It is significant that wealthy people under the collective farm and capitalist systems are very different. The wealthiest collective farmers, as a rule, turned out to be the former poor and middle peasants, who for the first time had the opportunity to play on equal terms with more affluent neighbors. This is the question of what is more often the cause of wealth under capitalism - honest work or deceit, callousness and other worst human qualities. It's just that under Soviet socialism, the most suitable people for life in society turned out to be hard-working, honest, sympathetic, inventive and able to work in a team. And capitalism requires other qualities - greed, cunning, hoarding, distrust of people, cruelty, the ability to deceive without problems for the sake of profit, etc.

The mechanization of agriculture radically facilitated the hellish labor of the Russian peasant. If you look at what was built in the country in the first place, it was tractor and automobile factories in order to facilitate hard peasant labor. Initially lagging behind the industrial countries for decades, electrification was rapidly taking place in the countryside, interrupted only by the War. Radio, libraries, cinemas, parachute towers, the world's best books in the countryside became commonplace.

By the way, "robbery of the village" - it looked like this: investments in agriculture increased from 379 million rubles. in 1928 to 3645 million in 1931 and 4983 million in 1935 l68.

But the Soviet village made the strongest breakthrough in 1939-1940.

“In 1938-1941, without exception, all foreign authors ... note a sharp increase in the standard of living of peasants ... not only in improving nutrition, but also in increasing the consumption of manufactured goods, but especially in improving the social sphere.”

For an offer to return to pre-revolutionary times in a personal conversation, collective farm peasants, without any regard for the NKVD, could be brutally beaten, if not killed. The difference was so compelling. It is not surprising that under the peasants they massively joined the partisans.

Here is the testimony of a man who was then an ardent anti-Stalinist, Alexander Zinoviev. As a child, Zinoviev witnessed collectivization.

“I repeatedly asked my mother and other collective farmers during visits to the village and later about whether they would agree to become individual farmers again if such an opportunity presented itself. They all flatly refused.

With the inert peasants and the collective farm system, something similar happened that under Peter I and his history with the planting of potatoes to the Russian people. The inert peasants who resisted and even rebelled (the famous "potato riots") at first could not even imagine their life without potatoes. Something similar happened to the collective farms on a gigantic scale.

By the end of the 30s, the village was no longer recognizable. The former bastard, dark, healer's village with peasants distrustful of strangers, deceitful drunken priests and psychopathic praying men before our eyes was turning into a modern mechanized cell of the Society of the Future.

Not only tractors, trucks and combines came to the village, but also radio, electricity, schools, houses of culture, kindergartens, sports sections, up to parachuting and gliding, hospitals, libraries and so on. The peasants not only watched movies and danced in the evenings, but also learned to stage plays, play musical instruments, subscribed to scientific journals. Can you imagine a royal peasant having the opportunity to play the harp, cello and piano? Yesterday's bastard poor man, who rose into the sky on a glider? All this was done in less than 10 years.

The people themselves have changed before our very eyes. He managed to overcome his laziness, inertia, his animal nature. The Great Architect of society - Joseph Stalin and the party supporting him changed the tuning of human souls. It was yesterday's dark peasants who became the heroes of labor and battle, there was no one else.

For those who knew how and wanted to work with their own hands, invent and create, the Soviet Power of those times was the best of all that has hitherto been created by mankind.

based on the materials of P. Krasnov

What is collectivization?
Collectivization is the unification of individual peasant farms into collective farms (collective farms). The resolution establishing collectivization was adopted in 1927 at the XV Congress of the CPSU (b). At the same time, there was a struggle against the kulaks, since the government saw in this class its rivals, capable of raising an uprising and seizing power. The process of dispossession would eliminate the class of prosperous peasants, and this problem would no longer be so acute. For the same purpose, collectivization was carried out. An experimental association of farms was carried out several years before this process was enshrined in law. Those collective farms showed a 2-3 times more productive result, which led the government to the idea of ​​expanding collective farms throughout the country.

