Why does Collectivization kill?

[punisa]

It is now widely credited as a murderous economy that killed millions all over the world.
Happened almost everywhere where a socialist revolution has taken place.
Why is that? What is so fundamentally wrong with this principle that so many people died?

USSR, China, Korea.. I bet there are more cases.

Cubans where also never really well fed..
Yugoslavia escaped this crisis, but many credit that to a good deal of partnerships with the west.

Why wasn't there enough food to go around?
Is industrialization the case? Was it forced to quickly or?

Please write what you know, I'm very interested in learning more on this topic.

[Bright Banana Beard]

We also have privatization kills. Check out Africa and Southwest Asia. A change produces differently and people will not always go along with it.

[SecondLife]

It is now widely credited as a murderous economy that killed millions all over the world.
Happened almost everywhere where a socialist revolution has taken place.
Why is that? What is so fundamentally wrong with this principle that so many people died?

USSR, China, Korea.. I bet there are more cases.


You can't compare collectivization in USSR and collectivization performed by Pol Pot or even Mao's "Great Leap Forward". Also Stalin's deportation of people wasn't direct connect with collectivisation, because this happens also in cities. In Ukraine there was economic problems, but not everywhere in USSR. Mao's and especially Pol Pot's collectivization was more brutal.
But why economic problems? Problem is not in collectivisation but in it's bad management. In later years, in USSR, kolkhozy and sovhozy works fine.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I am not really sure what you mean. Surely collectivisation is the system we all seek? So why are we questioning it because it has been implemented badly a couple of times in state capitalist regimes?

[rednordman]

This is a good question that I havent seen discussed much anywhere, apart from anti-communist capitalist media which just takes a black and white "murderous communists" viewpoint.

I think that the main 'problem' with collectivisation has caused deaths is because of the often underestimated power that the farmers and farm owners hold over their produce. In the past i believe that alot of these farmers took it for granted that they could deal with grain what ever way they want to and people had no other options than obey, otherwise they would starve.

As a result of this simply look at alot of the farmers in the UK nowadays..hardly working class are they. Do not misunderstand me here, they too also get exploited now by big supermarkets (tescos/morrisons etc), but alot of them are only now starting to feel the bite of capitalism take hold as traditionally, capitalism was on their side. Now ironically, due to huge competition from abroad, the market works against them.

This them lead to an even larger problem. During alot of the collectivisation projects of the past, due to the farmers protesting and going against the peoples state, they got purged. In many ways, anyone who decides to hold the population to ransom deserves what punisment they get, but these farmers had alot of knowledge and ideas on farming that simply got lost with them when they got killed. This meant that the level of production was likely to drop very suddenly, and in the case of a natural disasters, things would be 10times worse also as people didnt have the specialist knowhow to deal with the disaster.

A good example of this (non-communist example) is what has happened in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, when alot of white farmers got thrown of their farms and replaced with members of his polical party (something like that). I can be sympathetic to the original reasons for why he did what he did (though I do condemn what he has done), in the end the farmers that he brougt in to replace them, where not very knowledgeable at all on farming so all of a sudden food is hard to get by in Zimbabwe due to bad harvests.

Obviously I havent ever been to Zimbabwe so cannot totally confirm the status of the country, but after hearing what has happened there (western media i admit, but i can believe them in this particular case), i can see how problems will arise.

[el_chavista]

In the USSR in the 1920's there were a huge class struggle among landlords and landless peasants. Obviously the production had to decay, with its following starvation and epidemics.
In North Korea there were about 3 years of severe droughts.
In China "the great leap forward"resulted in so many politic, economic, agriculture-technical, etc. mistakes that you can't directly blame on collectivization.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Why is that? What is so fundamentally wrong with this principle that so many people died?

I can tell you this about it: Stalin's forced collectivisation caused problems such as famine because the Kulaks refused to give up their land, crops, and livestock. Instead they destroyed them, creating food shortages so you can't say that the idea of collectivisation itself is murderous. It's just destructive when carried out in the wrong ways.

[Idealism]

I can tell you this about it: Stalin's forced collectivisation caused problems such as famine because the Kulaks refused to give up their land, crops, and livestock. Instead they destroyed them, creating food shortages so you can't say that the idea of collectivisation itself is murderous. It's just destructive when carried out in the wrong ways.

What would be the right ways? non-forcible collectivism? isn't that reformism?

