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The kolkhozy surpass the kulaks
If the kulaks, who represented already 5 per cent of the peasantry, had succeeded in extending their economic base and definitively imposing themselves as the dominant force in the countryside, the socialist power in the cities would not have been able to maintain itself, faced with this encirclement by bourgeois forces. Eighty-two per cent of the Soviet population was peasant. If the Bolshevik Party had no longer succeeded in feeding the workers at relatively low prices, the very basis of working class power would have been threatened.
Hence it was necessary to accelerate the collectivization of certain sectors in the countryside in order to increase, on a socialist basis, the production of market wheat. It was essential for the success of accelerated industrialization that a relatively low price for market wheat be maintained. A rising rural bourgeoisie would never have accepted such a policy. Only the poor and middle peasants, organized in co-operatives, could support it. And only industrialization could ensure the defence of the first socialist country. Industrialization would allow the modernization of the countryside, increasing productivity and improving the cultural level. To give a solid material base for socialism in the countryside would require building tractors, trucks and threshers. To succeed would imply increasing the rate of industrialization.
On October 1, 1927, there were 286,000 peasant families in the kolkhozy. They numbered 1,008,000 on June 1, 1929.
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During the four months of June through October, the percentage of kolkhoz peasants rose from 4 per cent to 7.5 per cent.
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During 1929, collectivized agriculture produced 2.2 million tonnes of market wheat, as much as the kulaks did two years previously. Stalin foresaw that during the course of the next year, it would bring 6.6 million tonnes to the cities.
`Now we are able to carry on a determined offensive against the kulaks, to break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class and substitute for their output the output of the collective farms and state farms.'
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Stalin, Problems of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R., p. 163.
Next: A fiery mass Up: The first wave Previous: The kulak
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995