Red bread

MAURICE HINDUS

The author of "Humanity Uprooted" explains some of the Soviet methods of collectivization of farms

Revolutions, like unruly winds, have whims of their own and shift their courses with scarcely any warnings. I had hardly crossed the Russian frontier when information began to dribble through of a heightened socialist offensive in city and village. The Soviet newspapers which were reaching me bristled with news of it.

On January 5, 1930, the Politbureau, the highest functioning body in the Communist Party, had drafted an epochal declaration. Stalin has spoken of 1930 as the "year of the Great Break." If there was nothing else but this declaration, the year would still merit Stalin's dramatic designation. The events that followed had shaken Russia as nothing else had since the.cessation of the civil war and the abrogation of military communism.

Russian agriculture under the Soviet had reached an impasse. The chief causes of this impasse were parcelization of the land, attacks on the prosperous peasant, and the prevailing financial and manufacturing difficulties. Each of these merits close scrutiny.

With the increase of population and with the cultural awakening of the younger generation in the villages, especially of the women, who, upon marriage, often objected to living with their husband's family, as had been the custom in Russia, there began a continuous division and subdivision of land. Between 1917 and 1927 the number of individual farms had leaped from seventeen to twenty-seven million. This automatically removed from cultivation millions of acres which were taken up by the buildings and the yards of the new households, and by the ridges and the dead furrows which in Russia, in the absence of fences, have since days immemorial divided one strip of land from another. Nothing so impresses the visitor to rural Russia as these ridges and furrows which stretch snake-like in every direction to the very horizon, and which, like a scourge, contaminate nearby fields with noxious weeds. One scientist estimates that these Russian "fences" takes up 7 percent of the land, and another reckons that their aggregate acreage, if properly tilled, would raise enough bread to supply the yearly need of half the total population of all Russian cities. A relic of feudalism, these wasted areas constituted a barrier to the advance of Russian agriculture.

A further by-product of the incessant division and subdivision of the land was its diminishing productivity. Under Russian conditions of individual farming the owner of a small acreage could not afford to have a horse of his own, a good plow, or any other modern machine; yet without these he could not hope to whip out of the land all that it had to offer. In 1928 there were eight million Russian farmers who found themselves in the toils of this inescapable dilemma—they could not raise the productivity of their lands unless they possessed themselves of horses and modern machinery, and their individual acreages were so small that they could not make the investments necessary to obtain these without a serious and perhaps a fatal drain on their capital funds. Besides, the more individual owners there were on the land, especially when they cherished a deep dread of innovations, as do all Russian peasants, the more difficult it was to win them to new methods of tillage.

The evils incident to these conditions could be overcome through a system that would promote increasing instead of decreasing acreages. Large farms would eliminate the parasitic boundary ridges and dead furrows, and would make possible the purchase of machinery and other equipment necessary to the introduction of modern methods of tillage. But under a system of individualistic control of the land the Soviets could not contemplate such a policy without scrapping the law forbidding the sale and penalizing the renting of land; and such a move would of course strike a death blow at the basic tenets of the Revolution, which demand the annihilation of private property.

The war on the prosperous peasant only intensified the existing difficulties. It led to continuous and disastrous conflicts with the so-called koolack. Literally the word means a fist, and applies to a man who is supposed to gather material possessions into his own hands and hold them tight. Legally, a koolack is a man who indulges in some form of exploitation, employs hired help or derives an income from rent or interest or the operation of an agricultural or industrial machine. Actually, however, a koolack is a successful farmer as success is measured in Russia. He is a man who has lifted his household to a plane conspicuously above that of the average peasant. He has built up what Communists call a moshtshnoye khoziaistvo, a well-to-do household. In America the average Russian koolack would be a poor man, and even in Russia there is no permanent class of koolacks. They shift with their fortunes, which depend as much on themselves as on external conditions. All over the country there are koolacks who never had had any land until the Revolution gave it to them, and there are also bedniaks, poor men, who were once koolacks but who have been the victims of some catastrophe—a fire, a drouth or an epidemic which killed off all or most of their stock. Usually the koolack is not the fat lazy barbarian that he is pictured in Soviet motion pictures. A thrifty energetic man, sometimes miserly, he is no idler like the landlord of the old days who had all his work done by outside help. He is one of the hardest-toiling people in Russia, and so are his wife and children.

But under existing conditions, with the basic aims of the Revolution always in the foreground of their thoughts, the revolutionary leaders could not consistently assume an attitude of leniency toward him. Regarding material accumulation as the chief menace to the Revolution, they could not fail to see in the prospering individual farmer the chief menace to their plans. When, therefore, a man came into possession of two or three horses, as many or a few more cows, about half a dozen pigs, and when he raised three or four hundred poods of rye or wheat, he fell into the category of koolack, and it was always easy to find a legal excuse to brand him as such. For the least infraction of existing laws he was dealt with severely, and since 1928, as a further means of keeping down his material accumulations, he has been forced to pay a so-called "individualistic" tax.

