The Soviet State and the Peasants

The Peasant Problem

The Bolsheviks had made a revolution in the name of the proletariat — the urban industrial working class. But Russia in 1917 was overwhelmingly a peasant country: roughly 80 per cent of its population lived in villages and worked the land. The relationship between the Bolshevik state and this vast majority of its population would prove to be one of the most violent and consequential in modern history.

The tension was ideological as well as practical. Marxist theory regarded the peasantry as a backward, property-owning class, inherently inclined towards individualism and capitalism — the antithesis of the collective socialist future. The Bolsheviks needed peasant food to feed the cities and peasant sons to fill the Red Army, but they regarded the peasantry with deep suspicion and made no secret of their contempt.

War Communism and Its Consequences

During the civil war, the Bolshevik policy of “War Communism” requisitioned grain from the peasants at gunpoint to feed the Red Army and the cities. Peasants who resisted were shot; villages that concealed grain stores were burned. The result was a catastrophic famine in 1921–22 that killed between three and five million people, and a wave of peasant uprisings — the most significant of which, the Tambov Rebellion, required a full military campaign to suppress, including the use of poison gas.

Lenin’s response was the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, which restored limited market relations in the countryside, allowing peasants to sell surplus grain. It worked — agricultural production recovered — but it also created a class of more prosperous peasants (the “kulaks”) whom ideological Bolsheviks regarded as class enemies.

Collectivisation: The Second Revolution

Stalin‘s collectivisation drive, launched in 1929, was described at the time as a “second revolution” — and in its consequences, it was. The NEP was ended; private farming was abolished; peasants were forced into collective farms (kolkhozy) under state management. The “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” provided ideological cover for the deportation, imprisonment or execution of the most productive peasants — precisely those most capable of running the agriculture the state depended on.

Peasant resistance was widespread and desperate. Many slaughtered their own livestock rather than hand them over to the collective. Between 1929 and 1933, the Soviet Union lost approximately half its horses, cattle and pigs. The destruction of agricultural capacity, combined with continued state grain requisitioning, produced famine. In Ukraine, the famine of 1932–33 — the Holodomor — killed between three and seven million people in what many historians regard as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The Long Consequences

Soviet agriculture never fully recovered from collectivisation. The collective farm system was chronically inefficient — peasants had no incentive to work hard for the state when the rewards were fixed regardless of effort. The small private plots that collective farmers were allowed to retain were consistently more productive per hectare than the collective fields. Yet the system survived until the collapse of the USSR, a monument to ideological commitment overriding economic rationality.

Why It Matters Now

The Bolshevik encounter with the peasantry is a case study in the violence that results when a revolutionary state tries to remake an entire society against the will of its majority. It also raises questions about the nature of the Ukrainian famine that remain politically contested: was the Holodomor a deliberate policy of genocide against Ukrainians, or a by-product of a brutal but non-targeted collectivisation policy? The debate has direct political resonance in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine today.

Key Figures

• Joseph Stalin — Drove collectivisation against the advice of many economists and party members, regarding the destruction of peasant independence as a political as much as an economic necessity.
• Nikolai Bukharin — Leading Bolshevik who opposed forced collectivisation and advocated a gradual approach. Arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938.
• Lazar Kaganovich — Stalin’s enforcer during collectivisation in Ukraine, who oversaw grain requisitioning during the famine period.
• Alexander Antonov — Leader of the Tambov peasant uprising against War Communism (1920–21), the largest peasant revolt of the early Soviet period.

Timeline

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