A Comparative Analysis of Lynne Viola’s Monographs on Collectivization in the Soviet Union
The drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture, an integral aspect of Stalin's First Five Year Plan revolution, was about more than agricultural production. As this comparative analysis of Russian historian Lynne Viola's monographs on collectivization will illustrate, collectivization defined the true dynamics of the Soviet revolution, which came to be defined less by class warfare, than by a civil war between city and countryside, worker and peasant. Under the auspicies of the dictatorial vanguard, a people's revolution was transformed into rule by a tyrannical, one-party state. The collectivization drive also had longstanding implications for the Soviet state, and is key to capturing the true dynamics of the 1917 revolution. Understanding the dynamics of the revolution is important, not only to the Russian historian, but to society at large, as communism and socialism have been discredited in the popular discourse based on the failure of the USSR which, I also hope to demonstrate, did not constitute a communist entity in virtually any sense of the word.
A Comparative Analysis of Lynne Viola’s Monographs on Collectivization in the Soviet Union
Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987.
The campaign to collectivize agricultural production in the Soviet Union, a vital component of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan revolution, marked a period of fundamental transformation for all realms of Russian society. In the countryside, the drive for wholesale collectivization constituted a full-scale assault on peasant culture, autonomy and subsistence. Indeed, to many peasants Soviet power and the collectivization campaign were synonymous with the antichrist and the advent of apocalypse. In the cities, collectivization was seen as a new front - a war against kulak saboteurs, endemic hunger, Russian backwardness and capitalist encirclement. The campaign was to be the final surge in realizing the utopian vision of the Communist revolution. For the Soviet regime, the collective farm was to be an instrument of state control, guaranteeing the procurement of grain while extending political and administrative control over the countryside to the detriment of peasant culture and autonomy.[1]
Russian historian Lynne Viola – the first Western scholar granted access to the Soviet state archives on collectivization, has prepared two English language monographs on the collectivization campaign: The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (1987) and Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (1996). Although the Russian Revolution has been widely portrayed in the Marxist context of class struggle, Viola argues that notions of class conflict served to veil the true dynamics of the revolution – a struggle between town and countryside, state and peasantry, modernity and “backwardness.”[2] Collectivization marked the culmination of this struggle, as the dictatorship of the proletariat launched an “all-out attack” in an attempt to transform the peasantry into a “cultural and economic colony.”[3]
While firmly condemning the state’s brutal assault on the countryside, Viola is critical of the emphasis Western-scholarship has placed on “high-politics,” and the tendency of simply “fixing blame” rather than “understanding the historical process and the actors who participated in the process.”[4] Viola quotes the late E.H. Carr who observed that much of Western historiography on the Soviet Union “has been vitiated by this inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of understanding what goes on in the mind of the other party…History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.”[5] Rather than engage in wholesale condemnation of what she describes as “one of the twentieth century’s most horrific episodes of mass repression,” Viola presents collectivization through the vantage of both worker and peasant in an attempt to capture the underlying dynamics of the campaign.
The Best Sons of the Fatherland provides a case study of the 25,000ers, a cross-section of the urban social base of the Stalin revolution. The 25,000ers were mobilized in December of 1929, as the violence and “dizziness” of the collectivization campaign reached a crescendo in the Soviet countryside. This particular group of workers, which Viola argues represent a significant portion of the working-class, were urbanized, hereditary proletariat with long factory tenure and records of service to the party and state.[6] In addition, many of these workers had participated in the “formative experience,” of the civil war which provided the “revolutionary myths and traditions” that Stalin would call upon during the mobilization.[7] Viola presents the 25,000ers as a vehicle to explore the dynamics of collectivization through an “on-the-scene angle of vision,” in order to illuminate the actual process of collectivization and how little Moscow’s intentions corresponded with the realities on the ground.[8] In doing so, Viola attempts to illustrate that Stalin’s “revolution from above” had a significant support base among the working class.[9] Thus, “understanding the motivations, perceptions and behavior of the cadres is necessary to analyze both the process of policy implementation and the often tragic consequences of both the policy and the process.”[10] Together with an examination of the political and social profile of the cadres, Viola seeks to “resurrect the mentality of the times,” as the brutal legacy of the 1930s has altered the “historical recollection” of the “optimism, excitement, and revolutionary militancy of the First Five-Year Plan revolution.”[11] While this atmosphere is often dismissed as artificial, or attributed to a few fringe elements or utopian dreamers, Viola argues that there was in fact a significant core of “true believers” whose mentality not only shaped the drive to collectivize agriculture but “preconditioned the country for the events of the 1930s.”[12] Thus, Viola examines the campaign of the 25,000ers in order to “achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom [she] is writing,” in this case, the rank and file cadre worker in the midst of the collectivization campaign.
While The Best Sons of the Fatherland presents the collectivization campaign from the vantage of the worker, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin examines the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and actions which formed a peasant “culture of resistance” against the brutal policies of the collectivization campaign.[13] Viola uses resistance as a prism to understand peasant consciousness, arguing that resistance allows the peasant to “speak out loud,” and thus grants a voice to an otherwise inaccessible sector of society.[14] Besides serving to complement her previous work on collectivization, Viola’s sequel aims to challenge the traditional image in Western scholarship of the “passive and inert Russian peasant,” as well as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s contention that the peasantry accepted collectivization “fatalistically.”[15] Ultimately, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin seeks to “understand something of the politics of the revolution by understanding the politics of the countryside during the climax of the revolution,” since Viola maintains the primary aspect of contention was never class, but rather city vs. countryside, state vs. peasantry.[16] In order to illustrate this dynamic, Viola focuses the study on the “circulatory of response and effect” between peasant actions and state policy.[17] Viola admits that due to the nature of sources, she must view peasant resistance through the lens of the state.[18] This does not detract from the study, however, as Viola utilizes the nature of the sources to examine the “official discourse” – “the language and mentality that transformed the peasantry into enemies.”[19] Finally, the study examines the consequences of peasant resistance for both the peasantry and the state.
