This analysis includes a very controversial rethinking of
collectivization in light of contemporary Russian agriculture
(excerpt below). rb
The Peasant Question from Marx to Lenin by Nirmal Kumar Chandra
The Russian Experience
What is a class? Do peasants
constitute a single class? What is the peasant question from the
Marxists' revolutionary perspective? These issues are raised in this
paper, based on the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, above all.
The empirical part, mainly on the Russian
agrarian scene from the 1890s to 1930, explores if the peasants
constituted a cohesive social force free from internal
contradictions. There is also a brief discussion on the post-Soviet
situation.
http://epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2002&leaf=05&filename=4479&filetype=html
Coming to forced collectivisation in the late 1920s, there is an
abundance of materials on the horrors of collectivisation, and many
more are coming out of the archives. But several questions remain.
First, did the whole peasantry oppose the new policy? The following
Table gives for the USSR the number of peasant families who were
kolkhoz members and their percentage in all peasant families on the
first day of the relevant month, reproduced from Davies (1980:441-42).
There was no compulsion on peasants to join the kolkhoz before
autumn, 1929 when the Party decided to hasten the pace. One can
see that membership jumped from 1.0 to 14.6 million between
June 1, 1929 and March 1, 1930, and reached nearly 15 million on
March 10. On March 2, Pravda published Stalin's famous article,
'Dizzy with Success: Problems of the Kolkhoz Movement', in which he
berated the party cadres for compelling, in violation of the party
directive, middle peasants by force to join the kolkhoz. (It was
ironical as two years earlier
Stalin had lauded the Ural-Siberian method of forced
collection of grain against stiff opposition from Bukharin and
others!) Shortly thereafter, the party decided that peasants could
leave the kolkhoz if they so wished. By April 1, nearly one-third
left, and the percentage of those remaining shrank to just above
one-fifth on September 1, from nearly three-fifths in March; it
crawled up slowly in the next few months.
Now, if all peasants rejected the kolkhoz, at least those
who were forced to join from the autumn of 1929 should have left by
April or September 1930. But one-fifth, a far from negligible
fraction, of all families decided to stay on, signifying a
divergence in peasants' attitude toward collectivisation. At the
same time one must admit that the vast majority in 1930 were at
least sceptical of the advantages of joining the kolkhozy as the
figures above show.
Over the next few years, kolkhoz membership became almost
universal. In view of the prevailing terror throughout the rest of
the Stalin era one cannot assume that peasants joined voluntarily.
However, sometime during the next few decades, though one does not
know when, there was a sea change in peasants' attitude. The
majority of western experts, though with many notable exceptions,
have been asserting over the decades that socialised agriculture was
grossly inefficient from its inception right up to the moment of the
Soviet collapse. The private plots of the collective farmers, for
instance, yielded much higher income (per day of work) than what
they obtained from the kolkhoz. Given a free choice, they would
leave such units in droves and set up private farms.
They got this freedom in post-Soviet Russia. Western loans were
poured into certain regions like the Nizhnyi Novgorod to create
model private farms, encouraging other regions to emulate
[Shirokalova 1997]. The results so far have been quite disappointing.
In 1998 out of 91.7 million hectares of land under crops in the
whole of Russia, 5.9 million hectares were cultivated by new
farmers, the 'citizen's garden plots' accounted for another 4.6
million hectares, and the rest was with 'agricultural enterprises'
of the Soviet era. In the value of total agricultural output in
Russia, the share of farmers stagnated at a paltry 2 per cent during
1994-98 [Goskomstat 1999, tables 15.3 and 15.9]. Thus
de-collectivisation has not made much headway in contemporary
Russia despite official and foreign patronage. That should lead to a
rethinking
on the role of socialised agriculture in the USSR, the peasants'
perception of it, and its contemporary relevance.
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