[Soviet]

Excuse me,Russin,but I don't know who was killed in Russia by collectivisation.My grandparents were peasants and nobody were killed.I was born in the USSR and never starved.
The last famine in Russian history was at 1933.Collectivisation put an end with famine - it's a fact.
Stop your fantasy,trots.

[khad]

Excuse me,Russin,but I don't know who was killed in Russia by collectivisation.My grandparents were peasants and nobody were killed.I was born in the USSR and never starved.
The last famine in Russian history was at 1933.Collectivisation put an end with famine - it's a fact.
Stop your fantasy,trots.
Actually it is in the records that agriculture grew quite well in the 30s after initial "teething troubles." In China as well, collectivization introduced widespread access to and familiarity with agricultural technologies.

Not to justify the human cost incurred, but reports of economic devastation are pretty overblown.

[punisa]

I am not really sure what you mean. Surely collectivisation is the system we all seek? So why are we questioning it because it has been implemented badly a couple of times in state capitalist regimes?

What I mean is - nothing. I really don't know much of the system and wish to learn more about it.
I'm sure this topic could shine a little light as soon as we get over "why are criticizing our communists views? This belongs in the OI" :lol:

I was watching a documentary about Stalin the other day and it was very anti-Stalin indeed :lol: But the focus was describing how the USSR regime at the time completely miscalculated the economy and these steps were the reason why millions died of hunger.
I'm not saying I agree nor disagree, I just don't know. I'm one of those rarities that will honestly admit when I'm ignorant of something :)

Thing I can't comprehend is this... even if a portion of farmers refused to give away their food, why did so many die as a result?
Did villagers on small parts of land got rid of their only food?
I heard stories, but I need some facts.

I mean, if you have a family in the country with small crops and they can produce just enough to feed themselves, taking into the account they all collectively work on that crops.
Then if you send government agents to take away that food from them without leaving them an alternative source, what is that? This doesn't sound as an economy to me, this sounds as death punishment with utmost cruelty :(

Interesting video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3782479548759037983&hl=en

[Invariance]

I am not really sure what you mean. Surely collectivisation is the system we all seek? So why are we questioning it because it has been implemented badly a couple of times in state capitalist regimes? I love this response; it is so typical. 'Why care about studying the USSR, it was state-capitalist!' A great deal of responses of the left are to first compartmentalise something, then proceed to dismiss it. It reeks of a mind unwilling to ask hard questions, least of all answer them.

@ the OP,

Yes, industrialisation was the main impetus behind the drive for collectivisation. Its actually quite remarkable reading some of Marx's writings on the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land and his comments on primitive accumulation; they bear striking resemblance to what was occurring in the USSR from the late 20s to mid 1930s.
'In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of substitute, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis for the whole process. The history of this appropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs.'

'The bourgeois capitalist favoured the operation, with the intention, among other things, of converting the land into a merely commercial commodity, extending the area of large-scale agricultural production, and increasing the supply of free and rightless proletarians driven from their land.'

'The thinning-out of the independent self-supporting peasants corresponded directly with the concentration of the industrial proletariat.'

'Only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the home market of a country that extension and stability which the capitalist mode of production required...A consistent foundation for capitalist agriculture could only be provided by large-scale industry, in the form of machinery; it is large-scale industry which radically expropriates the vast majority of the agricultural population and completes the divorce between agriculture and rural domestic industry, tearing up the latter's roots, which are spinning and weaving. It therefore also conquers the entire home market for industrial capital, for the first time.'

'The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England, in more or less chronological order. These different moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. These methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.'
And the leaders certainly admitted this much; all the leaders circa 1926-28 agreed that industrialisation was necessary. They differed on how the capital for this industrialisation would be raised. Trotsky urged rapid industrialisation and the introduction of full economic planning. Preobrazhensky argued that the Soviet state undergo a 'primitive socialist accumulation of capital', that is, that the peasants would bear the burden of that industrialisation. The Soviet state could charge high prices for goods sold to the peasants, or alternatively purchase their produce cheaply and sell for a higher margin, and use the resulting profits as the source of capital for industrialisation.

Bukharin on the other hand argued for cooperation, for the expansion of agricultural production which would supply industry with the raw materials and create a reciprocating demand for industrial products. The rich peasants would voluntarily save in Soviet banks and therefore their capital accumulation would be available for industrialisation. 'We have to tell the whole peasantry, all its strata: get rich, accumulate, develop your economy' - Bukharin.

