Read Online Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark - Free Book Online
Authors: Norman M. Naimark
Tags: General, History, Military, 20th Century, Europe, Other, Modern, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, 9780691147840
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party credentials, and shunted off to the side. By the end of the 1930s they were sent to labor camps or shot.
3 Dekulakization
The Achilles heel of Soviet power, the problem to which the Bolsheviks returned repeatedly with little success, was the relative backwardness of the peasantry, which comprised the vast majority of the population of the Soviet Union. Everything about the peasants irritated the Bolsheviks: their religiosity and their attachment to cus-tomary law, their supposed primitiveness and inherently petit-bourgeois mentality. Throughout the late nineteenth century, European Marxists spoke of “the idiocy of rural life,” full of the prejudices of urban elites and beliefs in the progressive qualities of the factory proletariat. Lenin at least understood that the Russian peasantry had some revolutionary qualities, and that poor and middle peasants could serve as the allies of the working class in a revolutionary situation. Indeed, in the revolution of 1917
the Russian peasantry served as an important combus-tible force—in the army as raw recruits, in the factories as newly recruited peasant-workers, and in the villages as landless and land-hungry farmers—that helped bring down the autocracy in February 1917 and chased the Provisional Government from power in October.
52
chapter 3
Many historians note that peasants are often the first to rise in revolution and the first to suffer at its hands, and the revolution of 1917 is no exception. True, the Bolsheviks’ “Decree on Land” of November 8, 1917, granted the peasants’ demand for ownership of the land, fulfilling the dreams of rural Russia since the peasant uprisings of the seventeenth century. But already in 1918, as the Bolsheviks desperately needed to collect grain for securing their power and fighting the Civil War, the peasants’ rights to the land were quickly rescinded, and forced grain collection by armed groups of Red Army soldiers and hastily armed workers’ detachments alienated the same peasant producers who had helped to bring down the old order with their violent rebelliousness ( buntarstvo ).
The Civil War in the countryside was brutal and lethal.
Millions of peasants died in the conflict, some fighting on one side or the other, many simply caught in between the back and forth of the competing White and Red armies, Anarchists, Ukrainian factions, Cossacks, and the plethora of nationalist fighters. The forced expropriation of grain and attempts to collectivize the countryside led to pitched battles between peasants and the new representatives of Soviet power. Peasant uprisings broke out in the Tambov region and along the Volga. A terrible famine raged in the same regions and across Russia and Ukraine, as the policies of the Soviet government destroyed the productive capabilities of rural Russia. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no choice but to exercise a retreat in the countryside, a so-called peasant Brest, a temporary compromise with the economic realities of the Soviet countryside. In 1921
dekulakization 53
the Bolsheviks introduced what was called the New Economic Policy, which called for a halt to forced grain requisitioning, allowed the peasants to accumulate and trade in grain products, and trumpeted the smychka , the alliance between workers and peasants. Many historians consider this simply a pause between the first major Bolshevik war against the peasantry (1919–22) and the second and final one to follow (1928–33).1
Certainly the NEP had economic and political costs that were unacceptable to Stalin and his allies in the Politburo.
What is often called the “Second Revolution” in studies of the Soviet Union was really the breakneck and widely violent attempt by Stalin to steer the economy in a different direction and to save the Bolshevik Revolution—and his leadership of it—from what he feared was its potential disintegration. Therefore, in 1928 he introduced the First Five-Year Plan, which was intended to
3 Dekulakization
The Achilles heel of Soviet power, the problem to which the Bolsheviks returned repeatedly with little success, was the relative backwardness of the peasantry, which comprised the vast majority of the population of the Soviet Union. Everything about the peasants irritated the Bolsheviks: their religiosity and their attachment to cus-tomary law, their supposed primitiveness and inherently petit-bourgeois mentality. Throughout the late nineteenth century, European Marxists spoke of “the idiocy of rural life,” full of the prejudices of urban elites and beliefs in the progressive qualities of the factory proletariat. Lenin at least understood that the Russian peasantry had some revolutionary qualities, and that poor and middle peasants could serve as the allies of the working class in a revolutionary situation. Indeed, in the revolution of 1917
the Russian peasantry served as an important combus-tible force—in the army as raw recruits, in the factories as newly recruited peasant-workers, and in the villages as landless and land-hungry farmers—that helped bring down the autocracy in February 1917 and chased the Provisional Government from power in October.
52
chapter 3
Many historians note that peasants are often the first to rise in revolution and the first to suffer at its hands, and the revolution of 1917 is no exception. True, the Bolsheviks’ “Decree on Land” of November 8, 1917, granted the peasants’ demand for ownership of the land, fulfilling the dreams of rural Russia since the peasant uprisings of the seventeenth century. But already in 1918, as the Bolsheviks desperately needed to collect grain for securing their power and fighting the Civil War, the peasants’ rights to the land were quickly rescinded, and forced grain collection by armed groups of Red Army soldiers and hastily armed workers’ detachments alienated the same peasant producers who had helped to bring down the old order with their violent rebelliousness ( buntarstvo ).
The Civil War in the countryside was brutal and lethal.
Millions of peasants died in the conflict, some fighting on one side or the other, many simply caught in between the back and forth of the competing White and Red armies, Anarchists, Ukrainian factions, Cossacks, and the plethora of nationalist fighters. The forced expropriation of grain and attempts to collectivize the countryside led to pitched battles between peasants and the new representatives of Soviet power. Peasant uprisings broke out in the Tambov region and along the Volga. A terrible famine raged in the same regions and across Russia and Ukraine, as the policies of the Soviet government destroyed the productive capabilities of rural Russia. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no choice but to exercise a retreat in the countryside, a so-called peasant Brest, a temporary compromise with the economic realities of the Soviet countryside. In 1921
dekulakization 53
the Bolsheviks introduced what was called the New Economic Policy, which called for a halt to forced grain requisitioning, allowed the peasants to accumulate and trade in grain products, and trumpeted the smychka , the alliance between workers and peasants. Many historians consider this simply a pause between the first major Bolshevik war against the peasantry (1919–22) and the second and final one to follow (1928–33).1
Certainly the NEP had economic and political costs that were unacceptable to Stalin and his allies in the Politburo.
What is often called the “Second Revolution” in studies of the Soviet Union was really the breakneck and widely violent attempt by Stalin to steer the economy in a different direction and to save the Bolshevik Revolution—and his leadership of it—from what he feared was its potential disintegration. Therefore, in 1928 he introduced the First Five-Year Plan, which was intended to
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