The same years that saw the swift growth of socialized industry saw an equally swift revolution in farming. Between 1930 and 1933, some fourteen million small, inefficient peasant holdings were combined into some 200,000 large farms, collectively owned and managed, serviced by tractors and machines. The change was needed to bring prosperity to the farmers and security to the nation. For, in 1928, the old style Russian farming could not even feed the cities; it could never provide food for rapid industrialization or for expanding education and culture. Farming, along with industry, had to be modernized.
Russian peasants, in 1928, farmed by methods of the Middle Ages, methods that even went back to Bible times. They lived in villages and walked long distances to fields. A family holding of ten or twenty acres would be split into a dozen pieces, often widely scattered, and usually in ridiculously narrow strips on which even a harrow could not turn. One fourth of the peasants did not own a horse; less than half had a team of two horses or oxen. So plowing was seldom and shallow, often by homemade wooden plow, without a metal share. Sowing was by hand, the seed cast from an apron to the earth, where birds and winds carried much away. There was little machinery; the Fordson tractor I got for a children’s colony on the Volga won fame as the only tractor within two hundred miles.
Social life was equally medieval. The Old Man ruled the home. Sons married, brought their wives to the patriarchal homestead and worked the farm that their fathers still bossed. So farm practice remained old fashioned, unchanged by young views. Much of it was determined by religion. Holy days fixed dates for sowing, religious processions sprinkled fields with holy water to insure fertility, rain was sought by processions and prayers. The ultra-pious regarded tractors as “devil-machines”—priests actually led peasants to stone them. Any fight for modern farming thus became a fight “against religion.” I recall the tremendous campaign the Young Communists made against the Holy Helena to secure early sowing in Ivanovo province, where the feast of Helena had for centuries fixed the date.
By 1928, the farms had recovered from war devastation; the total crops equalled those before the war. Far less grain, however, was reaching the cities. Tsarist Russia had exported grain even though peasants starved. Soviet peasants were eating better than before, but marketing little. The surplus often got into the hands of kulaks, those petty rural capitalists who had grain not only from their own fields but through owning flour-mills and through money-lending against harvests. They fought the state for control of grain and for the support of the peasants.
The Right wing of the Communist Party held that kulaks should be allowed to get rich and that socialism could win through state ownership of industries. The Left wing was for forcing peasants rapidly into collective farms under state control. Actual policy shifted for several years under pressure of different groups in the Party. The policy finally adopted was to draw peasants into collective farms by offering government credits and tractors, to freeze the kulaks out by high taxes and, later, to “abolish them as a class.” Membership in collective farms was theoretically voluntary; in practice, pressures were sometimes used that went to excess.
American commentators usually speak of collective farms as enforced by Stalin; they even assert that he deliberately starved millions of peasants to make them join collectives. This is untrue. I travelled the countryside those years and know what occurred. Stalin certainly promoted the change and guided it. But the drive for collectivization went so much faster than Stalin planned that there were not enough machines ready for the farms, nor enough bookkeepers and managers. Hopeful inefficiency combined with a panic slaying of livestock under kulak urging, and with two dry years, brought serious food shortage in 1932, two years after Stalin’s alleged pressures. Moscow brought the country through by stern nationwide rationing.
I saw collectivization break like a storm on the Lower Volga in autumn of 1929. It was a revolution that made deeper changes than did the revolution of 1917, of which it was the ripened fruit. Farmhands and poor peasants took the initiative, hoping to better themselves by government aid. Kulaks fought the movement bitterly by all means up to arson and murder. The middle peasantry, the real backbone of farming, had been split between hope of becoming kulaks and the wish for machinery from the state. But now that the Five-Year Plan promised tractors, this great mass of peasants began moving by villages, townships and counties, into the collective farms.
The chairman of Atkarsk Collective Farms Union waved a pile of telegrams at me—there had been no such organization six months before. “On November 20, our county was fifty percent collectivized,” he exulted. “On December 1, 65 per cent. We get figures every ten days. By December 10, we expect 80 percent.”
A few months earlier, people had argued calmly about collectives, discussing the gain in sown area, the chances of tractors. But now the countryside was smitten as by a revival. One village organized as a unit, then voted to combine with twenty villages to set up a cooperative market and grain mill. Samoilovka held the record one day with a “farm” of 350,000 acres. Then Balakov announced 675,000 acres; then Yelan united four big communes into 750,000 acres. Learning of this, peasants of Balanda shouted in meeting: “Go boldly I Unite our two townships into one farm of a million acres.” A thousand horses came out in the field in Balanda for a “sowing rehearsal.” An old man of seventy ran in front of the camera: “Photograph me with the horses; now I can die. I never saw such a day.”