Stalin, of course, won that leadership battle and largely followed the former model via a method of collectivisation which would replace the private peasantry with a socialised model. This began in late 1929 with 25,000 communists sent to rural areas with powers to deport 'kulaks' and confiscate their property. Collectivisation was archived fairly quickly; In July 1929 there were less than 1,000,000 families in collectives, by January 1930 this had increased to around 4.4 million and by March 1930 the Soviets, at least, claimed around 14.2 million families (of around 25,000,000 families - 55% of all Soviet peasants were members of 110,200 collective farms).

Of course, there were abuses. Even Stalin admitted as much in his March 1930 speech 'Dizzy with Success' (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm). Perhaps this was a response to the possibility of peasant revolt which would have destroyed the 1930 harvest. At the very least the Central Committee passed a resolution which attacked the 'perversions of the party line.' The number of peasants reduced between March and May 1930, leaving around 5.7 million remaining, a drop of 60% in two months. It later resumed, and by the middle of 1932 the collective farms had more than March 1930 and by 1935 more than 70% of all Soviet peasants were members of about 233,000 kolkhozy.

Of course, many of the methods of joining the collective were hardly voluntary; economic disadvantage (i.e. missing out on lower taxes) was a possibility. Generally I find claims that the kulaks were responsible for the mass loss of livestock and therefore life unfounded; rich peasants were a very small minority of the population (around 3% from memory). Opposition to collectivisation was, I would say, more widespread. One source, which I somewhat doubt the accuracy of maintains that in the five years after January 1928 Soviet agriculture lost half of its horses (somewhat replaced via imported American tractors), cattle and hogs, and almost two-thirds of its sheep and goats. Largely speaking, the deaths were caused by famine which didn't just affect Ukraine but many agricultural districts across Eastern Europe; Kazakhstan for instance. Nevertheless, collectivisation did allow for the capital accumulation to begin. The Machine-Tractor Stations, later to be abolished under Khrushchev, had a monopoly of farm equipment which was rented out in exchange for grain from the peasants.

Statistical claims of the success are difficult owing to accuracy or lack thereof. Firstly, it must be remembered that agriculture per se was not really what the Soviets were interested in; heavy industry and machinery were priority, and agriculture and personal goods (far) less so. The Soviets at least claimed an increase in gross agriculture production of more than 50% from 1928 to 1940. This was scaled down substantially down when revised in the 1950s: Narodnoye Khozyaistvo SSSR v 1960 godu, page 169, 219 and 362. Likewise, the Soviets claimed a gross industrial output rise of 600% and a national income rise of 500% in the same period. These are likely to be very inaccurate. Nevertheless, calculations by Western scholars in the same period argue that Soviet gross national product (goods and services) about doubled. Kaplan and Morsteen find, using a weight base of 1928 that by 1940 industrial production was about 160% (excluding munitions and other war materials - which would very likely distort the picture in 1940). Johnson and Kahan found that agricultural output may have been 20% higher than 1928:Abram Bergson, The Real National Income of Soviet Russia Since 1928 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961) pg 152.

Generally, if you are going to assess the success of collectivisation, you are going to have to assess the success of industrialisation; simply analysing one is liable to do the other injustice; they are completely connected. So far as the famine is concerned and murders by the state, here is an article that I uploaded that deals with those issues: Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments (http://www.anonym.to/?http://f.imagehost.org/download/0108/826310) by Michael Ellman.

Sorry, but I'll try and address problems the agricultural industry faced post 1953 later, but here are a wide range of sources from Western and Soviet perspectives:

Soviet Goals for 1965 and the Problems of Agriculture, Roy Laird.

Soviet Agriculture Marks Time, Alec Nove.

Prices and Pork, Munich Research and Evaluation Department Background Information USSR.

Labor Productivity in Agriculture in the USSR and the USA, B.I Braginskii, Chief, Section on Statistics, Scientific Research Economic Institute Gosplan, USSR.

Meat Prices Raised to Cover Costs, Spur Output, Party Central Commitee and USSR Council of Ministers.