results of collectivization.
First of all, it should be noted that one of the main goals of collectivization was achieved - the process of dispossession was successfully completed. Unfortunately, the elimination of the class of prosperous peasants took place by force, through numerous repressions. The property of the "kulaks" was distributed among the state, collective farms and the poor. To prevent the revival of the kulaks, the state limited the lease of land and the hiring of labor, banned lending and the admission of “kulaks” to collective farms, and increased taxes for privately owned farms.
Social contrasts, black stripes and land surveying were eliminated in the village. Since then, the land, equipment, etc. have been in the common use of the collective farm workers.
The situation of the collective farm workers was greatly facilitated - the state itself provided them with financial support, provided benefits in obtaining and paying a loan, and taxation.
Since industrialization took place in parallel with the process of collectivization, a leap was made in the development of technology. Thus, the state provided new, better equipment free of charge. The electrification of the countryside has accelerated significantly, villages have begun to be equipped with new means of economy and communication. Maintenance in newly emerging farms was provided by employees of machine and tractor stations. At the state level, this process was completed by the 1970s.

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the peasant community was destroyed by the Stolypin agrarian reform. Although the results of this transformation were rather controversial, on the whole they can be rather positively assessed. In the 1930s, everything returned to normal after collectivization. Naturally, this led to negative consequences. The desire of the authorities to subordinate the largest class to their own control led to a sharp decline in the economy.
The development of the agrarian sector has become much more difficult due to the breaking of the established forms of farming in the countryside, the forcible amalgamation of privately owned farms and the inept leadership of the sent chairmen.
1930 was quite fruitful, which allowed the government to increase plans for food procurement. The next year in Ukraine, in the regions of the Lower Volga and Western Siberia, was no longer so fruitful, and the plan had to be fulfilled by all means. To achieve this goal, extreme measures had to be taken: up to 70% of the harvest from the collective farms was confiscated, sometimes even including the seed fund. Grain production per year in the period 1933-1937. decreased to the readings of the pre-war period of 1909-1913, that is, by 10%. The number of cattle decreased by almost two times, small cattle - by a third. In 1933 the USSR experienced a terrible famine. It is estimated that more than five million people died of malnutrition that year. Reliable information is unknown to us, since the government carefully concealed it. Former kulaks, who tried to earn their living through overwork, suffered the most - several million died.
JV Stalin in 1930 published the article "Dizziness from Success", in which he sharply condemned forced collectivization, since voluntary association into collective farms was enshrined in law. However, after the release of the article, nothing has changed, the violations continued.
Despite the obvious unprofitability of the transformation, it was not canceled. By the end of the second five-year plan, more than 243 thousand collective farms had already been organized, which included about 93% of the former privately owned farms. Since 1933, the supply of agricultural products to the state has become mandatory. The price paid by the state was several times lower than that which was set on the market. The leadership of the machine and tractor stations established plans for collective farm crops, and the district executive committees approved them. Payment in kind (in grain and agricultural products) was introduced. In 1932, the passport system was introduced, which limited the mobility of peasants.
However, it is worth saying that many of the goals set by the Bolsheviks were achieved. Taking into account the fact that in the process of collectivization the number of the peasant population decreased by a third, grain production by 10%, state reserves doubled in 6 years (if we count from 1928). The country no longer felt the need to import cotton and other crops. The agrarian sector fully and harmoniously joined the command-administrative economy and submitted to strict centralization.
The effectiveness of the reforms of the late 20s (collectivization and industrialization) was fully revealed during the Great Patriotic War. They became the basis for both the power of the state economy and its sore spot. The USSR did not have large state stocks by the time the war began, which, undoubtedly, was a consequence of collectivization. Individual peasants who did not want to join the collective farm destroyed their livestock so that it would not fall into collective farms. Most of the collective farms have not made any big leap in development in 10 years. As a result, the USSR had to accept the help of the allied countries (Great Britain, Canada and the USA). As part of Lend-Lease, flour, canned food, and fats were supplied. Under the treaty, the USSR had to pay for assistance after the end of the war, which complicated the already difficult situation of the economy - the state could not get out of debt for a long time.
The command-administrative type of economy, large amounts of government supplies at a low price created big problems for the positive dynamics of agricultural development and hampered economic growth in the country.