I will now shift to a more in depth summary of Viola’s monographs, focusing on the evolution of her primary assertions. I will then demonstrate that within the context of collectivization as civil war, Viola’s ability to understand and articulate the mindset of each opposing side allows the reader to step back from the endemic brutality and understand the historical and social circumstances that served as a backdrop for the Stalinist revolution.
Viola opens The Best Sons of the Fatherland with a discussion of the civil war years, which served as a “formative experience” that would prefigure the behavior of workers and the state during the crises period of the late 1920s.[20] Lenin proclaimed that the rural-bourgeois were using grain “as a political weapon against Soviet power,” and workers were mobilized to procure grain for the urban base.[21] Although fierce peasant resistance ultimately forced a retreat, the war scare of 1927, combined with endemic food shortages reignited the civil war mentality among the urban-workers.[22] With Stalin’s calls for “extraordinary measures,” the rural officialdom launched the collectivization drive, and, understanding the need to exert central control over the process, the Central Committee passed a resolution authorizing the mobilization of the 25,000ers in November, 1929. Manipulating the radical, militant, revolutionary atmosphere the war scare and grain procurement crises had provoked among urban cadres, the state was able to mobilize the 25,000ers with resounding success.[23]
The success of the recruitment drive should not be overlooked, for as Viola illustrates “there was little material incentive for a skilled worker to leave his factory and share in the trials and tribulations of the collective farmer.”[24] Western scholars often attribute the high levels of success to coercion, but Viola dismisses this claim, arguing that state policy and workers interests overlapped on the issue of collectivization.[25] This of course was due in part to the success of the state in portraying collectivization as the solution to the “grievances, fears, and needs of a part of its working class.”[26] Understanding the political and social origins of these cadres, as well as the atmosphere in which they were mobilized, is significant not only to our comprehension of the collectivization campaign, but also to our understanding of the “social underpinnings of the Stalin revolution,” as these workers would come to dominate the party and state bureaucracies throughout the 1930s.[27]
Having established the historical circumstances surrounding the worker-cadres in question, Viola turns to the onset of the campaign, highlighting the disparities between central policy and implementation in the rural countryside. The 25,000ers arrived in late-January and early-February 1930 amid the frenzied drive to collectivize.[28] Upon arrival in the countryside, the disorder of the campaign became apparent, as hostile local officials had received no instructions for the newly dispatched workers.[29] Indicative of the bureaucratization that plagued the Soviet Union throughout its existence, some 19 different agencies were responsible for certain aspects of the 25,000ers campaign.[30] “Everyone was responsible but no one assumed responsibility,” Viola adds cynically.[31] It was not until March, following the retreat and consequent purge of rural officialdom that the 25,000ers, often the beneficiaries of the vacant positions, were able to settle in and begin to consolidate power.[32] The disorder of the campaign in the first months serves as a microcosm of the reigning disorder plaguing rural administration during the frenzied drive to collectivize.[33] While Moscow presented an image of total control, Viola argues “the center was both all-powerful and completely helpless.”[34]
Collectivization was initiated to undermine the old order, modernize agriculture, create reliable grain collection, facilitate a cultural revolution, and build a new administrative base in the countryside.[35] Not only had the local officials failed to create something new, but the violent force employed had severely disrupted the agricultural foundation.[36] The 25,00ers were left to “pick up the pieces after the destructive interference of district cadres.”[37] The March retreat, however, was more about reclaiming central control than stopping excesses, although there was some fear of a massive peasant uprising.[38] Placing blame on rural officials also held the innate assumption that central policy had been correct and realistic, and with better leadership might well have been successfully implemented.[39] As the 25,000ers would come to find, however, such assumptions did not hold true when faced with the realities of the Russian countryside.
With the 25,000ers finally settled into the newly vacated positions as collective farm heads and rural officials, the “constructive phase of the socialist transformation of the countryside” was set to begin.[40] For many of the 25,000ers, “collectivization was much more than simply a struggle for grain,” it was a revolution aimed at forever destroying the antagonisms dividing city and countryside by rooting out the “idiocy of rural life.”[41] The directives were to come from the center as well as from the cadres own factory experience, however it soon became apparent that a third factor would play a decisive role in shaping the formation of the collective farm as well.[42] Bringing the “proletarian experience” to the countryside - the organization of piecework, wage scales, labor discipline, production conferences, shock work, and socialist competition - meant an entirely new form of life and labor, one that necessarily entailed the destruction of traditional means of farming and led to a direct clash between two disparate cultures.[43] The peasantry responded with numerous forms of active and passive resistance and the 25,000ers were forced to balance the factory experience and directives from the center with traditional peasant norms. Ultimately, the collective farms that were most successful were those that interfered least with peasant traditions.[44] By 1932 the state was forced to accept a socialized agriculture which combined elements of old and new to varying degrees.