Into these discussions penetrated organizers from the Party, sometimes farm experts giving counsel, sometimes workers ignorant of farming but aflame with zeal for collectivization. “Aren’t a thousand horses in one field too many? It may be thrilling but is it good farming?” Discussions were hot and hostile. Later, Moscow denounced the “disease of giantism.” But at first the enthusiasts called all caution “counter-revolution.” Families split; the young men followed the enthusiasts, eager for new ways. The old men doubted; they saw themselves losing control of the household along with the acres. The women worried over the fate of the family cow. What animals would be common property was not quite clear; there were several forms of collectives.
Kulaks and priests clouded the issue with rumors, playing on emotions of sex and fear. Everywhere, I heard of the “one great blanket” under which all men and women of the collective farm would sleep! Everywhere, rumor said that babies would be “socialized.” In some places, kulaks joined collectives—to rule or ruin. Elsewhere, they were being expelled from collectives as undesirable. Some collectives took in kulaks’ horses but not the kulaks, as had been done with landlords’ equipment in the Revolution. Kulaks fought back by burning the collective barns and even by assassination. A trial of twelve kulaks for the murder of a Party secretary was closing in Atkarsk. “He died for all of us,” declared the prosecution; the peasant audience wept. The storm of collectivization rose higher as farms were named in the martyr’s honor.
As I left the area, I asked a local official. “What docs Moscow say about this, about that?” He replied, hurriedly but proudly: “We can’t wait to hear from Moscow; Moscow makes its plans from what we do.”
Moscow was making plans, I learned when I returned to the city. News from all basic grain areas was correlated into those plans. The Five-Year Plan had called for a 20 percent collectivization by 1933; this drive gave 60 percent in some areas by 1930. No tractors or machinery had been planned for anything like this. So Moscow cut to the bone the imports of raw cotton, dooming the people to more years of rags. Moscow cancelled an order for Brazil coffee at bargain prices and made an enemy of Brazil. Moscow increased import of farm machinery and briefly made a friend of Henry Ford. That was when the city of Kharkov decided to build its own tractor works “outside the plan,” to meet die needs of the Ukraine.
In mid-winter, I went to the Odessa region to see the first of the Tractor Stations. A farm expert named Markovich had devised an efficient, economical way of serving farms with tractors. Instead of selling machinery to peasants who could neither run nor repair it, he kept several score tractors in a single center, with a full complement of machinery, a machine shop and a school for drivers. This station then contracted with collective farms within a radius of twenty miles or more, to supply tractors for whatever work they needed, taking payment in grain. The arrangements were flexible. One fairly prosperous farm, with many horses, rented tractors only for breaking virgin soil; while a pioneer Jewish collective, which had recently received land from the state but was very short of live stock, had most of its field-work done by the tractor station. State-owned tractor stations proved so useful that they spread rapidly throughout the USSR. They are the dominant form of machine-supply today.
The winter of 1929–30 was a time of considerable chaos. The precise form of the collective was not yet clear. Stalin, also making his plans from the peasants’ actions, stated on December 27, 1929, that the time had come “to abolish kulaks as a class.” This merely authorized what poor peasants were already doing, but with the authorization they began doing more. Cruel tales came of the unroofing of kulaks’ houses, of chaotic deportations. Meantime, organizers, eager for a record, forced peasants into farms by threat of deportation as “kulaks”; they “communized” cows, goats, chickens, even dishes and underwear. Kulaks grossly exaggerated these excesses and incited peasants to kill and eat their livestock and “go naked into the collective where the state supports you all.”
“Why doesn’t Stalin stop it?” I asked a Communist friend. “Has a kulak no rights? This is chaos!”
“There is really too much anarchy,” he answered. “It comes from division in the Party; we Communists must take the blame. Stalin has stated the ‘line’—‘to abolish kulaks as a class.’ The Right-wing elements, who control the government apparatus”—I knew he meant Rykov—“delay the formulation in law. So the Left-wing elements among our local comrades, having no law as guide, do what is right in their own eyes and the eyes of farmhands and poor peasants. This is anarchy. We expect government decrees soon; then there will be more order.”
The first decree appeared February 5, 1930—it authorized deportation of kulaks in areas where collectivization was “total” and where peasants’ meetings asked for the deporting of definite people after hearings. The list must then be checked by the provincial authorities, and arrangements made for the districts to which the kulaks should go. These were usually construction jobs or virgin land in Siberia. After the decree, the anarchy lessened, but there still seemed to be many mistakes and excesses. Why didn’t Stalin take it in hand?