[ComradeOm]

I think Vinnie has covered most of the important points in his usual thorough manner. I made a series of relatively in-depth posts (for RevLeft anyway) in this thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-thread-all-t100814/index.html) on the same topic (particularly concerned with the famine in the Ukraine)

Some miscellaneous points that spring to mind would be the sheer incompetence of the collectivisation programme with over-centralisation and a lack of agricultural expertise (this being at the height of Lysenkoism) causing havoc. There's also some controversy as to whether 'Dizzy With Success' was a genuine rebuke or simply Stalin covering his ass (although the tendency to 'fulfil and overfulfil' the plan was a noted tendency of the Soviet state at the time, often with tragic consequences). Finally, the figures for livestock demise broadly fit in with those I've seen - it wasn't until the 1950s that cows/pigs/sheep levels returned to 1928 levels while the slaughter of draught horses was a complete disaster that led to the immediate and massive redistribution of resources to tractor production during the crisis years. I very much doubt that 'kulaks'* were responsible for the latter but would ascribe it to a simple shortage of animal feed

* I fecking hate that label


The last famine in Russian history was at 1933.Collectivisation put an end with famine - it's a fact.Actually there was a famine in 1946. I've not seen any academic numbers for the death toll but AFAIK it was fairly major with roughly a million deaths resulting


Actually it is in the records that agriculture grew quite well in the 30s after initial "teething troubles."Arguable. The collective model never functioned as well as expected and by the 1960s or 1970s was unable to provide for the USSR's urban population; thus necessitating the import of grain from capitalist producers. When studied independently of the industrialisation (ie, to assess the actual efficiency of the agricultural system itself) the Soviet system remains very unimpressive. Whatever gains were made during the 1930s (and in terms of overall agricultural production these were marginal at best) were clearly not sustainable

[SecondLife]

Yes, the lack of agriculture appliances was reason of famine, but I just don't want to believe that collective farms can't be set up at all without tech. If peasants live good, then why they can't live good also in farms. More over, collectivisation point was rationalization, to produce better productivity. I think problem was in organization, planning and lack of specialists. There wasn't time for this, because peasants starts to kill animals, conceal corn and conceal all that owns some importancy.
Also too much corn was given away from peasants and sent to cities.
Also there was problem, that sometimes gets 'kulak' status also peasant who acually wasn't it (maybe he/she just lives bit better than others). But in that I am completely agreed that if, in revolution situation, someone don't want to allow to current law, is counter-revolutionary and makes sabotage, then .....sorry.

[khad]

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/55/br_27.html


Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2003)

THE ISSUE of the economic performance of the Soviet Union is hardly any less controversial today than it was at the height of the Cold War. While specialists continue to debate the precise figures, the consensus today is that under Stalin the Soviet economy grew rapidly, though at enormous human cost, and that economic growth was not translated into commensurately rising living standards. Moreover, revisionists have argued that the Russian Revolution aborted what would have been a capitalist economic take-off which would have allowed Russia to join the ranks of the leading capitalist powers. Those who find anything positive in the Soviet experience risk demonization as apologists for Stalin.

1 Bob Allen is a distinguished economic historian who has only recently ventured into the minefield of Soviet economic history and in this book he seeks systematically to clear a path through it, arguing that Russian capitalism before the revolution was not poised for take-off. He recognizes that collectivization and terror imposed economic, as well as human, costs but argues that the economic gains of Stalinist industrialization had neutralized those costs by the end of the 1930s. Finally, he argues that the slowdown of the Soviet economy after 1970 was not, as today's consensus has it, inherent in the Soviet system of economic planning, but was primarily the result of major planning mistakes. Robert Allen does not reach his conclusions as an apologia for Stalinism, but on the basis of computer simulations based on traditional, though now unfashionable, models from development economics.

2 Allen argues that pre-revolutionary Russia lacked what are generally considered to be the institutional prerequisites for capitalist development so that its development prospects were not good. Although economic growth in the 50 years before the Revolution was relatively rapid, by the Revolution the sources of growth had been exhausted. Agriculture had reached North American levels of productivity before wheat prices collapsed after 1914. The expansion of the railroads had run its course and there was no prospect of protected light industry becoming internationally competitive. Moreover, Russian capitalist development had brought little if any benefit to the urban and rural working class, intensifying the class conflicts that erupted in Revolution. The appropriate comparators for the prospects for Russian capitalism in the 20th century are not Japan but Argentina or even India.

3 Following War Communism, the New Economic Policy (NEP) sought to develop the Russian economy within a quasi-capitalist framework. However, the institutional and structural barriers to Russian economic development were now compounded by the unfavourable circumstances of the world economy, so that there was no prospect of export-led development, while low domestic incomes provided only a limited market for domestic industry. Without a state-coordinated investment programme, the Soviet economy would be caught in the low-income trap typical of the underdeveloped world.