On 23 December 1931, the Central Committee issued a decree coinciding with the conclusion of the First Five-Year Plan revolution which instructed regional and district organs not to retain those 25,000ers who wished to return to the factory.[45] Although the First Five-Year Plan had been a relative success, the realities of rural Russia had led to a loss of revolutionary momentum.[46] Consolidation and gradualism became the new order of the day.[47] Many of the cadres, increasingly isolated from the revolution, the working class, and the factory, returned to the city.[48] Despite the hardships and loss of revolutionary momentum, some 18,000 of the original 27,000 cadres deployed in the 25,000er campaign served until the end. The relative success of the campaign, as well as the dedication of the workers illustrated the strong social foundations upon which the Stalinist revolution was built.[49] It was these same workers - activists, party members, highly skilled workers and civil war veterans that would rise up through the party and state bureaucracy to replace the cadres purged in the 1930s.[50]
The workers took a leading role in the construction of the collective farm system, helping to establish a basic structure that would remain by and large unchanged throughout the Soviet period.[51] The irony of the revolution in the countryside is that its outcome was directed less by the center than by the “undisciplined and irresponsible” activities of rural officials and the experimentation of the collective farm leaders (25,000ers) who attempted to pick up the mess.[52] The experience of the 25,000ers was indicative of the gap between Moscow’s intentions and the actual implementation of policy.[53] The state ruled by decree but did not have the proper organizational infrastructure or manpower to ensure proper implementation.[54]
Like The Best Sons of the Fatherland, Viola begins Peasant Rebels Under Stalin with a discussion of the civil war. The brutalizing legacy of years of war, revolution and civil war created a party determined to wage what Lenin called “the last and most decisive battle.”[55] Foreshadowing the mind-set of the late 1920s, in May 1918 Lenin declared that anyone with surplus grain, regardless of social status would be regarded as “enemies of the people.”[56] In order to justify the contradiction, Lenin cited a “kulak mood [that] prevails among the peasants.”[57] Any anti-party activity could be labeled as kulak activity, therefore peasant revolts against grain requisitioning became kulak revolts against the people.[58] It is important to establish this precedent, as the official discourse was used to dehumanize the peasantry, thereby making repression and violence permissible.
The smychka of the mid-1920s was short-lived, as the grain procurement crises – partially created by Soviet pricing policies, was interpreted in the city as a “kulak grain strike,” igniting a civil war-like mood and mentality.[59] Collectivization and dekulakization campaigns began in the summer of 1929, jumping the rails of central control and creating an escalating cycle of violence.[60] In the countryside the party and the collective farm came to be viewed in apocalyptic terms, declaring them to be “tools of the antichrist,” while in the town the peasantry became a “parasite, able and willing to hold the town hostage.”[61] Poor and middle peasants who “rebelled” were deemed podkulachniki, literally “under the kulak” or agents of the kulaks.[62] Despite the clear political and social aims of peasant rebellion, the kulak lost all political agency and was deemed a “terrorist,” “bandit” or “arsonist.”[63] While hostile actions by the peasantry were demonized, atrocities committed by the state or its agents “became mistakes, deviations, or excesses committed by cadres who were “dizzy from success” rather than by criminals or savages.”[64]
With collectivization and dekulakization came a wholesale assault on peasant culture as well. Churches were closed, bells were removed and priests were arrested.[65] Other cultural institutions and social spaces were also targeted such as agricultural markets, the peasant commune, the skhod (peasant council), mills and shops in order to eliminate key grounds for meeting and interaction.[66] Community leaders such as priests, intelligentsia, village elders, craftsmen, traders and shop-owners were targeted as well.[67] It is against this repressive backdrop that Viola condemns collectivization as internal colonization, both economically and culturally.[68] In response, peasants of every social-stratum united behind their common culture, forming a culture of resistance rooted in biblical notions of the apocalypse.[69]
Rumors, ever-present among peasantries during times of fear and upheaval “spread like wildfire throughout the [Soviet] countryside.”[70] Rumors of the return of serfdom, the coming of the apocalypse and the imposition of the “common blanket,” were all used as weapons “in the arsenal of peasant resistance.”[71] The apocalyptic tradition was used to delegitimize collective farms and the state that backed them as many peasants argued that to join the collective farm was to be stamped with the mark of the beast.[72] “Tales of moral abomination in the collective farms served as metaphors for the amorality, atheism, and evil of communism,” while rumors of the return of serfdom implied a betrayal of the revolution.[73]
Another non-violent tool in the arsenal of peasant resistance came in the form of collective and individual forms of self-help. Razbazarivanie, or Luddism - the “squandering,” destruction or sale of livestock, machinery and crops was utilized for the purpose of self-dekulakization, protest and/or sabotage.[74] A collective form of self-help was community defense, as peasants across the countryside declared “we have no kulaks here.”[75] Some peasants even went so far as to boycott the sale of expropriated properties in a demonstration of solidarity.[76] The long-standing tradition of peasant complaint through letters and petitions also remained strong, despite the fact that petitioning could bring charges of counterrevolutionary activity.[77] Forms of collective resistance both undermined and enhanced Stalin’s revolution in the countryside, undermining it through vast destruction and opposition, while enabling him to “kulakize,” and therefore wage war against, the entire countryside.[78]
As state policies continued to back the peasant into a corner, however, violence was increasingly seen as the sole recourse to state repression.[79] Violence had always been a last recourse for peasants, however forced to resort to such measures, they played into the state image of terror, becoming “kulaks with sawed-off shotguns,” in the official discourse.[80] Terror served as both a threat, as well as retribution for anyone who might break from the village community.[81] Arson, known as the “red rooster,” was also a powerful tool, as it could be portrayed as an accident by the perpetrators, and consequently accidental fires could be portrayed as arson as well.[82] Peasant summary justice (Samosud), part of a traditional and brutal form of peasant justice, could take the form of beatings, burning, drowning or even the murder of one’s family.[83] While peasant terror was indeed dangerous to the state, it also served to “sustain the violent momentum of the state’s campaign and to rationalize the repression of the peasantry.”[84]
The cycle of state repression and peasant violence reached a crescendo in March of 1930, a period described as “March fever,” in an attempt to cast it in a pathological light.[85] March fever was marked by a sharp increase in mass disturbances often with women assuming the leading role as the men waited on the sides, armed, waiting for the outbreak of violence.[86] Women’s riots (bab’i bunty) may in fact have been the “dominant mode of active protest in the peasant culture of resistance during collectivization.”[87] Women understood that they had little chance of being punished, as the state designated them as “irrational,” and thus apolitical.[88] Viola argues that these riots were often in response to “generic” peasant concerns including threats to subsistence, the village ethos of collectivism or symbols of village culture and tradition.[89]
