We’ve all long known that Stalin did communalise Russian - Soviet - farming and that millions died as he did so. Also that food production dropped massively and so on. Anyone who’s read Gulag - and everyone should - knows that.
Which then leads to a puzzle. Why would someone do something so obviously counterproductive?
It’s possible, obviously, that there was some theoretical issue in socialism and or communism that, drunk as they were on such idiocies, meant that farming should be communalised. Now, agreed, I’m not an expert on the ins and outs of whatever the fools were scribbling in the pamphlets but I’m not actually aware of any such insistence. I also can’t see that peasant farming is in some manner unsocialist.
Capitalist farming, sure, wage labour and all that. Can see this might violate the principles of some urban idiot. But folks farming their own land? Why does that have to be collectivised?
Over at Works in Progress a piece that gives me a clue. Samuel Watling has a long description of how Stolypin worked on that road out of serfdom. Those who like this sort of thing will like this sort of thing. For me there was one great big “Ahhhhh!” moment. In the move from serfdom there was an intermediate stage:
Secondly, to replace the legal authority of the gentry in governing peasant life, the government gave legal authority to the village commune. The commune was the basic unit of village administration, typically consisting of 4–80 households, that governed three quarters of a million villages across Russia. It was governed by locals who were elected by the community and decided important matters at large village meetings. Following the abolition of serfdom the commune was recognized as a governing body and even given authority over the local police and the right to judge crimes as serious as assault.
The commune also had unique economic functions that the abolition of serfdom entrenched. Under the legal doctrine of collective responsibility, peasants interacted with the nobility and local administrators as a commune, not as individuals. They paid the poll tax as a commune. The institutions of peasant life thus had to fulfill two objectives: each member of the village had to be able to support themselves, and the village had to meet its collective obligations. The solution was to share the land between households based on their ability to pay the tax burden – for example, the number of able-bodied men in, or the livestock owned by, the family. As the main state tax was normally based on the number of working males, the land was periodically repartitioned to account for changes in household size.
Stolypin pushed the reforms that tried to change this. From something akin to the English medieval manorial system - at my level of detail that’s good enough, calling the Manor the Commune - to something much more like the individual farming after enclosure. As a short had for the economic shift undertaken. With the result that:
However, even given the acute constraint of state resources, the results on the ground were impressive. From 1906 to 1915, a sizable minority of the population was able to complete the options given to it by the government. By 1915 an area of 12.7 million dessiatine (approximately 140,000 square kilometers, greater than the size of England) had been transferred from communal land tenure to personal property. Slightly under 2.4 million households – 22 percent of total peasant households – had their claims processed and enacted by 1915. Approximately half (1.23 million) went through individual consolidation – people leaving the commune – and the other half (1.14 million) went through the consolidation of the whole commune itself.
In our own economic models that really is pretty close to what happened. From the open field manorial system to the enclosed field peasant one. And it all took place really very late - in that lead up to WWI.
This does not explain why someone would try to reverse this process. As the essay points out there was a vast increase in agricultural productivity as a result of this, Russia went from regular starvations to being the world’s largest grain exporter. And it wasn’t the grand estates which led this, it was those peasant farms. So if you’re interested in agricultural production, in productivity, this would be one of those things you’d leave alone.
Sure, yes, it’s entirely possible to start muttering that we need larger farm sizes and therefore we should be encouraging larger farms. So, communalism for that reason. But given the recent experience that’s not something that would be regarded as objectively true in the Soviet Union of the late 1920s and early 1930s. So, why do it? Why move back to the system of 20 and 30 years before which was known to be less productive?
As a method of farming we know it’s not good. So, why?
My Aha! moment is in this line:
the government gave legal authority to the village commune. The commune was the basic unit of village administration, typically consisting of 4–80 households, that governed three quarters of a million villages across Russia.
So, what if your concern were not agriculture or even productivity? But control. If you were, say, a paranoid Stalinist. As Stalin in fact was. And you wanted to be able to control everyone?
No fascist nor communist system has ever found it difficult to recruit the block captains who control the urban populations. But how do you control individual peasants farming their own plot of land? Reach back only a generation, not even that, to that previous method of control, the commune.
Job done.
Well, sure, millions starve as agricultural productivity drops 30 and 50%. But who cares about that if it is the control, not the agriculture, which is the aim?
Further, everyone would still recall how that old system worked - it was within living memory. That’s why there was a certain resistance on the part of the kulaks, they remembered what it had been like. There would also have been at least folk memories of what it had been like before that, under serfdom, too.
But, you’re the paranoid dictatorial type and it’s the control that’s important. And there is the method, already close to hand - the commune.
Now I don’t insist that this was the actual thought process - although I’m willing to believe that it was - but it does answer that question for me - why did they do it?
Communal farming simply doesn’t work. So, why did they communalise farming? Because it wasn’t about agriculture, it was about control. And they had that model, from only a couple of decades before, of how communes did control that rural population. And that’s the bit I didn’t know before, how it went serfdom to commune to enclosure and it was that last step that Stalin rolled back. They had the model to hand so why not?
Not a grand revelation, obviously, but it does answer that question for me - why did they do it? Because that was the model they had to hand for that control.