“We cannot attack our local comrades until the collective seed is in collective barns and the sowing safe,” said my Communist friend. “Otherwise there might be widespread famine.” He meant that peasants, who already had eaten livestock and then expected the state to feed them, might also eat their seed grain. “We are like a man on skis on a swift slope,” he added. “We cannot stop nor control speed or distance. We can only guide our jumps and try to land on our feet. If we cannot, then everything is finished.” I knew what he meant for when I went to Riga to renew my passport—Washington had as yet no embassy in the USSR—I found men in the American consulate giving full time to collecting data on Soviet collectivization from scores of local Soviet newspapers. They sent a thousand pages of reports to the U.S. State Department. Foreigners predicted the collapse of the USSR through famine. More than one border nation was reported to be getting its armies ready to march.
On March 2, 1930, when the basic grain areas had their “seed collections” made, Stalin issued his famous statement: “Dizziness From Success.” He said that the speed with which peasants joined collective farms had made “some comrades dizzy.” He reminded everyone that membership was voluntary and that the type of collective farm recommended for the present period socialized only the land, draft animals and larger machinery, but left as personal property such domestic animals as cows, sheep, pigs, chickens. Every paper in the land published the statement in full; millions of copies circulated as leaflets. Peasants rode to town and paid high for the last available copy, to wave in the face of local organizers as their charter of freedom. Stalin suddenly became a hero to millions of peasants, their champion against local excesses. Stalin quickly checked this hero-worship by publishing Answers to Collective Farmers, in which he stated: “Some people speak as if Stalin alone made that statement. The Central Committee does not … permit such actions by any individual. The statement was … by the Central Committee.”
Toward the end of March, I went south to meet the spring. Twenty-four hours from Moscow I found it, on the line to Stalingrad. When my train set me down after midnight, I was appalled by the crowds of peasants who surrounded me, pouring out bitter words. “A former bandit got into the Party and bossed our village.” “Stalin says collectives are voluntary, but they won’t give back our oxen.”
Next morning in the township center, I heard similar complaints heaped on a tired secretary from dawn till long after dark. “The chairman isn’t here,” he explained. “He went to help a village where kulaks last night burned a barn containing twenty-seven horses that were relied on for the sowing. He must organize emergency help.” Meantime the secretary wearily repeated to all comers that of course they would get their oxen back if they decided to leave the collective farm, but they couldn’t disorganize sowing by grabbing the oxen on a day’s notice from field-gangs plowing twenty miles away. Especially, when they kept changing their minds several times a week.
Farms seemed going to pieces under a dozen pressures—violence of kulaks, attacks by priests, official stupidities and just plain inefficiency of medieval Russia. Yet, as soon as I left the railway and went inland, the chaos was replaced by a spectacular, mass sowing. I saw then that all journalists who judge by the railway and the township center must judge wrongly. All complaints and injustice flowed to the railroad and sought adjustment from the township center. No peasant who could plow went to the railway—he was plowing. Beyond the railroad, men were fighting for a record harvest to establish their right to land and machines.
“The First Bolshevik Spring,” they called it, the first sowing on collective farms. There were miles of rich black earth in a single field, one crop rotation planned for the whole. At regular intervals came the field brigades—horses, oxen, or tractors moving in rhythm across the land, in the swiftest, deepest plowing this soil had ever known. At night, the earth was dotted with campfires whence music of balalaikas and the singing of men and women rose. Opera singers were there from Moscow; they led festival processions to the fields that replaced the old religious processions. A white-haired professor of astronomy from Leningrad toured the camps with lantern slide lectures on the stars; to the field-gangs it was “culture,” to the Communists it was “anti-religion.” Brigades of city mechanics came as volunteers to repair farm implements.
It was the most dramatic sowing in human history. Millions of peasants, for the first time consciously mixing with the life of the cities, with workers, farm experts, artists and journalists, all swept along in a great crusade, built in a single spring the agricultural basis of socialism.
Three figures stand out for me from that great sowing: Ustina, the farmhand; Melnikov, the reporter; Kovalev, party secretary of a township.
Ustina was chicken-woman of a large collective farm called “Fortress of Communism” She had been a servant from the age of eight. After the Revolution she joined a small, struggling farm commune; she was so destitute that she wrapped her newborn babies in newspapers. Step by step, those communards built a sound farm, with tractors and an incubator—Ustina won this from Moscow as a prize for good work. After two years of relative comfort, the communards were again hungry, because so many hungry, penniless farmhands had rushed to join them, and they had to feed everybody till harvest. Some had argued for restricting membership to those who brought their own food-grain. Ustina said firmly: “This is our second war. The first was a murdering war. This is not murdering, but it is war all the same. So we must help all who are with us.”