The “March fever” of 1930, however “represented the last real wave of active resistance on any large scale, the final open, collective act in the peasant civil war against Soviet power.”[90] There was much less resistance to the Fall collectivization campaign, as the peasantry was already “too exhausted by food shortages and state repression to continue active collective resistance.”[91] By the end of 1930 peasant resistance entered a new phase under the official rubric of tikhaia sapa - “on the sly,” “a quiet or stealthful undermining or weakening of foundations.”[92] This form of resistance included refusal to work, foot dragging, dissimulation, pilfering, flight and sabotage as the peasants struggled against those who sought to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interests from them.[93] Such forms of resistance had been deeply ingrained from the earliest days of serfdom and into the Soviet period.[94] These forms of resistance would continue to varying degrees throughout the Soviet period. In 1935 the Model Collective Farm Statute fully legalized private plots, ensured the inviolability of private property and even allowed the use of collective farm horses - at a price - for private usage.[95] The state understood they would have to accept certain realities of the countryside and settle for “just” taking grain, rather than completely re-socializing the peasant colony.[96] While the peasantry did not emerge triumphant, resistance had maintained the cohesiveness and durability of the peasantry as an “autonomous social formation.” Peasant resistance to state repression had led to an uneasy truce between city and countryside with consolidation and compromise extended from each end of the spectrum.
The grain procurement crises combined with the war scare in the late 1920s struck a death blow to the uneasy alliance (smychka) between worker and peasant. In the urban sphere, chronic unemployment, housing problems and a lack of material benefits combined with the food supply crises and the reintroduction of rationing to plague urban workers.[97] Stalin successfully presented the shortcomings of the state as products of internal sabotage and argued that collectivization “as an integral part of industrialization and the resolution of food supply problems, was of immediate interest to the working class.”[98] The peasantry, meanwhile, saw intrusion from Soviet power as the advent of the apocalypse, the return of serfdom, the onslaught of amorality and/or a direct threat to their very means of subsistence. Resurrecting the mentality of the times, understanding the escalating cycle of violence and placing collectivization within its proper historical context, Lynne Viola, in her complementary monographs, is able to instill a degree of empathy for both the worker and the peasant as they engaged in a brutal civil war.
Nevertheless, while Viola’s monographs excel in accessing the mind-set of the workers, peasants and central authorities, they fail to offer the reader a sufficient understanding of why the rural officialdom acted as it did. While offering explanations, though not necessarily justifications, for the actions of the other major players, Viola fails to provide access into the rural officialdom and thus, perhaps inadvertently, fixes much of the blame for the “excesses” of the collectivization campaign upon them. Perhaps a third study on collectivization from the vantage of the rural officialdom would serve to complement the reader’s understanding of the “historical process and the actors” – in this case the local officials – “who participated in the process.”
[1]Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of
Peasant Resistance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996., vii
[2] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, viii
[3] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, vii
[4]Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987, 5
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 6, 34
[7] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 9, 16
[8] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 5
[9] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 6
[10] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 5
[11] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 6
[12] Ibid.
[13] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 4
[14] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 4-5
[15] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 4
[16] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, viii
[17] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 11
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 9
[21] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 10
[22] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 26-7
[23] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 25
[24] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 56
[25] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 53
[26] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 72
[27] Ibid.
[28] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 74
[29] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 79-80
[30] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 87
[31] Ibid.
[32] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 88
[33] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 89
[34] Ibid.
[35] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 91
[36] Ibid.
[37] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 104
[38] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 114
[39] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 115
[40] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 152
[41] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 153
[42] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 154
[43] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 161
[44] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 160
[45] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 179-80
[46] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 180
[47] Ibid.
[48] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 186
[49] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 211
[50] Ibid.
[51] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 215
[52] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 216
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 15
[56] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 16
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 21
[60] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 28
[61] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 30-1
[62] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 34
[63] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 36
[64] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 37
[65] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 39
[66] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 40-1
[67] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 41
[68] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 44
[69] Ibid.
[70] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 45
[71] Ibid.
[72] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 55-6
[73] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 59
[74] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 68
[75] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 88
[76] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 90
[77] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 91, 93
[78] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 99
[79] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 100
[80] Ibid.
