According to Carr, the reason the VKP(B) accelerated collectivization exactly the moment it did was one of simple lack of time: by the end of 1926, the Bolsheviks knew WWII would happen soon. In this, everybody agreed, not just Stalin. The only difference was that, at the time, they believed the main belligerent and invader would be the British Empire, not a still very weak and submissive Germany.
If memory doesn't fail me, Trotsky, Zinoviev et al believed the British would invade not later than 1934. The Soviets started a frantic pro-war, anti-imperialist diplomatic campaign, led by Litvinov, in the international arena. It was very successful, but historians still debate to this day if it was the main factor that delayed WWII.
It is important to highlight that, by then, the Bolsheviks already were a serious entity with serious power: they had full access to the diplomatic channels of the Soviet State and had inherited all of the defunct Russian Empire's obligations and privileges. Those were not hysterical gibbering from some random crazy leftists: they knew they would be invaded and knew that it would mean WWII for a fact.
The Bolsheviks always knew forced collectivization was in the cards. Bukharin refuted it precisely because they had calculated how many lives it would have cost: some 23 million (not necessarily dead, but displaced). That's why he defended the “industrialization at a snail's pace”. Forced collectivization was definitely not Stalin's invention.
Everybody in Europe knew WWII would happen as soon as the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Liberals like to point out Keynes, but he was far from being a visionary: from documents of the time, it feels like it was written on the wall. We can attest that by the fact that all the major European powers started to rearm and modernize right after WWI. The big question was which side against which and exactly when and where it would be triggered. The British had a trigger in its hands: Poland. With Germany's acceptance to the League of Nations in 1926, the final piece of the puzzle for an invasion of the USSR led by the British was obtained.
In my opinion, the decisive factor that avoided an earlier WWII fought between a British Coalition and the USSR was a mix of economic and doctrinaire: from French and British documents, we know that they were not nearly rebuilt from WWI by the end of the 1920s or even the first half of the 1930s; France was specially traumatized by War and didn't want to fight another one. On the doctrinaire front -- and we know that because Neville Chamberlain's letters are published in full -- we have that the British elites, personified by the Conservative Party then in power, believed in the thesis that another world war would finish what the October Revolution started, i.e. complete the World Revolution, or at least the Revolution in Europe. Some of them believed that, was WWI prolonged by a few more years, World Revolution would have happened.
Things continued to get worse from the point of view of the Soviets through the 1930s, for obvious reasons. The Soviets knew and did read Hitler's Mein Kampf from the very beginning, and knew his ultimate plan was to invade and destroy the USSR and, more importantly, communism. By the end of the 1930s, things got desperate because the British and French continued to refuse an alliance with the USSR against Germany. This period coincided with the most accelerated and brutal phase of forced collectivization; it was also during this phase that the great purge of the Party and Red Army happened. The accelerated conclusion of forced collectivization catapulted Molotov to the de facto post of second most powerful man of the USSR.
Litvinov was sacked (if memory doesn't fail me, in 1937) and Molotov assumed his place. Molotov was not a diplomat and many people in the West use this episode as a demonstration of Stalin's anti-intellectualism and Asiatic ignorance, but they miss the point: Molotov wasn't there to make diplomacy, but only to “close shop” and formally start the processes of waging what would be WWII.
So, long story short, if you don't want to read this long comment: the Bolsheviks enforced collectivization simply because they lacked the time to do it by more peaceful, “organic” means.
"Stasis, or equilibrium of sorts, ensues" -- only until population growth did it's work. At some point all the land suitable for giving to landless farmers as homesteads would have been occupied-- no more free homesteads for landless laborers. Then extra children on existing homesteads would have felt strong pressure to go to the cities.
I am not sure you read Russian, and don't think this book has been translated into English, unfortunately.
OSTROVSKY A.V. “RUSSIAN VILLAGE AT THE HISTORICAL CROSSROADS”
This is what I would call a "closing" book in the eternal discussion of the "land problem" in Russia. Closing in the sense that it gives answers to the main points of that discussion.
Based on local statistics (very important difference, countrywide stats average out, which for a country like Russia just doesn't make sense) he shows that by 1914 Russia was sitting in the Malthusian trap up to it's nostrils. A very large proportion of population, located in the Northern European part of the country (majority, in fact) faced literal starvation risk year in, year out, with a negative trend even without plunging into WW1. And the author argues, very pursuasively, that the last chance to change course was in 1861. Once the government botched the emancipation of serfdom, violent breakdown was baked in.