In retaliation, the well-to-do peasant embarked on a passive strike. He limited artificially his productivity and withheld much of his surplus produce from the market. I do not wish to clutter this article with statistics, but a few figures on the decrease of cattle in Siberia, for example, will bear testimony to the devastating results of the policy of penalizing the prosperous peasant. In pre-war days Siberia was a famed dairy land. More than 57 percent of its peasants were owners of four cows, while peasants having only one cow made up a little over 7 percent of the farming population. In 1928, peasants having four cows totaled slightly more than 13 percent, and those with one cow 33 percent, of this population. The civil war had done serious damage to the dairy industry of Siberia, but the chief devastation resulted from the treatment of the so-called koolack.

The financial and manufacturing straits of the Soviet government added to the agrarian crisis. Gold had ceased to circulate, and paper money did not tempt the peasant. He saw value chiefly in goods, and whenever he sold grain, a calf, a pig, he wanted to buy something. But the Soviets were unable to supply him with the amounts of goods demanded; the capacity of their factories was limited, and from foreign lands they were importing negligible quantities of so-called "consumption goods." In consequence, the poor and the middle peasant, as well as the koolack, sold less and less of his surplus. He consumed more himself, and the remainder he hoarded.

The cumulative effect of these conditions —the parcelization of the land, the attacks on the prosperous farmer, the financial and manufacturing straits of the government— were pushing the country toward disaster, actually threatening the city and the army with famine. To avert a possible catastrophe, the Soviets compelled the peasant, through so-called "grain collections," to sell to them his surplus grain at prices which they fixed. The peasant stormed in protest, and in the summer of 1928, after enough grain had been collected to meet the needs of the city for the ensuing year, the Soviets issued an announcement promising that they would not again resort to grain collections. Since the basic conditions remained unchanged, this promise was broken the following year when they once more embarked on grain collections in an even firmer and more organized manner.

The poorest peasants, who raised no surplus grain, were exempted from collections, as they were from all taxes. But the others were obliged to sell the government all their surplus, the amount of which was determined not by them but by Soviet agents. Though intended originally as an emergency measure to end a severe shortage of bread, grain collections had become an indispensable fixture of Soviet internal administration.

This is not the place to examine the vehement controversies that raged within the ranks of the Communist Party as to the proper solution of the agrarian crisis. I am concerned here, not with Rykov's or Bukharin's or Kondratyer's proposals, but with Stalin's actions. He after all held control of the Party policy, and he, through the operation of sovkhozy (state farms) and through the kolhozy, opened the road to the much needed large-scale farming without invalidating the basic Bolshevik aims of the Revolution. Here I am concerned, of course, only with kolhozy. As early as 1927 the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party had passed a resolution making collectivization a definite part of the Party's program. But the resolution had remained essentially a paper document. Only in the spring of 1929 was it accorded energetic action, and in the autumn of the same year the collectivization movement had gathered conspicuous momentum. Encouraged by the initial results, and desirous of making them more sure and more permanent, the Politbureau under Stalin's influence drafted its famous declaration of January 5, 1930. This declaration embodied two vital decisions: to liquidate the bodied two vital decisions: to liquidate the koolacks and to achieve complete collectivization of the land within a specified time. The koolacks were to be economically exterminated. Their properties were to be confiscated and they exiled to Siberia, to the far north in Europe, or to a remote strip of poor land away from their former homes, where, with limited animal power, few implements, and with no aid from the state or the cooperatives, they would have to make their way in the world as best they could. Since koolacks constituted between 4 and 5 percent of the population, this decision doomed more than one million families to loss of their property and to banishment from their lands.

(Continued on page 88)

(Continued from page 67)

It is easy enough to see the reasons for the imposition of such a cruel fate on the koolacks. Being the more prosperous men in the community, they naturally would be most energetic in opposition to collectivization. Not only would they themselves refuse to join, even were they given the chance— which they were not—but as men of standing in the community they would influence others to follow their example. Besides, their presence would sustain the innate urge of every peasant to come some day into individual prosperity. "Every peasant," confessed to me a high official in the Commissary of Agriculture, "has his own fiveyear plan, at the end of which he wants to attain to the position of a koolack." But with the koolack out of the way and the example of his fate fresh before the population, the average muzhik would not be so eager for advancement through an individual household. Then of course the koolack had the best cows, the best horses, the best pigs, the best tools, the best buildings, the best seed, and these the government sorely needed to equip the multitude of newly formed kolhozy.

Simultaneously with this movement against the koolacks, the country was divided into three districts, one of which was to achieve complete collectivization in the spring of 1931, the second in the spring of 1932, the third at the end of the five-year plan, in 1933. I must add that the declaration of the Politbureau made clear that not coercive but persuasive methods were to be employed by field organizers to win the peasant over to collectivization, and that the type of kolhoz to be favored at this stage of the country's development was the artel, in which only land, work animals, portions of other domestic stock and implements are held in common.

