In the late 1920s StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More faced a seemingly unsolvable economic dilemma. How did the USSR industrialise, build defence industries and protect itself from a hostile world when its weak agriculture could not provide enough grain surpluses for export or to create cheap food to feed the cities? The NEP had produced a social class that, in Marxist Leninist discourse, was hostile to the Soviet regime, the Kulaks (though in reality, they posed no threat at all). Therefore, in order deal with the problems of food shortages, and the threat of an enemy class emerging, Stalin chose collectivisationCollectivisation Full Description:
The policy of forced consolidation of individual peasant households into massive, state-controlled collective farms. It represented a declaration of war by the urban state against the rural peasantry, intended to extract grain to fund industrialization. Collectivisation was a radical restructuring of the countryside that abolished private land ownership. The state seized land, livestock, and tools, forcing independent farmers into kolkhozy. Resistance was met with brutal force, including the “liquidation” of wealthier peasants (Kulaks) as a class.
Critical Perspective:This policy fundamentally altered the relationship between the people and the land. It treated the peasantry not as citizens to be supported, but as an internal colony to be exploited. By establishing a state monopoly on food production, the regime gained the ultimate lever of social control: the power to grant or withhold the means of survival, leading to man-made famines used to crush regional nationalism and resistance.
Read more, the forceful transfer of food resources from the peasantry to the workers, facilitated by the state using violence. Check out my quick video for students on Stalin and Collectivisation here:
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