Reasoning and answer from the point of view of pure arithmetic.
The USSR in the late 1920s faced a serious crisis. The international situation was aggravating, another war for the redivision of the world was approaching, and although the USSR reached the level of 1913 in terms of basic industrial and agricultural indicators, it was much weaker than the Russian Empire in relative terms - after all, the world did not stand still. And therefore, the country has become the primary task of making a modernization breakthrough in order to overcome the lag and develop the country. The country did not have any resources for this, except for the export of agricultural products. The question "where to get them?" did not stand. It is clear that it was possible to take only in the village. The question was "how to make the village produce more?".

How to raise the marketability of agriculture? Marketability is that excess of production that agriculture is able to give to the whole society, except for its own consumption. The surplus was used to provide food for citizens, workers, the army, etc. From the same surplus it was possible to sell grain abroad in order to obtain currency for the purchase of equipment and technologies for new factories. And there were no other significant sources of products for export then.

The then ruling regime chose the path of collectivization of the countryside. For which it is now mercilessly criticized up to declaring it criminal. What is collectivization? This is the union of disparate producers (individual farmers) into one single and large economy. Plus mechanization. That is, collectivization is the enlargement of farms and the mechanization of work in order to increase labor productivity and the marketability of all agriculture. Can such a necessary thing be criminal? After all, this is a huge progress for the benefit of the whole society, and progress cannot be criminal by definition.

With this, I conclude the lengthy introductory part and move on to pure arithmetic. To begin with, take a look at the social structure of the Soviet countryside and make sure that there were no other reserves, except for general collectivization, to increase the marketability of agricultural production at that time. Academician Strumilin and his "The Stratification of the Soviet Village" will help me with this. According to him, I made the following schematics:

Critics of collectivization scold her for the fact that the Soviet government did not rely on the kulak, as the most effective business executive and producer. This is true: the fist was efficient and productive. The schemes show that kulak farms accounted for 3.5% of the number of farms, while cultivating 11.5% of the total land. It is clear that it was they who produced the main marketable products, which went to the market and to the state feed. But were they effective? For myself - certainly, but for the whole society - no. This can be seen from their share in the total income of the village:

Working almost 12% of the land, they had a share of only 8% of taxable income. Those. somewhere, somehow managed to bypass taxes. But the bulk of the taxes were given by the middle peasants with 76%, which corresponded to their share of the land.

But that is not my goal. I want to show that only a bet on the growth of the productivity of all the villagers could give a tangible and significant increase in the productivity and marketability of agriculture. Relying only on efficient and productive kulaks had a very weak effect. To do this, let's fix a number of figures of that time: the average gross grain harvest of the late 20s in the USSR was about 65 million tons, with an average yield of 7.5 centners per hectare. The entire area of ​​cultivated land was 87 million hectares. How these numbers were distributed among these groups:

Of the total harvest of 65 million tons, about 11 million tons of grain are purchased by the state. The rest of the village sold on the market and consumed itself. It was on these 11 million that the ruling regime lived, fed the townspeople, the army, and some of it was exported. This quantity was categorically lacking: the townspeople lived from hand to mouth, not enough was spent on cards and for export for industrialization.