[81] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 101
[82] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 121-2
[83] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 127
[84] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 130
[85] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 132
[86] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 154-5
[87]Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 197
[88] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 204
[89] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 155
[90] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 176
[91] Ibid.
[92] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 205
[93] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 206
[94] Ibid.
[95]Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 232
[96] Ibid.
[97] The Best Sons of the Fatherland 24-5
[98] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 27
A Comparative Analysis of Lynne Viola’s Monographs on Collectivization in the Soviet Union
Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987.
The campaign to collectivize agricultural production in the Soviet Union, a vital component of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan revolution, marked a period of fundamental transformation for all realms of Russian society. In the countryside, the drive for wholesale collectivization constituted a full-scale assault on peasant culture, autonomy and subsistence. Indeed, to many peasants Soviet power and the collectivization campaign were synonymous with the antichrist and the advent of apocalypse. In the cities, collectivization was seen as a new front - a war against kulak saboteurs, endemic hunger, Russian backwardness and capitalist encirclement. The campaign was to be the final surge in realizing the utopian vision of the Communist revolution. For the Soviet regime, the collective farm was to be an instrument of state control, guaranteeing the procurement of grain while extending political and administrative control over the countryside to the detriment of peasant culture and autonomy.[1]
Russian historian Lynne Viola – the first Western scholar granted access to the Soviet state archives on collectivization, has prepared two English language monographs on the collectivization campaign: The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (1987) and Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (1996). Although the Russian Revolution has been widely portrayed in the Marxist context of class struggle, Viola argues that notions of class conflict served to veil the true dynamics of the revolution – a struggle between town and countryside, state and peasantry, modernity and “backwardness.”[2] Collectivization marked the culmination of this struggle, as the dictatorship of the proletariat launched an “all-out attack” in an attempt to transform the peasantry into a “cultural and economic colony.”[3]
While firmly condemning the state’s brutal assault on the countryside, Viola is critical of the emphasis Western-scholarship has placed on “high-politics,” and the tendency of simply “fixing blame” rather than “understanding the historical process and the actors who participated in the process.”[4] Viola quotes the late E.H. Carr who observed that much of Western historiography on the Soviet Union “has been vitiated by this inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of understanding what goes on in the mind of the other party…History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.”[5] Rather than engage in wholesale condemnation of what she describes as “one of the twentieth century’s most horrific episodes of mass repression,” Viola presents collectivization through the vantage of both worker and peasant in an attempt to capture the underlying dynamics of the campaign.
The Best Sons of the Fatherland provides a case study of the 25,000ers, a cross-section of the urban social base of the Stalin revolution. The 25,000ers were mobilized in December of 1929, as the violence and “dizziness” of the collectivization campaign reached a crescendo in the Soviet countryside. This particular group of workers, which Viola argues represent a significant portion of the working-class, were urbanized, hereditary proletariat with long factory tenure and records of service to the party and state.[6] In addition, many of these workers had participated in the “formative experience,” of the civil war which provided the “revolutionary myths and traditions” that Stalin would call upon during the mobilization.[7] Viola presents the 25,000ers as a vehicle to explore the dynamics of collectivization through an “on-the-scene angle of vision,” in order to illuminate the actual process of collectivization and how little Moscow’s intentions corresponded with the realities on the ground.[8] In doing so, Viola attempts to illustrate that Stalin’s “revolution from above” had a significant support base among the working class.[9] Thus, “understanding the motivations, perceptions and behavior of the cadres is necessary to analyze both the process of policy implementation and the often tragic consequences of both the policy and the process.”[10] Together with an examination of the political and social profile of the cadres, Viola seeks to “resurrect the mentality of the times,” as the brutal legacy of the 1930s has altered the “historical recollection” of the “optimism, excitement, and revolutionary militancy of the First Five-Year Plan revolution.”[11] While this atmosphere is often dismissed as artificial, or attributed to a few fringe elements or utopian dreamers, Viola argues that there was in fact a significant core of “true believers” whose mentality not only shaped the drive to collectivize agriculture but “preconditioned the country for the events of the 1930s.”[12] Thus, Viola examines the campaign of the 25,000ers in order to “achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom [she] is writing,” in this case, the rank and file cadre worker in the midst of the collectivization campaign.
While The Best Sons of the Fatherland presents the collectivization campaign from the vantage of the worker, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin examines the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and actions which formed a peasant “culture of resistance” against the brutal policies of the collectivization campaign.[13] Viola uses resistance as a prism to understand peasant consciousness, arguing that resistance allows the peasant to “speak out loud,” and thus grants a voice to an otherwise inaccessible sector of society.[14] Besides serving to complement her previous work on collectivization, Viola’s sequel aims to challenge the traditional image in Western scholarship of the “passive and inert Russian peasant,” as well as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s contention that the peasantry accepted collectivization “fatalistically.”[15] Ultimately, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin seeks to “understand something of the politics of the revolution by understanding the politics of the countryside during the climax of the revolution,” since Viola maintains the primary aspect of contention was never class, but rather city vs. countryside, state vs. peasantry.[16] In order to illustrate this dynamic, Viola focuses the study on the “circulatory of response and effect” between peasant actions and state policy.[17] Viola admits that due to the nature of sources, she must view peasant resistance through the lens of the state.[18] This does not detract from the study, however, as Viola utilizes the nature of the sources to examine the “official discourse” – “the language and mentality that transformed the peasantry into enemies.”[19] Finally, the study examines the consequences of peasant resistance for both the peasantry and the state.