4 The Soviet Union had a massive rural surplus population with little scope for increasing agricultural productivity, other than through the consolidation of excessively fragmented holdings. The obvious development strategy, as Soviet economists were well aware, was to transfer the surplus rural population to industrial employment in the cities. The key issue was how to achieve this. Stalin achieved it by a brutal policy of collectivization, forced migration, compulsory requisitions, and heavy rural taxation. Allen believes that the continuation of the NEP policy of encouraging market forces in agriculture, alongside state-sponsored industrialization, could have achieved almost the same result at much less human cost as the surplus population was attracted to industrial employment in the city and those who remained increased their sales of produce. Allen argues that a capitalist economy would not have created the industrial jobs required to employ the surplus labour, since capitalists would only employ labour so long as the marginal product of labour exceeded the wage. State-sponsored industrialization faced no such constraints, since enterprises were encouraged to expand employment in line with the demands of the plan.

5 Allen's simulations of alternative strategies in the 1930s suggest that a capitalist development strategy would have provided very slow growth and high unemployment, but that the Stalinist collectivization strategy soon overcame the disasters of collectivization to outperform a hypothetical continuation of the NEP policy alongside rapid industrialization by the end of the 1930s, although not by very much. The other positive feature of the Stalinist strategy was that the rapid expansion of education and growth of employment reduced the fertility rate and saved the Soviet Union from the population explosion that has plagued much of the Third World.

6 The strong performance of the NEP strategy might seem surprising, since the turn to forced collectivization was made at the end of the 1920s precisely because the NEP was not working: the peasants were not increasing their sales sufficiently to feed the urban population. However, Allen's finding is primarily due to his assumption that without collectivization farm output would have grown steadily, so that under his NEP simulation farm output is 51 per cent greater than under collectivization and it is still 16 per cent higher in 1939 (234): the food supply to the cities comprises a much lower proportion of total agricultural production than under collectivization.

7 Soviet industrialization was not only based on forced collectivization, but also on the massive allocation of resources to heavy industry and the military at the expense, Stalin's critics have argued, of the living standards of the population. Allen uses simulations of Feldman's classic Soviet growth model to show that an investment strategy focused on heavy industry is quite compatible with rising consumption and re-analyses the best available data to show that, after the catastrophe of collectivization, living standards indeed rose rapidly.

8 Bob Allen shows that the Stalinist strategy worked, in strictly economic terms, until around 1970, when growth slowed dramatically. He explains the downturn in terms of the failure of the system to adapt to the ending of the labour surplus, but the failure was not so much that of the system as of the decision-making at the top. A growing proportion of investment resources was wasted by diversion to the military; by expanding energy production instead of economizing on consumption; by investing heavily in Siberia; and by retooling old plants rather than closing them down and building new facilities. However, we might ask whether these faulty decisions were just subjective errors or whether they did not perhaps have deeper systemic roots. The decisions may have been economically irrational, but there were good reasons for them, as for so many other economically irrational decisions, in the rationality of the Soviet system.

9 Bob Allen's book convincingly establishes the superiority of a planned over a capitalist economy in conditions of labour surplus (which is the condition of most of the world most of the time). However, his findings should not divert attention from the well-documented deficiencies of the Soviet economic system that provided perverse incentives at every level and led to grotesque levels of inefficiency and waste. His book is testimony to the astonishing achievements of Soviet workers, whose efforts produced such impressive results despite their bad management and often appalling living and working conditions.

10 The big question raised by Bob Allen's book is whether it is possible to reconcile the benefits of central planning with democracy and microeconomic efficiency. Gorbachev believed that it was, but his attempts at democratization and economic liberalization led to the collapse of central planning, so that the Russian people merely exchanged the irrationality of the Soviet system for the irrationality of global capitalism. The failure of the Soviet Union to achieve its proclaimed socialist aims surely does not mean that it is impossible for humanity to make a better world.

11 Bob Allen has written a thought-provoking book, packed with stimulating insights and supported by rigorous analysis, that merits reading and re-reading. 12
Simon Clarke
University of Warwick.

[ComradeOm]

As I said, decouple collectivisation from the restructuring of industry during the initial five year plans (as the review you quote fails to do and is necessary for evaluating Soviet agriculture over the span of the entire existence of the USSR) and the picture that emerges is damning. Its primary virtue was in channelling an increased amount of food into the cities but at the expense of long-term growth. This was simply not an efficient or sustainable system.