Let us assume the hypothesis that the state does not carry out collectivization, but relies on the efficient kulak. By some miracle, the fist strains, although he categorically did not want to strain (it was easier for him to hand over less grain to the state and more and more expensive to sell grain and flour on the market). So, the fist, as it were, strains and gives out a fantastic yield for those times of 12 centners per hectare instead of 9.3. What will be the schedule in this case? Here's one:

In this scenario, we get a total harvest of 68 million tons instead of 65, and in this case, not 11 million tons, but 13-14 million will go to public procurement. Do these additional 3-4 million tons of grain from kulaks solve the problem? Don't decide at all. It is not yet certain that they will give them. And industrialization needs much more. That is why the state, relying on all sections of the rural population, except for the openly resisting kulaks, is carrying out forced collectivization and literally in the first half of the 30s, the yield was up to 9 centners per year, and in the late 30s and 10. And with such a yield, state purchases reach 25-30 million tons annually with a general increase in gross collections, which allows the state to have much larger food resources than in the 20s before collectivization.

This simple arithmetic shows that a small increase in the productivity of all peasants has a much greater effect than a slightly larger increase in the productivity of a small, albeit the most efficient, part of the peasantry.

Why did they collectivize?

The grain procurement crisis jeopardized the plans of the VKP(b) party for . As a result, the party decided to begin consolidation in agriculture - collectivization - the amalgamation of small peasant farms into large collective farms.

It was an objective process taking place in all developed countries, possibly with different incentives and within the framework of the economy, but everywhere it was relatively painful for the peasantry.

With low productivity and low productivity, small farms could not provide for the growing population of the country, moreover, too many people were employed in agriculture, a significant part of whom could work in cities. In fact, the Bolsheviks had a choice: leave the country as it is and lose in the first war, or start modernization. Another issue is methods.

Tasks of collectivization

The following main tasks were set:

1. to increase the volume of agricultural production,
2. to eliminate inequality in the standard of living among the peasants (in other views - to destroy the small owner - the kulak, as a subject fundamentally antagonistic to the communist idea),
3. introduce new technologies to the village.

There was a kind of optimization of agriculture. However, economists often point out that the main goal was ensure industrialization with means and people. The country could not remain further agrarian.

How was collectivization

Collective farms began to be created en masse.

Active propaganda was carried out among the peasants for joining the collective farms and against the kulaks.

The layer of the kulaks was destroyed in a short time. The process of dispossession deprived the countryside of the most enterprising, most independent peasants.

But the measures taken were not enough, and the peasants for the most part ignored the agitation to join the collective farms, and therefore in 1929 the party decided to drive them there by force.

In November 1929, Stalin's article "The Year of the Great Break" was published. It spoke of "a radical change in the development of our agriculture from small and backward individual farming to large-scale and advanced collective farming."

In addition, private households raised taxation.

The deadlines set earlier for the reform were drastically reduced, and now it has become necessary to complete it in two years. Local performers showed increased diligence. Mass unrest and clashes began, as a result of which Stalin's article "Dizziness from Success" was published and collectivization moved into a calmer direction (for a short time).

In the collective farms, cases of theft of bread spread. The state responded to the low rates of grain procurements with repressions. The Law on the Protection of Socialist Property introduced execution for such theft.

In 1932, 33, a mass famine broke out, which claimed the lives of several million.

In 1934, the final stage of collectivization began. Almost all peasants were divided into collective farms, which were assigned land and the obligation to hand over to the state from a third to a quarter of their production.

The results of collectivization

With the help of collectivization, several problems were solved:

• Industry received the necessary funds and people,
• An uninterrupted supply of food to cities and the army was established.
• The bread confiscated from the peasants during collectivization was supplied abroad in exchange for technology.
• Peasant labor has become somewhat easier.

We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries.
We have to run this distance in 10 years.
Either we do it or we're crushed"
Stalin, February 1931

(Before the start of the Great Patriotic War, 10 years and 4 months remained)

It is known that in Russia, since tsarist times, there was an agrarian overpopulation, and it was possible to obtain marketable bread for the needs of the state and for export purposes only due to the malnutrition of the bulk of the peasant population. ("Myth 2. About grain production in Russia").
With a frightening frequency of 10-13 years, famine raged in Russia since the 11th century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the process only got tougher. “In 1842, the government stated that crop failures are repeated every 6-7 years, lasting two years in a row.

