The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, Volume 1: The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of the Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930

The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia #1

by Robert William Davies

By the summer of 1929 Soviet industrialisation was well under way, but agriculture was in a profound in 1928 and 1929 grain to feed the towns was wrested from the peasants by force, and the twenty-five million individual peasant households lost the stimulus to extend or even to maintain their production. In the autumn of 1929 the Soviet Politburo, led by Stalin, launched its desperate effort to win the battle for agriculture by forcible collectivisation and by large-scale mechanisation. Simultaneously hundreds of thousands of kulaks (richer peasants) and recalcitrant peasants were expelled from their villages. This book tells the story of these events, as momentous in their impact on Russian history at the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, and of the temporary retreat from collectivisation in the spring of 1930 in the face of peasant resistance. The crisis in the Communist Party which resulted from this upheaval, in the months preceding the XVI party congress in June 1930, is described in detail for the first time.

Genres: History, Soviet Union, Russia, Economics, Nonfiction, Soviet History, Politics

512 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1980

About the author

Robert William Davies was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Commerce and Social Science from the University of Birmingham.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the course of the interwar era, the Soviet Union sought to bring their economy fully into the 20th century through a massive campaign of industrialization. Not only were considerable resources directed to expand the industrial sector, but its products were then employed to modernize agricultural production, which was in many ways still wedded to practices dating back to the prewar tsarist era. How the Soviet leadership sought to do that is the subject of R. W. Davies's book, the first of several volumes devoted to detailing the efforts to the Soviet leadership to reshape their economy according to their ideological vision and how they responded to the challenges they faced in doing so.

Key to this effort was the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. As Davies explains, efforts to exert greater control in the years immediately after the Russian Revolution were frustrated by the disruptions of the civil war that followed. In response, under Lenin's direction the Soviet leadership allowed peasants to sell some of their surplus. The most successful of these, known as the kulaks, prospered during the 1920s and were the main beneficiaries of Soviet efforts to introduce tractors and industrial products to agriculture. As the decade came to an end, however, the ability of the Soviet government to use industrial goods to pay for surpluses declined, increasing the costs of supporting the growing industrial workforce.

Davies sees the 1928 harvest as the tipping point for the push towards collectivization. With the cost of grain increasing, a growing majority in the Soviet leadership spearheaded by Joseph Stalin embraced collectivizing the peasant farms as a means of exerting control. Until that point the Communist Party presence in the rural areas was limited, with traditional peasant institutions such as the mir bring the dominant form of peasant governance. Under Stalin's direction this changed, with kulaks targeted as opponents of the regime and the land reorganized. Though this effort was publicly hailed as a success, Davies highlights the resistance that soon gave the Soviet leadership pause. By 1930 the initial campaign was at an end, with collectivization considerably advanced but still incomplete in the minds of Stalin and his subordinates.

All of this Davies details with an economics-based analysis that is supported by an abundance of statistics. While this doesn't always make for the most scintillating reading, it nonetheless offers a convincingly detailed analysis of the issues facing the Soviet economy and the effects of the policy upon the countryside. Nor does Davies neglect the peasants themselves, as he uses the available sources to penetrate through the propaganda to get at their true attitudes and reactions. Taken together, it makes for a book that is not for the fainthearted but one that is nonetheless informative reading for anyone seeking to understand one of the critical events of not just Russian history but the history of the modern world as a whole.