The months of January and February were tempestuous months in the Russian villages. Collectivization was sweeping the land, and the newspapers screamed with joy at the success of the movement. Like mercury in a thermometer that is being artificially heated, their figures for collectivization rose higher every day, and the reader was led to imagine that peasants were of their own accord flocking to kolhozy as to a place of deliverance. Complete collectivization seemed not a question of the two or three years which the Politbureau had set for it, but of months only. I was in New York at the time, and the news which the Soviet papers and the dispatches from Moscow carried seemed incredible. I could not imagine the Russian peasant making such a complete turn-about overnight in his attitude toward collectivization.

Then came the crash, and the very newspapers that had been featuring the success of collectivization now began even more loudly to announce its failures. The movement had developed into one of force, not in all instances, of course, but in many throughout the country. Organizers in their impassioned desire to outdo one another and to bring about complete collectivization in a lesser period than that prescribed by the Politbureau, discarded persuasion in favor of coercion. Under threat of confiscation of property, exile, deprivation of citizenship, they drove the peasant in masses into the kolhozy. They did not even bother to assure him that whatever property he might turn over t6 the kolhoz would yield him an extra return.

The peasant, sullen and desperate, struck back in his own manner. If he was to be forced into the kolhoz he would go in empty handed, and let the government find its own means of running the affair. He began to dispose of his personal property, sell what was saleable and kill what was killable. In village after village it was the same, and the slaughter of stock was appalling. At least one-half of all the pigs in the country went under the knife, in addition to a full fourth of the cattle and an even larger share of the sheep and goats.

Stalin and the Central Committee have since avowed that the men in the field, in using forcible measures against the peasant, were acting without the knowledge and authority of the Party and in violation of its will and instructions. In the statement of the Central Committee of March 15, 1930, in which it condemns and forbids coercive methods of collectivization, it admits that "in a series of districts compulsion was substituted for voluntariness and men were made to join under threat of dekoolackization and deprivation of citizenship rights."

Stalin himself, in his famous letter on "dizziness from success," in which he likewise takes the organizers to task for violating the principle of voluntariness, which was to be the basis of the organization of collectives, says: "In certain parts of Turkestan attempts were made to catch up with and surpass [in collectivization] the advanced regions of the Soviet Union by means of military force and the threat of deprivation of water for irrigating the fields and the refusal to sell manufactured articles to peasants who were not ready to join the kolhoz." In his "Answer to the Comrade Kolhozniksin which a month later he goes at greater length into the subject of coerciveness, he cites devastating evidence of the frequency with which it was practiced.

The question arises, why did Stalin and the Central Committee, which he dominated powerfully at the time, wait until March, a period of about two months, before putting an end to the "perversion of the Party line" in the villages? It is absurd for them to plead ignorance of the situation. No government in the world has at its disposal the multitude of highly sensitized agencies of information that the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party has. There is the GPU (state political police) with its far-seeing eyes and far-hearing ears. There are the half million village newspaper correspondents who are always leaping into print with full reports of any untoward events in their communities. There is the Red Army, with its mass of peasant soldiers to whom parents and relatives rush with their grievances against the government. There are the numerous secretaries of the Party and a host of social workers who are always out in the field—teachers, nurses, agronomes, lecturers and others—whose heads had not turned dizzy and who realized the danger of the methods which multitudes of organizers pursued, and surely reported their observations and complaints to their superiors or to the GPU. The Central Committee and Stalin could not help knowing what was transpiring in the villages.

(Continued on page 98)

(Continued from page 88)

One is forced to the conclusion that they had a purpose in delaying action. They were gambling for big stakes, and one is aided in understanding the nature of these stakes when one examines the gains which, in spite of abuses and barbarities, the campaign had yielded. It put into the hands of the government, according to Stalin's own words, two hundred million poods of seed, enough to ensure the necessary sowing of the spring crops. It turned over to the kolhozy, again according to Stalin's own words, koolack property, implements, grain, stock and buildings to the value of four hundred million gold roubles. It left more than one-fourth of the peasantry settled on the kolhozy, with thirty-six million hectares of the best tillable land under their control. Thus thousands of large farms, so indispensable to the productivity of the nation, had actually been formed out of the puny peasant holdings. Moreover, for the time being it put these farms within easy reach and control of the government, thus assuring the latter of easy access to about half of all the marketable grain of the land and promising as easy access in the future.

From a Party viewpoint these gains were stupendous. But the cost wast equally stupendous.

EDITOII'S NOTE: Maurice Hindus has completed Red Bread his new book on Russia, which is soon to be published by the firm of Cape & Smith. This article will form a part of that book.