During the second half of the 19th century, famines caused by crop failures in 1873, 1880 and 1883 were particularly cruel. In 1891-1892, 16 provinces of European Russia and Tobolsk province with a population of 35 million were engulfed in famine. Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Tambov provinces were especially affected then.

In the Volga region, the eastern regions of the black earth zone suffered from a catastrophic famine - 20 provinces with a 40 million peasant population. (Hunger as a socio-economic phenomenon / / New Encyclopedic Dictionary. Under the general editorship of Academician K.K. Arseniev. T.14. St. Petersburg: F.A. Brockhaus and I.A. Efron, 1913. P. 39-46.)

According to the report to the tsar for 1901:
"In the winter of 1900-1901, 42 million people starved, but 2 million 813 thousand Orthodox souls died of them" (only those who were buried in Orthodox churches were counted, and there is no evidence of the number of dead "foreigners" and Old Believers at all).

The wars and revolutions taking place in the country also played an important role in the emergence of famine. For example, the famine in the Volga region of 1921-1922 caused by a long absence of precipitation and complicated by the consequences of the Civil War or the famine of 1946.
But, after the completion of collectivization, there was no more famine in peacetime, with the exception of the last famine in our country, in the post-war 1946.

Due to the complete collapse of the Russian economy at the time of the transfer of power to the Bolsheviks, the only way to minimize food difficulties in the country, avoid mass starvation in the cities and preserve the institutions of the state, was the introduction of food requisitions in the countryside, and the distribution of food by the methods of war communism in the cities.

The New Economic Policy proclaimed by the 10th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was supposed to help get out of the war communism regime and, replacing the surplus appropriation with a tax in kind, solve the problem of grain shortages.

In the appeal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars "To the peasantry of the RSFSR" on March 23, 1921, it was said:
« .. apportionment is canceled, and instead a tax on agricultural products is introduced. This tax should be less than the grain allocation. It should be appointed even before the spring sowing, so that each peasant can take into account in advance what share of the crop he must give to the state and how much will remain at his full disposal.

“The tax should be levied without mutual responsibility, that is, it should fall on an individual householder, so that a diligent and industrious owner does not have to pay for a sloppy fellow villager.”

“When the tax is fulfilled, the remaining surplus of the peasant goes to his full disposal. He has the right to exchange them for food and implements, which the state will deliver to the countryside from abroad and from its own factories and plants; he can use them to exchange for the products he needs through cooperatives and in local markets and bazaars”…

Despite the fact that wealthy peasants were taxed at higher rates, and the use of hired labor was severely limited, the well-being of the peasants as a whole increased compared to the pre-war level. The proportion of middle peasants increased, while the number of poor and rich decreased.

However, the elimination of landlordism and the reduction in the number of kulaks greatly reduced the possibilities of agriculture for the production of marketable grain.
One tax in kind could not meet all the needs of the state, in marketable bread.

The state counted on the purchase of bread. But he did not have enough money and commodity resources to buy the missing bread

In conditions of scarcity of resources, in order to obtain the required amount of grain, from the mid-1920s they began to actively use understated grain prices and overpriced industrial goods. For this reason, a crisis began, which received the name "procurement".
Because of the "price scissors," the peasants stopped selling grain beyond what they needed to pay their taxes.

Although the pre-war level of grain production of 78,393 thousand tons was reached in the 1926-27 agricultural year, only two-thirds of the target was harvested.
The following year, 1927-28, the state procured 2,000 thousand tons. less than the previous year.

It became clear that small-scale agricultural production is not able to provide the country with a sufficient amount of marketable grain for the accelerated modernization of industry and agriculture, and the economic policy in the countryside must be urgently changed.

The evolutionary path of development assumed a slow, natural social stratification of the peasants. Such an evolutionary path promised long decades of slow ruin for most agricultural producers and the consolidation of "reference" farms, with their transformation into mechanized farm-type enterprises.
For the same long years and decades, the problems of marketable grain, almost the only source of currency necessary for the modernization of the country, remained unresolved.

