Why did the Bolsheviks adopt the SR land policy?

[Ostrinski]

As opposed to a policy of nationalization and integration of the peasantry into the industrial process?

Do you think this was the right move, or was it an inappropriate course of action? Upon the seizure of the land the peasants essentially just set up shop instead of voluntarily collectivizing it.

Was it done to appease the peasantry? After all, in the months before the October revolution, there was conflict between the provisional government and the peasantry where the peasants refused to hand over the mandated grain that the government demanded. So the Bolsheviks probably feared an extension of this.

On the other hand, was it done to appease and/or compromise with the SRs?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Actually, Lenin and probably other Old Bolsheviks adopted the SR land policy not in 1917, as is commonly claimed, but as early as 1905.

[Geiseric]

It had to be done, or else the peasantry would of supported the SR's. The bolsheviks still had trouble getting the peasantry to go along with the revolution, even after they gained power, and formed the red army. The crisis with the N.E.P. eventually (the purges) is why the land reform was needed, because too few peasants owned too much land.

Basically it was buying the peasants support by ceiding the rural petit bourgeoisie some demands. Nationalization would of happened a few years after the revolution, if the civil war didn't break out.

[Ostrinski]

Actually, Lenin and probably other Old Bolsheviks adopted the SR land policy not in 1917, as is commonly claimed, but as early as 1905.I thought the original Bolshevik policy was one more or less of nationalization?

[Ostrinski]

It had to be done, or else the peasantry would of supported the SR's. The bolsheviks still had trouble getting the peasantry to go along with the revolution, even after they gained power, and formed the red army. The crisis with the N.E.P. eventually (the purges) is why the land reform was needed, because too few peasants owned too much land.

Basically it was buying the peasants support by ceiding the rural petit bourgeoisie some demands. Nationalization would of happened a few years after the revolution, if the civil war didn't break out.The peasants already did support the SRs, though. They were traditionally the party of the peasantry after all. Why would they jump parties just because the Bolsheviks adopted part of the SR program?

[A Revolutionary Tool]

They needed support from the peasantry. Of course there were negative consequences as a result but I think at this point they thought they needed the peasantry and said what they thought would be popular with them which was the SR platform when it came to the peasantry.

[Zealot]

The SRs were a peasant party allied with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks had to go along with it because the peasantry composed the majority of the population. The survival of the fledgling socialist regime and its protection in the looming civil war depended on popular support, which could only be won by satisfying the class interests of the peasantry. However, the peasants began to sell their land for various reasons such as needing money or having a bad harvest and this quickly led to the development of a bourgeoisie and proletariat in the countryside. When this process started nearing completion the Soviet leadership moved in to collectivise it. Had they attempted collectivisation earlier they would have met with a much more militant opposition than what they actually got.

[l'Enfermé]

During October, they didn't. The peasants were already seizing the land and there would have been no way to stop them. They merely recognize the reality and legitimized the seizure of land. Thus the Decree on Land which Lenin submitted to the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets(on October 26?).

Anyway the SR land programme was centered around "socializing land", giving all the land to village communes who allocate it, etc, etc(i.e a return to an idealized version of the Russian "Mir"). The RCP(b) programme was centered around promoting large-scale "socialist" agriculture. What the Bolsheviks borrowed from the SRs was the expropriation of landowners.

[Geiseric]

The SRs were a peasant party allied with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks had to go along with it because the peasantry composed the majority of the population. The survival of the fledgling socialist regime and its protection in the looming civil war depended on popular support, which could only be won by satisfying the class interests of the peasantry. However, the peasants began to sell their land for various reasons such as needing money or having a bad harvest and this quickly led to the development of a bourgeoisie and proletariat in the countryside. When this process started nearing completion the Soviet leadership moved in to collectivise it. Had they attempted collectivisation earlier they would have met with a much more militant opposition than what they actually got.

That's not true, collectivisation would of been easier to implement before the Kulaks had time to organize themselves, and build up so much power over the economy. It could of been done by 1925, which is when the economy was at the point it was pre revolution, or in other words, a possible time to start industrializing.

[Zealot]

That's not true, collectivisation would of been easier to implement before the Kulaks had time to organize themselves, and build up so much power over the economy. It could of been done by 1925, which is when the economy was at the point it was pre revolution, or in other words, a possible time to start industrializing.

Wrong. I'm sorry, but it seems to me that a handful of kulaks would be easier to deal with than millions of propertied peasants.