Working out from Stalingrad went the Travelling Struggle, a newspaper published from three railway cars. It journeyed through the spring from township to township, investigated and published abuses, and even summoned judges from the city for special courts. Melnikov, its most energetic reporter, could digest ten shocking cases daily and find in them no discouragement but a call to battle. He told of the bandit, Zotev, who got elected as president of a village of his clansmen, then tried to deport as a kulak a Red Army veteran who had exposed his banditry. He told of the zealous organizer who swept through seven Kalmuck settlements and collectivized them all in seven days by listing their property and telling them they were now one farm. The illiterate Kalmucks, to whom a government paper was magic and authority, dared not even drive their hungry sheep to summer pasture lest they be “stealing government sheep.” When Stalin’s statement of “Dizziness from Success” reached them, all seven settlements took off into the desert in one night.
Not all the anti-Sovet sheets in America could invent more “Bolshevik atrocities” than Melnikov triumphantly recorded in his routine. This Travelling Struggle had had more than two hundred officials arrested that season for crimes ranging from graft to banditry. But when I asked whether the harvest would be much less because of the turmoil, Melnikov stared as if I were crazy.
“Less? It must be much greater! Have you not seen tractors doubling the sown area? Have you not seen, even without tractors, how farmhands and peasants use kulaks’ horses to increase area seventy percent? The kulak sabotaged the harvest, fearing taxes and hating the Soviet power. These new owners drive forward like madmen.”
The hunger of the poorer peasants for more life was the power released in that “First Bolshevik Spring” This power was led by Communists who, despite inexperience and excesses, were a disciplined and tireless group. I could pick them out in field brigades by their tense concern that everything go well. It is thus I recall Kovalev, Party secretary of a small Tartar district south of Stalingrad, and his talk with ten shiftless, deserting peasants.
These peasants were leaving the collective farm. One said: “I have no warm coat and they make me pasture livestock in the rain.” Another: “They work my camel hungry and he dies before my eyes.” A third: “My wife won’t live with me since I joined the kolhoz.”
The reasons seemed sound to me but not to Kovalev. “These conditions you always had” he said. “Nobody offered a golden dish in the kolhoz. Faults of management can be corrected. Men working at night must have warm clothes. Hay is scarce from last year’s drought, but it will be no better in individual fields. Who leaves will not better himself, for the whole Soviet power helps the kolhoz. A peasant is not an independent person; his farm depends on the nation and the nation depends on his farm. Our land is surrounded by capitalist lands. We must swiftly build great industry and modern farming or we perish. That great factory in Stalingrad will this summer give tractors to your farms. That great power station, Stalgres, will this autumn give light to your homes. While these are unfinished, they need bread; there must be a great increase in grain. Can this be done if every peasant sits at home, deciding whether to plow? The task of every citizen this year is to strengthen the collective farm.”
After two hours of such argument, the men’s wives called to them from outside. Kovalev invited them in, but they refused. They had their minds made up and their men obeyed. Without wasting a word in regret, Kovalev turned to five Communists still remaining in the room, including local teachers and a librarian. He assigned them at once to work in field gangs on harrows; their main task was to build morale. He phoned Stalingrad for an emergency supply of hay and also for a Tartar woman organizer to work among the wives. He told the librarian to send travelling libraries to the field-gangs. It was able generalship, worthy of a larger sphere. This was one small Tartar village on poor soil. Into every such village the Party organizers penetrated, fighting the war for Soviet wheat that spring.
Melnikov guessed right. Though the seed was sown in the chaos of class war—by men who stormed their way out of the Middle Ages in a year—yet such was the drive of their awakened will that when crop-returns at last came in, the Soviet Union (and the foreign powers who watched like hawks) knew that the country had achieved the widest sown area and the greatest harvest it had ever known.
That harvest changed the history of farming for the world.
One harvest was not enough to stabilize collectivization. In 1930, it was put over by poorly organized, ill-equipped peasants through force of desire. In the next two years, the difficulties of organization caught up with them. Where find good managers? Bookkeepers? Men to handle machines? In 1931, the harvest fell off from drought in five basic grain areas. In 1932, the crop was better but poorly gathered. Farm presidents, unwilling to admit failure, claimed they were getting it in. When Moscow awoke to the situation, a large amount of grain lay under the snow. Causes were many. Fourteen million small farms had been merged into 200,000 big ones, without experienced managers or enough machines. Eleven million workers had left the farms for the new industries. The backwardness of peasants, sabotage by kulaks, stupidities of officials, all played a part. By January, 1933, it was clear that the country faced serious food shortage, two years after it had victoriously “conquered wheat.”