This path, the path of capitalist development in those years was absolutely impossible for another reason.
The ruin of the bulk of the peasants, with the enlargement of the capitalist farms of the farm type, threatened with a real danger of a new civil war. The party noted that the policy of the NEP in the countryside, the poor continue to consider as a sharp turn from the poor to the kulak. Increasingly, the authorities noted among the poor not only open, but also decisive action against the prosperous and upper part of the middle peasants.

By this time, in a country with a population of 130.5 million people, 110.8 million lived in the countryside. There were about one million "right owners" among them. In order to follow the evolutionary path, the Soviet state would have to take the side of a million kulaks at this stage against tens of millions doomed to ruin.

But going over to the side of the kulaks, the expropriators of other people's labor, which, according to Marxist ideology, won the recent civil war, meant "a betrayal of the ideals of the revolution." The Soviet state, in this civil confrontation, resolutely took the side of the poor, proclaiming the expropriation of the expropriators.

The revolutionary way of consolidating agricultural production, with its simultaneous modernization, was the expansion of the cooperative movement, the rapid and decisive socialization of the economy. Naturally, for ideological reasons, collectivization was chosen from these two possibilities.

The main goal of collectivization was the elimination of small-scale production in order to provide the country with the necessary amount of marketable grain, sufficient to ensure the accelerated modernization of the country.

The enlargement and modernization of agricultural production, in turn, helped to solve the problem of agrarian overpopulation (80 percent of the country's inhabitants were engaged in agriculture) and to provide workers for the factories under construction.

For ideological and tactical reasons, they chose the revolutionary path, and in December 1927 they proclaimed a course towards collectivization.
As life has shown, it took a little more than five years, and since 1934, the problem of hunger in peacetime, which had existed in Russia for many centuries, was solved. And by June 1941, a powerful industry was created, which ensured the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War.

Analyzing the situation in hindsight, it can be concluded that the alternative path to collectivization, the transition to commercial farm-type agricultural production, required a lot of time.
This factor did not allow to provide the necessary speed of industrial modernization and the required defense capability on the eve of the Second World War. And the loss of life as a result of the defeat in the war would be incomparably huge.

In December 1927, a policy of collectivization was proclaimed. By the summer of this year, almost 200,000 peasant farms had been subject to collectivization. It was possible to achieve the pre-war level of productivity, about 8 centners per hectare. But the marketability of grain farming remained extremely low, an average of 13.3%. At the same time, marketability on the collective farms was 47%, on the farms of the kulaks 20.0%, and among the poor and middle peasants 11%. The middle and poor peasants were, in essence, subsistence farming. Grain was not sold, but supplied only as a tax in kind.

The state has increased funding for agriculture. 60% of the proceeds from food imports went to the purchase of agricultural machinery and fertilizers. (National Economy of the USSR Statistical Handbook 1932 SOTSEKGIZ - Moscow-Leningrad 1932)

In 1928 collective farms received 76 million rubles. loans, and in 1928/29. already 170 million rubles. The supply of agriculture with machines and implements also increased sharply. For two years (1927 - 1928), the total amount of appropriations for the mechanization of agriculture increased from 112.5 million to 240.3 million rubles. The tractor fleet in agriculture has almost doubled.

But the expected return did not happen. Since, not covered by collectivization, the peasants, convinced of the impossibility of an equivalent exchange of grain for industrial goods, began to curtail production to a level corresponding to self-sufficiency in food. Stopped making for sale. And this already threatened with inevitable famine in the cities.

In the 1928-29 agricultural year, grain procurements in the central black earth region fell by 8 times, in Ukraine by 7.5 times, and in the North Caucasus by 4 times.
The reason for this was not so much the drought in these areas as the unwillingness of individual peasants who had marketable grain to sell it at a fixed price to the state.