[Geiseric]

One monopoly is easier to bring down than hundreds of small businesses? Hardly. Those millions of poor propertied peasants were also collectivized, at a rate that was much too fast, resulting in deaths... The Kulaks had a few more years to consolidate their power, and build up support, which made collectivization that much harder. I mean the right opposition had a huge amount of support.

But the monopolization of land by an increadibly small minority of peasants was a reality as soon as 1925. That shouldn't matter though, since the pre war production was reached by that point. There wasn't any plans to do an NEP before the civil war, and it should of been gotten rid of, and industrialization been implemented, sooner. I know that Stalin wanted peasants in Georgia to own their land for "20, 30 years!" (A direct quote from him) but the late start was a huge mistake, that I wish we could all accept as a bad move. Nothing good came from it that couldn't of been done easier in 1925, and there were tons of problems with "popping the balloon," that was the Kulak's concentration of land.

[Grenzer]

That's not true, collectivisation would of been easier to implement before the Kulaks had time to organize themselves, and build up so much power over the economy. It could of been done by 1925, which is when the economy was at the point it was pre revolution, or in other words, a possible time to start industrializing.

Untrue, since the peasants had already gotten their own parcels of land, they weren't going to part with them without a fight. The idea of peaceful collectivization, especially given the conditions in Russia, is completely illusory. Every single time collectivization has been tried peacefully, it's never worked. Not a single damn time.

You've got your head buried in the sand if you think they could have started industrializing that easily. The Civil War absolutely ravaged the economy and it needed time to recover. Attempting collectivization and industrialization before there was a chance of recovery is pure insanity. It would have sparked even more peasant rebellions and the shaky edifice of Bolshevik government would have come crashing down. You're also kidding yourself if you think all the troubles of collectivization were caused by the "Kulaks" alone. It was something that was resisted by every facet of the peasantry.

GDP is irrelevant in such a judgement. Agricultural output was far, far, far from what it was in the pre-revolution days.

[l'Enfermé]

Ghost Bebel: Indeed, but the criteria set by the government in 1928/1929 for being a kulak was so broad, that you could call practically any peasant in the Soviet Union a "kulak" and be right. So if Stalinists wanna be really anal about this point, they could point out that the troubles of collectivization were caused only by the "kulaks" - since practically anyone could be a kulak if required by the state.

[Grenzer]

Ghost Bebel: Indeed, but the criteria set by the government in 1928/1929 for being a kulak was so broad, that you could call practically any peasant in the Soviet Union a "kulak" and be right. So if Stalinists wanna be really anal about this point, they could point out that the troubles of collectivization were caused only by the "kulaks" - since practically anyone could be a kulak if required by the state.

Good point that out. I really don't even like the term Kulak because it essentially throws class out the window. I've sometimes seen it defined as "wealthy peasant", but I'm not sure how this makes sense entirely. Surely if they are actually accumulating wealth, then they must at least partially own the means of their subsistence making them petit-bourgeois at least.

The main problem I've had with Trotsky's take on collectivization is that he believes it could be done voluntarily in a short amount of time with the promotion of the collectives through use of incentives like tractors and other industrial tools. The problem is that the infrastructure to really create these incentives didn't yet exist. I don't think his alternative was a fully credible one in practice, and that if implemented it would essentially create a fork in the road where collectivization would have to be pressed forward in a Stalinist manner or withdrawn entirely.

But to Trotsky's benefit, that's not even getting into the issue of how coercive collectivization could have been carried out, if that was the path to be pursued. The Stalinists could have pursued it with much less death if they had approached the matter more cautiously and with greater circumspection.

[Geiseric]

Well they could of pursued it much easier by only collectivizing the land that was owned by peasants who employed lower peasants to do their work for them! That was the arguement the entire time, so I don't see why that shouldn't of happened in 1925, seeing as around 8% of Kulaks (who employed lower peasants) had control of about 80% of the food that was being made.

[ComradeOm]

The Decree on Land was probably the single most important piece of legislation passed in the early Soviet years. It legitimised at a stroke the peasant black repartition that had marked that summer and won the vast majority of the peasantry over to Soviet power. Not necessarily to the Bolsheviks or socialism, of course, but it's not much exaggeration to say that land reform was the banner that won the Civil War

And of course all this has to be put in the context of the (flawed) Bolshevik conceptions of the peasant world and the idea that class struggle would soon extend to the villages


Well they could of pursued it much easier by only collectivizing the land that was owned by peasants who employed lower peasants to do their work for them! That was the arguement the entire time, so I don't see why that shouldn't of happened in 1925, seeing as around 8% of Kulaks (who employed lower peasants) had control of about 80% of the food that was being made.Where are you getting those numbers from?