I will now shift to a more in depth summary of Viola’s monographs, focusing on the evolution of her primary assertions. I will then demonstrate that within the context of collectivization as civil war, Viola’s ability to understand and articulate the mindset of each opposing side allows the reader to step back from the endemic brutality and understand the historical and social circumstances that served as a backdrop for the Stalinist revolution.
Viola opens The Best Sons of the Fatherland with a discussion of the civil war years, which served as a “formative experience” that would prefigure the behavior of workers and the state during the crises period of the late 1920s.[20] Lenin proclaimed that the rural-bourgeois were using grain “as a political weapon against Soviet power,” and workers were mobilized to procure grain for the urban base.[21] Although fierce peasant resistance ultimately forced a retreat, the war scare of 1927, combined with endemic food shortages reignited the civil war mentality among the urban-workers.[22] With Stalin’s calls for “extraordinary measures,” the rural officialdom launched the collectivization drive, and, understanding the need to exert central control over the process, the Central Committee passed a resolution authorizing the mobilization of the 25,000ers in November, 1929. Manipulating the radical, militant, revolutionary atmosphere the war scare and grain procurement crises had provoked among urban cadres, the state was able to mobilize the 25,000ers with resounding success.[23]
The success of the recruitment drive should not be overlooked, for as Viola illustrates “there was little material incentive for a skilled worker to leave his factory and share in the trials and tribulations of the collective farmer.”[24] Western scholars often attribute the high levels of success to coercion, but Viola dismisses this claim, arguing that state policy and workers interests overlapped on the issue of collectivization.[25] This of course was due in part to the success of the state in portraying collectivization as the solution to the “grievances, fears, and needs of a part of its working class.”[26] Understanding the political and social origins of these cadres, as well as the atmosphere in which they were mobilized, is significant not only to our comprehension of the collectivization campaign, but also to our understanding of the “social underpinnings of the Stalin revolution,” as these workers would come to dominate the party and state bureaucracies throughout the 1930s.[27]
Having established the historical circumstances surrounding the worker-cadres in question, Viola turns to the onset of the campaign, highlighting the disparities between central policy and implementation in the rural countryside. The 25,000ers arrived in late-January and early-February 1930 amid the frenzied drive to collectivize.[28] Upon arrival in the countryside, the disorder of the campaign became apparent, as hostile local officials had received no instructions for the newly dispatched workers.[29] Indicative of the bureaucratization that plagued the Soviet Union throughout its existence, some 19 different agencies were responsible for certain aspects of the 25,000ers campaign.[30] “Everyone was responsible but no one assumed responsibility,” Viola adds cynically.[31] It was not until March, following the retreat and consequent purge of rural officialdom that the 25,000ers, often the beneficiaries of the vacant positions, were able to settle in and begin to consolidate power.[32] The disorder of the campaign in the first months serves as a microcosm of the reigning disorder plaguing rural administration during the frenzied drive to collectivize.[33] While Moscow presented an image of total control, Viola argues “the center was both all-powerful and completely helpless.”[34]
Collectivization was initiated to undermine the old order, modernize agriculture, create reliable grain collection, facilitate a cultural revolution, and build a new administrative base in the countryside.[35] Not only had the local officials failed to create something new, but the violent force employed had severely disrupted the agricultural foundation.[36] The 25,00ers were left to “pick up the pieces after the destructive interference of district cadres.”[37] The March retreat, however, was more about reclaiming central control than stopping excesses, although there was some fear of a massive peasant uprising.[38] Placing blame on rural officials also held the innate assumption that central policy had been correct and realistic, and with better leadership might well have been successfully implemented.[39] As the 25,000ers would come to find, however, such assumptions did not hold true when faced with the realities of the Russian countryside.
With the 25,000ers finally settled into the newly vacated positions as collective farm heads and rural officials, the “constructive phase of the socialist transformation of the countryside” was set to begin.[40] For many of the 25,000ers, “collectivization was much more than simply a struggle for grain,” it was a revolution aimed at forever destroying the antagonisms dividing city and countryside by rooting out the “idiocy of rural life.”[41] The directives were to come from the center as well as from the cadres own factory experience, however it soon became apparent that a third factor would play a decisive role in shaping the formation of the collective farm as well.[42] Bringing the “proletarian experience” to the countryside - the organization of piecework, wage scales, labor discipline, production conferences, shock work, and socialist competition - meant an entirely new form of life and labor, one that necessarily entailed the destruction of traditional means of farming and led to a direct clash between two disparate cultures.[43] The peasantry responded with numerous forms of active and passive resistance and the 25,000ers were forced to balance the factory experience and directives from the center with traditional peasant norms. Ultimately, the collective farms that were most successful were those that interfered least with peasant traditions.[44] By 1932 the state was forced to accept a socialized agriculture which combined elements of old and new to varying degrees.