The state's needs for marketable grain for this year were estimated at 500 million poods. It was collected as taxes and voluntarily sold 350 million. A deficit of 150 million poods had to be taken "in the order of organized pressure on the kulak and wealthy sections of the countryside", up to a return to procurement on the principles of surplus appropriation.

Realizing the problem, in the spring of 1929, collectivization was forced to speed up. As of July 1, 1929, there were more than a million individual farms in the country that joined the collective farm. And over 57 thousand collective farms. Unfortunately, such rapid growth was achieved mainly through the use of administrative measures.

Grain procurement, carried out by the method of surplus appropriation, and administrative, forced collectivization led to revolts by wealthy peasants, and those middle peasants supporting them who did not want to join the collective farm. Collective farmers, not wanting to give "their hard-earned" to the common economy, slaughtered cattle.

Peasants began armed protests against joining the collective farm. In 1928 1440 terrorist acts of the kulaks were registered. In 1929 the number of kulak terrorist acts exceeded 2 thousand. The kulaks managed to provoke or organize more than 1300 performances, with attempts to disrupt the collectivization of agriculture. The speeches were brutally suppressed.

Having suffered a defeat in a direct clash with the authorities and troops, those dissatisfied with collectivization turned to arson, destruction of property, sabotage, and the murder of collective farm activists.

In response, the state declared war on groups of the rural population capable of organizing resistance to collectivization. Such groups were seen, first of all, kulaks. Dekulakization, as the expropriation of the expropriators, was declared the most important part of the reconstruction of the countryside,

The growth of collective farm and state farm production also created the economic prerequisites for dispossession. So, if in 1927. kulaks produced 126 million poods of marketable grain, and collective farms and state farms - only 35 million poods, then in 1929. collective farms and state farms gave more than 130 million poods of marketable grain.

In January 1930, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On measures to eliminate kulak farms in areas of complete collectivization", which set the goal of "liquidating the kulaks as a class."

If there was no complete collectivization, there was no real alternative, then the application of preventive harsh measures to wealthy peasants from the standpoint of today seems unjustifiably cruel.
But whether there was another, less painful alternative to the “expropriation of the expropriators” solution, we will never know. It remains only to feel sorry for those innocents who went through the rink of social war.

They dispossessed kulaks in three categories: (http://www.zakonprost.ru/content/base/88531)
The first category (approximately 60 thousand people) - counter-revolutionary kulak activists were proposed to be immediately imprisoned in concentration camps, without stopping against the organizers of terrorist acts, counter-revolutionary actions and insurgent organizations before using the highest measure of repression.

The second category (approximately 150 thousand people) were to be made up of the remaining elements of the kulak asset, especially from the richest kulaks, who were subject to deportation to remote areas of the USSR and within the given region to remote regions of the region.

It was warned of the need "to unconditionally prevent the spread of these measures to any part of the middle peasant farms."
Restrictive contingents for the dispossession of farms by districts were established so that the total number of dispossessed farms, in areas of complete collectivization, did not exceed 3-5% of all peasant farms.

Families of Red Army soldiers and officers of the Red Army were not subject to eviction and confiscation of property. As regards the kulaks, whose family members have worked for a long time in factories and factories, a particularly cautious approach should be taken to ascertain the position of the persons concerned not only in the countryside, but also with the relevant factory organizations.

Family members of kulaks deported and imprisoned in concentration camps could, if they wished and with the consent of local district executive committees, temporarily or permanently stay in the former area.

75% of the former kulaks were settled within the same administrative districts and subsequently accepted into collective farms and state farms or moved to cities.
More than 240,700 families were deported to remote areas in 1930-32—about 1/4 of kulak farms, 1% of the total number of peasant farms.

