History of the Soviet Union. Geoffrey Hosking
modern equipment and methods and who had provided much of the pre-1914 grain surplus, had been expropriated, and their estates had mostly been divided up among the peasants. The ‘Stolypin’ peasants likewise had their enclosed plots of land taken away from them, and they were either expelled from the village or reabsorbed into the mir. Enclosed holdings were once again divided up into strips and often made subject to periodic redistribution; modern crop rotations were abandoned where they did not fit the communal pattern. The mir, in short, achieved a dominance in Russian rural life which it had never known before. This was a direct consequence of the Bolsheviks having adopted the Socialist Revolutionary programme in 1917, but that did not mean to say it was welcome to them now.
Landholdings, even among peasants themselves, had also tended to get smaller since 1917, in spite of the new awards of land. The problem was that millions of unemployed and hungry workers had streamed out of the towns, looking to resettle on the land, and many of them were awarded communal strips, where they still had claims. The revolution also seems to have intensified strains and disputes within peasant households, which provoked younger family members to break away and claim holdings of their own. As a result of all these new awards, the total number of family holdings rose from 17–18 million in 1917 to 23 million in 1924 and 25 million in 1927. The average size of each holding naturally fell also, in spite of the annexations from landowners, church and state in 1917, as did the proportion of the crop from each holding which was sold on the market rather than used for subsistence.
For the government the implications of this fragmentation of holdings, and of the reversion to primitive techniques were very alarming. As they began to conceive ambitious industrial projects, they needed more food to be both produced and sold. Yet their own policies aggravated the situation. The better-off and more productive peasants were usually taxed more heavily and felt themselves to be under stronger political pressure than their poorer colleagues. They always suspected, moreover, that the policies of 1918–21 might return.
These factors are reflected in the agricultural production figures, especially for grain, the most vital crop for the regime. It is true that output recovered rapidly from the catastrophic levels of 1920–1, but it never quite returned to pre-war levels. Compared with 81.6 million tonnes in 1913 (admittedly an unusually good year), grain output never exceeded 76.8 million tonnes in 1926, and fell off thereafter. Livestock production did reach pre-war levels in 1926, but declined subsequently. And there were some 14 million extra mouths to feed: in 1914, grain production had been 584 kg. per head of the population, in 1928–9 it was only 484 kg., while the government was planning for an enormous growth in the number of industrial workers, who would not produce food but would certainly need to consume it. Furthermore, of the amount produced, somewhat less was being marketed than in 1914–though Stalin exaggerated this factor in order to produce the impression that grain was deliberately being hoarded on a large scale. In fact, since official grain prices remained low, many peasants preferred to turn their grain into samogon (unlicensed liquor), or even not to grow it at all.
Of course it had never been the Bolsheviks’ intention to let Russian agriculture stagnate in small and primitively cultivated holdings. They had always envisaged large farms, collectively owned and mechanized. Their 1917 Land Decree had been a tactical diversion from this strategy, and they intended now to return to the main highway. In the last years of his life Lenin on the whole thought that this ‘collectivization’ of agriculture should take place gradually, with the party encouraging the creation of model collectives whose high productivity and prosperity would in time persuade the rest of the peasantry to join them.
A certain number of collective farms did already exist, some of which had started during the civil war, with party encouragement and help. Broadly speaking, these were of three types: (i) the kommuna, in which all property was held in common, sometimes with communal living quarters and childrearing; (ii) the artel in which each household owned its own dwelling and small plot of land, together with such tools as were needed to cultivate it, but all other land and resources were shared; (iii) the TOZ, or ‘association for common cultivation’, in which some or all of the fields were cultivated collectively. The last category might be barely distinguishable from the traditional village community, with its custom of pomochi, or mutual aid at busy times of year. It is no surprise, then, to find that the majority of collectives were of the TOZ variety, and there is evidence to show that some of them at least were ordinary village communes relabelled to draw the tax advantages of ‘collective’ status.
In addition, there were some state farms (sovkhozy), in which the labourers were paid a regular wage, like industrial workers. Even taken together, however, all state and collective farms accounted in 1927 for less than 2 per cent of cultivated land. It is significant, though, that their share of marketed produce was much higher: about 7.5 per cent in 1927. In view of this, one might have expected that the party would have begun a programme of ‘collectivization’ much earlier. In fact, however, the party was remarkably dilatory during most of the 1920s about pursuing its own official policy.
In part this was because of the weakness of the village soviets. In theory the soviets were supposed to take over local administration, leaving the peasant mir (renamed ‘land society’) to cope with questions of land tenure and cultivation. In practice, however, the mir continued to collect local taxes and to perform administrative functions, as before the revolution. A study published by Izvestiya in 1927 showed that the mir, not the soviet, was still the basic unit of local government in most villages, and that this was creating problems in the relations with the next tier above, the volost soviet.
Nor was the party any more successful than the soviets in rooting itself in the countryside. The Communists were townspeople by mentality and inclination, and most of them regarded village life with indifference or distaste. It is true that the revolution and civil war did bring an influx of rural members into the party, mostly Red Army soldiers. Yet these were often the first to be expelled in purges against the corrupt or insufficiently active, and in any case they constituted a negligible proportion of the rural population. The 1922 party census reported that party members formed a mere 0.13 per cent of the villages’ inhabitants, and many of these were teachers, doctors, agronomists and officials of volost soviets. By 1928 this proportion had only doubled: out of an estimated rural population of 120 million, about 300,000 (0.25 per cent) were Communists, and of that number only some 170,000 were actual peasants.
By and large, the weakness of the party meant domination of the village by the traditional notables. While all adults, including women, enjoyed a vote for the soviet, the commune was, by custom, a gathering of the heads of household, almost invariably male. Younger men, women and the landless were usually excluded. This meant that, in spite of the equalizing tendencies of the revolution, a degree of stratification soon reappeared in the villages. Indeed, it had never entirely disappeared. Since the commune had usually controlled the process of redistribution in 1917–18, the village notables had typically tried to ensure that some elements of greater wealth–whether in the form of acreage, livestock, or tools–remained in their own hands, or with the families whom they trusted. The former landless were better off than before, but they never became the equals of their ‘betters’.
This stratification is greatly emphasized in the Soviet studies of the subject, both contemporary and subsequent. They divide peasants into so-called ‘kulaks’ (‘fists’ or moneylenders, by nineteenth-century usage, but a term now loosely applied to better-off peasants), middle peasants, poor peasants and landless labourers. The definitions of these terms fluctuated, and they were used by the party on the whole for political rather than scientific purposes. Their use was intended to suggest that class war was brewing in the countryside between the richer and poorer strata. However, Teodor Shanin’s examination of the Soviet data tends to invalidate this hypothesis. He shows that the incomes of kulak households were only marginally higher than those of the ‘middle peasants’: they might own two horses, hire labour at busy times of year and have more produce left over for the market, but they were in no sense a separate, capitalist stratum. As for the ‘poor peasants’, while clearly a real category, their poverty was typically due to circumstances that were temporary–illness, natural disaster, military service of the breadwinner, shortage of working hands. ‘The chance of a hard core of poor peasants showing lasting cohesion and ability for political action emerging