On 23 December 1931, the Central Committee issued a decree coinciding with the conclusion of the First Five-Year Plan revolution which instructed regional and district organs not to retain those 25,000ers who wished to return to the factory.[45] Although the First Five-Year Plan had been a relative success, the realities of rural Russia had led to a loss of revolutionary momentum.[46] Consolidation and gradualism became the new order of the day.[47] Many of the cadres, increasingly isolated from the revolution, the working class, and the factory, returned to the city.[48] Despite the hardships and loss of revolutionary momentum, some 18,000 of the original 27,000 cadres deployed in the 25,000er campaign served until the end. The relative success of the campaign, as well as the dedication of the workers illustrated the strong social foundations upon which the Stalinist revolution was built.[49] It was these same workers - activists, party members, highly skilled workers and civil war veterans that would rise up through the party and state bureaucracy to replace the cadres purged in the 1930s.[50]
The workers took a leading role in the construction of the collective farm system, helping to establish a basic structure that would remain by and large unchanged throughout the Soviet period.[51] The irony of the revolution in the countryside is that its outcome was directed less by the center than by the “undisciplined and irresponsible” activities of rural officials and the experimentation of the collective farm leaders (25,000ers) who attempted to pick up the mess.[52] The experience of the 25,000ers was indicative of the gap between Moscow’s intentions and the actual implementation of policy.[53] The state ruled by decree but did not have the proper organizational infrastructure or manpower to ensure proper implementation.[54]
Like The Best Sons of the Fatherland, Viola begins Peasant Rebels Under Stalin with a discussion of the civil war. The brutalizing legacy of years of war, revolution and civil war created a party determined to wage what Lenin called “the last and most decisive battle.”[55] Foreshadowing the mind-set of the late 1920s, in May 1918 Lenin declared that anyone with surplus grain, regardless of social status would be regarded as “enemies of the people.”[56] In order to justify the contradiction, Lenin cited a “kulak mood [that] prevails among the peasants.”[57] Any anti-party activity could be labeled as kulak activity, therefore peasant revolts against grain requisitioning became kulak revolts against the people.[58] It is important to establish this precedent, as the official discourse was used to dehumanize the peasantry, thereby making repression and violence permissible.
The smychka of the mid-1920s was short-lived, as the grain procurement crises – partially created by Soviet pricing policies, was interpreted in the city as a “kulak grain strike,” igniting a civil war-like mood and mentality.[59] Collectivization and dekulakization campaigns began in the summer of 1929, jumping the rails of central control and creating an escalating cycle of violence.[60] In the countryside the party and the collective farm came to be viewed in apocalyptic terms, declaring them to be “tools of the antichrist,” while in the town the peasantry became a “parasite, able and willing to hold the town hostage.”[61] Poor and middle peasants who “rebelled” were deemed podkulachniki, literally “under the kulak” or agents of the kulaks.[62] Despite the clear political and social aims of peasant rebellion, the kulak lost all political agency and was deemed a “terrorist,” “bandit” or “arsonist.”[63] While hostile actions by the peasantry were demonized, atrocities committed by the state or its agents “became mistakes, deviations, or excesses committed by cadres who were “dizzy from success” rather than by criminals or savages.”[64]
With collectivization and dekulakization came a wholesale assault on peasant culture as well. Churches were closed, bells were removed and priests were arrested.[65] Other cultural institutions and social spaces were also targeted such as agricultural markets, the peasant commune, the skhod (peasant council), mills and shops in order to eliminate key grounds for meeting and interaction.[66] Community leaders such as priests, intelligentsia, village elders, craftsmen, traders and shop-owners were targeted as well.[67] It is against this repressive backdrop that Viola condemns collectivization as internal colonization, both economically and culturally.[68] In response, peasants of every social-stratum united behind their common culture, forming a culture of resistance rooted in biblical notions of the apocalypse.[69]
Rumors, ever-present among peasantries during times of fear and upheaval “spread like wildfire throughout the [Soviet] countryside.”[70] Rumors of the return of serfdom, the coming of the apocalypse and the imposition of the “common blanket,” were all used as weapons “in the arsenal of peasant resistance.”[71] The apocalyptic tradition was used to delegitimize collective farms and the state that backed them as many peasants argued that to join the collective farm was to be stamped with the mark of the beast.[72] “Tales of moral abomination in the collective farms served as metaphors for the amorality, atheism, and evil of communism,” while rumors of the return of serfdom implied a betrayal of the revolution.[73]
Another non-violent tool in the arsenal of peasant resistance came in the form of collective and individual forms of self-help. Razbazarivanie, or Luddism - the “squandering,” destruction or sale of livestock, machinery and crops was utilized for the purpose of self-dekulakization, protest and/or sabotage.[74] A collective form of self-help was community defense, as peasants across the countryside declared “we have no kulaks here.”[75] Some peasants even went so far as to boycott the sale of expropriated properties in a demonstration of solidarity.[76] The long-standing tradition of peasant complaint through letters and petitions also remained strong, despite the fact that petitioning could bring charges of counterrevolutionary activity.[77] Forms of collective resistance both undermined and enhanced Stalin’s revolution in the countryside, undermining it through vast destruction and opposition, while enabling him to “kulakize,” and therefore wage war against, the entire countryside.[78]
As state policies continued to back the peasant into a corner, however, violence was increasingly seen as the sole recourse to state repression.[79] Violence had always been a last recourse for peasants, however forced to resort to such measures, they played into the state image of terror, becoming “kulaks with sawed-off shotguns,” in the official discourse.[80] Terror served as both a threat, as well as retribution for anyone who might break from the village community.[81] Arson, known as the “red rooster,” was also a powerful tool, as it could be portrayed as an accident by the perpetrators, and consequently accidental fires could be portrayed as arson as well.[82] Peasant summary justice (Samosud), part of a traditional and brutal form of peasant justice, could take the form of beatings, burning, drowning or even the murder of one’s family.[83] While peasant terror was indeed dangerous to the state, it also served to “sustain the violent momentum of the state’s campaign and to rationalize the repression of the peasantry.”[84]
The cycle of state repression and peasant violence reached a crescendo in March of 1930, a period described as “March fever,” in an attempt to cast it in a pathological light.[85] March fever was marked by a sharp increase in mass disturbances often with women assuming the leading role as the men waited on the sides, armed, waiting for the outbreak of violence.[86] Women’s riots (bab’i bunty) may in fact have been the “dominant mode of active protest in the peasant culture of resistance during collectivization.”[87] Women understood that they had little chance of being punished, as the state designated them as “irrational,” and thus apolitical.[88] Viola argues that these riots were often in response to “generic” peasant concerns including threats to subsistence, the village ethos of collectivism or symbols of village culture and tradition.[89]