Stalin accepted the blame for the Party at the Central Committee Plenum; it had been caught napping. When the emergency was seen, the measures taken were quick and sound. To meet the immediate need, ruthless pressure was put on the farms to deliver all grain they owed the state, on taxes or for machinery, whether or not they had grain for themselves. “Shall workers who honestly gave you tractors, starve because of your inefficiency?” they were asked. The grain, in state hands, was then used to put the whole country on rations. It was doled out even to the farms that had failed, in the form of rations at sowing time for those who worked. From one end of the land to the other, there was shortage and hunger—and a general increase in mortality from this. But the hunger was distributed—nowhere was there the panic chaos that is implied by the word “famine.” Under nationwide iron rationing, the harvest of 1933 was brought in.
Meanwhile three measures were taken to prevent future catastrophes—a new law on grain collections, a Congress of Farm Champions and the organization of “political sections”—“Politodels”—in the tractor stations. The grain collections, which formerly bore lightly on weak farms, were changed to reward good harvests and penalize inefficiency. The Congress of Farm Champions brought to Moscow the “champions” from the best farms, and publicized throughout the land their methods, sending them home with honors to lead whole areas to success. And, since two-thirds of the farms were already serviced by tractor stations, these were now expanded by 20,000 new, efficient people, of a type never before seen at work in rural Russia. Factory directors, army commanders, university professors volunteered to work in the “politodels” to organize “efficiency” on the farms.
The foreign press called it “Stalin’s war against the peasants.” The Soviet press called it “our war for harvest yield.” It was a nationwide fight by both farms and cities. My husband, working at the time for the Peasants’ Gazette, spent forty days flying from farm to farm of the North Caucasus in a two-seater plane, in charge of a “brigade” of ten other reporters. On landing, he would measure square-meter samples of the harvested area, count the wasted grain-heads, calculate how much loss this meant for the farm, and note what methods best saved the grain. Such facts, collected by ten people, were wired to all the press to guide the harvesting as it moved north. My husband lost thirty pounds in those forty days; he came home exhausted and filthy with lice. He figured his gang had saved nearly a million bushels. This was only a sample of the all-out struggle that year.
The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization.
Victory was consolidated the following year by the great fight the collective farmers made against a drought that affected all the southern half of Europe. In former years, drought-stricken peasants would have eaten their livestock and fled to the cities to look for jobs. In 1934, the collective farmers held regional congresses, declared “War Against Drought” and planned measures to suit each region. Some used their fire departments to haul water; some planted forest glades. On North Caucasus slopes, they dug thousands of miles of irrigation ditches, saying: “We have mountains; we don’t need rain.” In each area where winter wheat failed, scientists determined what second crops were best; these were publicized and the government shot in the seed by fast freight. This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933. Even in the worst regions, most farms came through with food for man and beast and with strengthened organization.
By 1935, the new farming was stabilized; for two years almost no one had wanted to leave the collective farms. The model constitution for a farm, the model type of “farm plan” had been determined; crop rotations and the location of fields was settled. For three years, the grain crop had run fifteen to twenty million tons above past records; the sugar beet area had doubled; the area in cotton was two and a half times any in the past. There had been heavy loss in livestock because so many had been killed and eaten in the first year of collectivization. (In China, the cooperative farms, learning from the Russian errors, buy the animals from the peasants on the instalment plan.)
More important than the economic gain was the change in the peasant. The farmers not only learned reading and writing; they went in for science and art. Seven thousand “laboratory cottages” where the farmers studied their own crops, exchanging data with the government experiment stations, were set up in two years in the Ukraine alone. Almost every farm had its drama circle, its gliding and parachute-jumping club, even its aviation courses. The farmers related themselves to the nation’s life and the nation related itself to the farmers. A Soviet agricultural scientist said to me: “We scientists used to feel unregarded, but now that the collective farms demand our science, we see our work for several thousand years.”
In the second world war, when German tanks were captured or German planes forced down in rural areas, local farmer guerrillas were able to drive the tanks or fly the planes to the rear. Life magazine said, March 29, 1943, in a special number: “Whatever the cost of farm collectivization … these large farm units … made possible the use of machinery … which doubled output … (and) released millions of workers for industry. Without them … Russia could not have built the industry that turned out the munitions that stopped the German army.”
After the war, in 1947, I was flying across the USSR and landed at Kazan, on the Volga. There were so many dozen small planes at one end of the field that I thought it must be a military training field and wondered why they let us land.
“Oh, no,” said a Russian. “Those are the planes of the collective farmers. They have flown to town on various errands.”