But during the dispossession carried out by the local party leadership, relying on the poor assets of the village, along with the fact of using hired labor as the main characteristic of kulak farms, the use of political signs began to play an increasingly important role. Such could be the refusal to join the collective farm, the failure to fulfill state tasks, the refusal to cultivate all of their land. The term “podkulaknik” began to be widely used, which could be applied not only to the objectionable middle peasant, but also to the poor
In response to excesses in dispossession and forced collectivization, mass protests of peasants began against the actions of local authorities.
From January to March 1930, 2724 mass demonstrations were registered, in which over a million people took part.
Events began to take the form of a full-fledged civil war

Realizing the acuteness of the situation, Stalin published in Pravda an article "Dizziness from Success", and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On the fight against distortions of the party line in the collective farm movement." A government directive was sent to the localities to soften the course in connection with the threat of a "wide wave of insurgent peasant uprisings" and the destruction of "half of the grassroots workers."

After bringing individual leaders to justice, the pace of collectivization slowed down, and artificially created collective farms and communes began to fall apart. (Later, all these "individual leaders" were accused of Trotskyism and repressed).
But the process of collectivization was not stopped. Just as the flow of immigrants was not stopped.

The choice of the place of resettlement, and the timing of its implementation, were determined with the resettlement department of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR and provided the resettlement of the OGPU. The huge volume of displacement of the population, problems with transport and roads in remote areas, poorly organized food supply, caused a high mortality of the displaced.

Settlers, in violation of instructions, were poorly provided with housing, food and necessary equipment. In the first year of the mass expulsion, there was often almost no supply, and the settlers were settled in places that had no prospects for agricultural use.

Things were not much better on the collective farms, to which the lands and property of the deported kulak families were transferred. The low qualification level of local managers who want to distinguish themselves before their superiors, excessive centralization of management and leveling led to the fact that, despite the excellent harvest of 1930, part of the grain was not harvested to the end, and a number of collective farms were left without seed by the spring of next year .

The unwillingness to give livestock to collective farms, the unpreparedness of the material base for large-scale livestock farming, and the lack of veterinarians led to the mass death of livestock.
The freezing of winter crops in cold winters and the drought in the main agricultural regions of the country in summer, aggravated by the mismanagement of the majority of peasants towards what seemed to them alien collective farms, led to a decrease in the gross grain harvest in the country by 14 million tons. (from 83.5 in 1930 to 69.5 in 1931).

But local administrations tried to meet and exceed the planned grain norms. Since the main producer was already the collective farms, the mass seizure of grain from the collective farm barns by the peasants was not yet realized as the seizure of their property.

The situation in animal husbandry has deteriorated sharply. In addition to the reduction in the number of livestock due to the unwillingness to give it to collective farms, mass death of livestock and horses began due to lack of fodder, due to epizootics accompanying starvation and cold. In many parts of the country the food situation has become critical.

And in 1932 disaster struck. By the time of the sowing campaign of 1932, a significant number of collective farms approached without seed and working livestock, and those collective farms that were able to sow winter crops lost them due to freezing.
Although plans for grain harvesting were reduced by 22% and livestock delivery by 2 times, this did not save the overall situation.
A repeated crop failure, both caused by the elements and mismanagement, backed by a violation of basic agronomic principles, led to a severe famine in the winter of 1932 - in the spring of 1933.

By the beginning of 1933, the leadership of the CPSU (b) took a number of emergency measures in order to change the situation in agriculture. Equalization in the collective farms was overcome - workdays, piece work, brigade organization of labor were introduced. Bodies of direct party leadership of collective farms and political departments under the MTS have been created.

The system of purchases, deliveries and distribution of agricultural products was reorganized. The required amount of seed grain has been allocated for the spring field campaign.
Liquidated "contracting", which involves the promotion of "counter plans" for the supply of grain. Commissions have been created to determine the expected yield, setting the volumes of mandatory supplies. A purge was carried out in the institutions and organizations of the USSR People's Commissariat of Agriculture.

Thanks to decisive actions to change the catastrophic situation, in 1933 it was possible to harvest a good harvest, which made it possible in 1934 to abolish food cards in the cities. In 1937, state acts were handed over to the collective farms for perpetual ownership of the land. The collective farm system has finally won.
Since then, there have been no hungry years in the USSR in peacetime.