The “March fever” of 1930, however “represented the last real wave of active resistance on any large scale, the final open, collective act in the peasant civil war against Soviet power.”[90] There was much less resistance to the Fall collectivization campaign, as the peasantry was already “too exhausted by food shortages and state repression to continue active collective resistance.”[91] By the end of 1930 peasant resistance entered a new phase under the official rubric of tikhaia sapa - “on the sly,” “a quiet or stealthful undermining or weakening of foundations.”[92] This form of resistance included refusal to work, foot dragging, dissimulation, pilfering, flight and sabotage as the peasants struggled against those who sought to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interests from them.[93] Such forms of resistance had been deeply ingrained from the earliest days of serfdom and into the Soviet period.[94] These forms of resistance would continue to varying degrees throughout the Soviet period. In 1935 the Model Collective Farm Statute fully legalized private plots, ensured the inviolability of private property and even allowed the use of collective farm horses - at a price - for private usage.[95] The state understood they would have to accept certain realities of the countryside and settle for “just” taking grain, rather than completely re-socializing the peasant colony.[96] While the peasantry did not emerge triumphant, resistance had maintained the cohesiveness and durability of the peasantry as an “autonomous social formation.” Peasant resistance to state repression had led to an uneasy truce between city and countryside with consolidation and compromise extended from each end of the spectrum.
The grain procurement crises combined with the war scare in the late 1920s struck a death blow to the uneasy alliance (smychka) between worker and peasant. In the urban sphere, chronic unemployment, housing problems and a lack of material benefits combined with the food supply crises and the reintroduction of rationing to plague urban workers.[97] Stalin successfully presented the shortcomings of the state as products of internal sabotage and argued that collectivization “as an integral part of industrialization and the resolution of food supply problems, was of immediate interest to the working class.”[98] The peasantry, meanwhile, saw intrusion from Soviet power as the advent of the apocalypse, the return of serfdom, the onslaught of amorality and/or a direct threat to their very means of subsistence. Resurrecting the mentality of the times, understanding the escalating cycle of violence and placing collectivization within its proper historical context, Lynne Viola, in her complementary monographs, is able to instill a degree of empathy for both the worker and the peasant as they engaged in a brutal civil war.
Nevertheless, while Viola’s monographs excel in accessing the mind-set of the workers, peasants and central authorities, they fail to offer the reader a sufficient understanding of why the rural officialdom acted as it did. While offering explanations, though not necessarily justifications, for the actions of the other major players, Viola fails to provide access into the rural officialdom and thus, perhaps inadvertently, fixes much of the blame for the “excesses” of the collectivization campaign upon them. Perhaps a third study on collectivization from the vantage of the rural officialdom would serve to complement the reader’s understanding of the “historical process and the actors” – in this case the local officials – “who participated in the process.”
[1]Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of
Peasant Resistance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996., vii
[2] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, viii
[3] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, vii
[4]Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987, 5
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 6, 34
[7] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 9, 16
[8] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 5
[9] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 6
[10] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 5
[11] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 6
[12] Ibid.
[13] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 4
[14] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 4-5
[15] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 4
[16] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, viii
[17] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 11
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 9
[21] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 10
[22] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 26-7
[23] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 25
[24] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 56
[25] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 53
[26] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 72
[27] Ibid.
[28] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 74
[29] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 79-80
[30] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 87
[31] Ibid.
[32] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 88
[33] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 89
[34] Ibid.
[35] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 91
[36] Ibid.
[37] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 104
[38] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 114
[39] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 115
[40] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 152
[41] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 153
[42] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 154
[43] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 161
[44] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 160
[45] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 179-80
[46] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 180
[47] Ibid.
[48] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 186
[49] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 211
[50] Ibid.
[51] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 215
[52] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 216
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 15
[56] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 16
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 21
[60] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 28
[61] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 30-1
[62] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 34
[63] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 36
[64] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 37
[65] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 39
[66] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 40-1
[67] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 41
[68] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 44
[69] Ibid.
[70] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 45
[71] Ibid.
[72] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 55-6
[73] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 59
[74] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 68
[75] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 88
[76] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 90
[77] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 91, 93
[78] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 99
[79] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 100
[80] Ibid.
[81] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 101
[82] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 121-2
[83] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 127
[84] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 130
[85] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 132
[86] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 154-5
[87]Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 197
[88] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 204
[89] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 155
[90] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 176
[91] Ibid.
[92] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 205
[93] Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 206
[94] Ibid.
[95]Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, 232
[96] Ibid.
[97] The Best Sons of the Fatherland 24-5
[98] The Best Sons of the Fatherland, 27
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