Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

The strength of the wealthy farmer, Stalin concluded, lay “in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Larger farms were more efficient, more productive, more amenable to modern technology. Ivanisov had spotted the same problem: over time the most successful farmers became wealthier and accumulated more land, which raised their productivity. But by doing so they became kulaks, and therefore ideologically unacceptable. What should be done about this? Stalin’s ideology would not let him conclude that successful farmers should be allowed to accumulate more land and build up major estates, as had happened in every other society in history. It was impossible, unimaginable, that a communist state could contain major landowners, or even wealthy farmers. But Stalin also understood that persecution of successful peasants would not lead to higher grain production either. His conclusion: collective farming was the only solution. “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms…for us is the only path.”26 The USSR needed large, state-owned farms. The peasants had to give up their privately owned land, pool their resources, and join them.