*It was only possible to judge the performance of collectivisation sometime after it had been implemented. Stalin may have "chosen collectivisation" based on projections as to its output but, unless he was a time traveller, he would have had no prior experience as to the system

Edit:
To compare with the figure of 2.5% growth between 1928 and 1940: the NEP system had largely reached the 1913 grain levels by 1928. This is despite a number of factors - the NEP had only been introduced in 1921, the collapse of the Tsardom and the subsequent Civil War had been far more severe crises than the that of the early 1930s, and the 1913 figure is considerably inflated by the fact that excellent weather led to a record harvest that year. So in terms of annual growth you could easily argue that the NEP outperformed the collectivised model (edit: I've not actually sat down and done the sums though). The issue of course was 'squeezing' the peasantry for ever larger amounts of 'marketed production'

[SecondLife]

NEP: there isn't differences 'small business' or 'big corporation'. NEP was politically incorrect and in essencec contra-revolution idea. In many cases 'small business' is more dangerous than 'big business'. It supports bourgeois more than corporations do.
Maybe 'collectivisation' is just bad "name", maybe workers separation from peasants was at all bad idea. There wasn't any suspicious that _all_ was needed to nationalize. This means also that peasants must become workers in farms. There isn't possible that in cities becomes socialism, but in land stays capitalism - it's just absurd.



The big question raised by Bob Allen's book is whether it is possible to reconcile the benefits of central planning with democracy and microeconomic efficiency.

I think, for that should be more complex social structure in state management. More institutions that control central economy planning and more direct relationship with people, to more respect people opinion.
This don't mean bureaucracy, because bureaucracy means more badly managed institution but not lot a number of well working institutions.
In USSR was institution named 'SORVO'. It was like economic police, to fight with corruption. But it was too weak.

[Cumannach]

Collectivization was a success, and furthermore was an inevitable policy in a socialist country. You can't continue to have a capitalist agriculture and a rural bourgeoisie in a socialist country any more than you can have private investment banks or private industrial plants. As soon as it was possible to do away with each of these, the Soviets made their move decisively, and eliminated them. And you can find as many scholarly papers as you want to undermine any aspect of socialism. The success of socialist collectivization has been long proven.

[Die Neue Zeit]

This is a good question that I havent seen discussed much anywhere, apart from anti-communist capitalist media which just takes a black and white "murderous communists" viewpoint.

I think that the main 'problem' with collectivisation has caused deaths is because of the often underestimated power that the farmers and farm owners hold over their produce. In the past i believe that alot of these farmers took it for granted that they could deal with grain what ever way they want to and people had no other options than obey, otherwise they would starve.

As a result of this simply look at alot of the farmers in the UK nowadays..hardly working class are they. Do not misunderstand me here, they too also get exploited now by big supermarkets (tescos/morrisons etc), but alot of them are only now starting to feel the bite of capitalism take hold as traditionally, capitalism was on their side. Now ironically, due to huge competition from abroad, the market works against them.

This them lead to an even larger problem. During alot of the collectivisation projects of the past, due to the farmers protesting and going against the peoples state, they got purged. In many ways, anyone who decides to hold the population to ransom deserves what punishment they get, but these farmers had alot of knowledge and ideas on farming that simply got lost with them when they got killed. This meant that the level of production was likely to drop very suddenly, and in the case of a natural disasters, things would be 10times worse also as people didnt have the specialist knowhow to deal with the disaster.

A good example of this (non-communist example) is what has happened in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, when alot of white farmers got thrown of their farms and replaced with members of his polical party (something like that). I can be sympathetic to the original reasons for why he did what he did (though I do condemn what he has done), in the end the farmers that he brougt in to replace them, where not very knowledgeable at all on farming so all of a sudden food is hard to get by in Zimbabwe due to bad harvests.

Obviously I havent ever been to Zimbabwe so cannot totally confirm the status of the country, but after hearing what has happened there (western media i admit, but i can believe them in this particular case), i can see how problems will arise.

I definitely agree with you on the part about "holding the population ransom" (cue the suicide bombers :( ). Mistakes were made by both sides in the Soviet collectivization sides - by the Soviet bureaucracy and by overly possessive Ukrainian farmers.

In regards to the so-called "Holodomor" (Ukrainian nationalism), another key reason why it occurred was the specific collectivization policy used: the kolkhozy model, in which ordinary farmers bore the risks of underproduction. In Central Asia, the sovkhozy model was used, and after Stalin's death this more successful, wage-based model (wherein the state absorbed the risks of underproduction, to be offset by strict "red directors" like the current Belarusian president, Lukashenko) would be expanded throughout the Soviet Union by the "revisionists."