Even when Stalin picked a number out of the air in 1928 it was 5% of the peasant population (much higher than the 3.2% that contemporary economists were discussing). And then they were collecting 8-13% of the grain harvest (according to Gaister and Nemchinov, respectively). Given that even kulaks were only selling 20% of their produce on the market, that's a small, if disproportionate, percentage of marketed grain

And, while we're on it, only 50% of kulaks employed labour. In fact, kulaks 20% of the available agricultural labour; the majority of hired labour (62%) was employed by the middle peasants (serednyaki)

That's not even getting into the degree to which the very definition of kulaks (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761699&postcount=18) was bullshit

Moshe Lewin's got a really good chapter on this in his The Making of the Soviet System

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The managing of capitalism. Political power at all costs. 'They had to do it'. :thumbup1:

[l'Enfermé]

^Fucking Bolsheviks, abolishing the landowning class and giving the land to the peasants just so they could "manage capitalism"! Those opportunists! They should have given the land to the church or something I guess.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

The peasants already did support the SRs, though. They were traditionally the party of the peasantry after all. Why would they jump parties just because the Bolsheviks adopted part of the SR program?
Because in power, the SRs and the Provisional Government did not carry out the paper program of the SRs. Really, land to the tiller was a necessary gambit in an overwhelmingly peasant country. The Bolsheviks did not expect to be alone in Europe as a revolutionary government -- they figured collectivization would come pretty rapidly, especially with the industrial might of Germany in the revolutionary union. As it was, the NEP stabilized the Soviet State and bought some time. Of course Stalin and the Rightists tried to turn it into a permanent policy rather than a necessary evil.

Then, when the peasants began withholding grain on a massive scale, Stalin, panicked and reactive, pressed for the horribly executed collectivization where there where huge collective farms with no machinery to farm with. And where so much livestock was slaughtered that it took until the early 1950s to regain levels of the mid twenties.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

The Decree on Land was probably the single most important piece of legislation passed in the early Soviet years. It legitimised at a stroke the peasant black repartition that had marked that summer and won the vast majority of the peasantry over to Soviet power. Not necessarily to the Bolsheviks or socialism, of course, but it's not much exaggeration to say that land reform was the banner that won the Civil War

And of course all this has to be put in the context of the (flawed) Bolshevik conceptions of the peasant world and the idea that class struggle would soon extend to the villages

Where are you getting those numbers from?

Even when Stalin picked a number out of the air in 1928 it was 5% of the peasant population (much higher than the 3.2% that contemporary economists were discussing). And then they were collecting 8-13% of the grain harvest (according to Gaister and Nemchinov, respectively). Given that even kulaks were only selling 20% of their produce on the market, that's a small, if disproportionate, percentage of marketed grain

And, while we're on it, only 50% of kulaks employed labour. In fact, kulaks 20% of the available agricultural labour; the majority of hired labour (62%) was employed by the middle peasants (serednyaki)

That's not even getting into the degree to which the very definition of kulaks (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761699&postcount=18) was bullshit

Moshe Lewin's got a really good chapter on this in his The Making of the Soviet System
You are certainly right that the peasants were won over to support the Bolsheviks based on the land decree. I'm not sure what your point is about these percentages. The peasantry withheld grain -- the harvest of 1928 was a good harvest. Enough grain was held back to threaten the cities with famine. This had been predicted by the LO as the ultimate result of the Duumvirate's pro-peasant anti-industrial policies.

[ComradeOm]

'm not sure what your point is about these percentagesAside from the fact that the numbers proffered were wrong?


The peasantry withheld grain -- the harvest of 1928 was a good harvest. Enough grain was held back to threaten the cities with famine. This had been predicted by the LO as the ultimate result of the Duumvirate's pro-peasant anti-industrial policies.Pro-peasant policies? The grain crisis of 1928 was largely the product of poor pricing by Moscow: coupled with a lack of manufactured goods, the peasants simply had no incentive to sell to the state at official prices. The LO's policies in this regard largely foreshadowed the coming Stalinist assault and were equally dependant on myths of kulak hoards