As the saying goes, if something can't go on, it stops. SOMETHING had to change in the way things were run. That SOMETHING turned out to be the October revolution and then collectivisation. Collectivisation by the way wasn't anything new really, first projects started to percolate in the Duma since 1910, once it became clear that Stolypins reforms are a dud, almost in exactly the same form as it later happened, minus repressions against the kulaki.
As for famines: a) your numbers are hugely exaggerated b) real numbers are roughly in line with the "normal" famine deaths trendline of the Russian empire, i.e. nothing new (if you exclude the famine of 1922 which was more about a breakdown of the entire economy rather than bolshevik rule/misrule or mother nature playing up). But famines are a different issue.
Newer apartments in nice clean brand new buidings and free health care looked more promising for the parents whoch wanted better future for their kids. Taking the property rights from the people and allocating of their estate in social economic cooperations paid back. Industrialisation was painful but fast and necessary even if some people couldn't survive it.. But the inequality between property owners and those who don't have property was falling. On the contrary inequality between entrepreneurs and normal people was perhaps not growing as much as in western Europe because Soviet Union had its grib on price manipulations, production planning etc.
Jean-Baptiste Say already pointed this out in his Cours d'Economie Politique (see below).
France was a country of many small landowners with few children; England was the opposite -> It was much more difficult to find workers for factories in France.
Before the Revolution, landowners numbers: 4 million in France vs. 30,000 in England.
Before 1830, total fertility rate <4 in France vs. > 5 in UK
Say was a textile entrepreneur around 1810: “ J'ai été forcé une fois de faire venir des ouvriers du département de l’Oise dans celui du Pas-de-Calais : ces deux départemens ne sont pas séparés par une fort grande distance ; j'avais eu soin de faire marcher ces ouvriers en famille, conséquemment avec ce qu'ils avaient de plus cher, de leur procurer des gains assurés, de faciliter leurs arrangemens, de leur rendre la vie douce. Cependant aucun ne résista à l'ennui, au malaise qu'on éprouve loin du pays natal. Au bout d'un certain nombre d'années, ils étaient tous , sans exception , retournés dans leur canton. Un canton différent, pour la classe laborieuse, est un pays étranger. »
(…) « dans les cantons cultivés par de grands entrepreneurs de culture , il y a moins de population rurale et plus de villes industrieuses et peuplées or, c'est dans les villes que se perfectionne la civilisation. »
There are two topics Dr M does not address in this argument:
(a) As DLR quote accurately notes, Malthusian squeeze should have still pushed significant numbers of peasants into industrial work. Those small farmers in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria were not landless. But those smallholdings could not support an infinitely expanding population. Dr M, do you have population demographic facts to go along with the landholding facts?
(b) What were the inheritance rules in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria? Did all children of these smallholders inherit equally? All male children? Only the first-born son? If the inheritance system is too equal, those smallholdings will become too small to support a family, and the too-small holder has to give it up and either move to the city or go to work as hired labor for someone with enough land to support the family and additional labor.
It was fascinating to reflect on how this mirrors the horrifying history of land dispossession in South Africa, particularly the 1913 Land Act which made it illegal for Black South Africans to buy or rent land in 93% of the country, which forced the majority of people into the service of white industrialists and farmers. There's a good summary of it on SA History Online: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/natives-land-act-1913
How did Serbia industrialize then? During the interwar period? What did Tito do to industrialize Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia? Sorry I don't know this history. I know about Tito, the horrible regime set-up by the Third Reich, and that is about it...
"The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror.." except in China, where Mao decentralized industrialization, after eschewing the centralized, Soviet model and relying on peasants' innate intelligence to learn manufacturing.
The enclosure acts in England and the idea that everyone, starting with 4 years of age had to earn their keep and stop living of the commons land was forced industrialization.
Several factors led to starvation and death during Soviet industrialization, many of them not controlled by the soviets...
Sven Beckert discusses this issue in The Empire of Cotton to explain how countries like India, previously a world leader in the field, initially failed to industrialize cotton production.
Fascinating topic - would be interesting to look at how this sort of dynamic played out in Mexico. I understand that a big issue that contributed to the Mexican revolution was landgrabbing by powerful interests that was partly motivated / justified by the desire to turn small land holders into wage labourers either on large land holdings or by moving to cities.
According to Carr, the reason the VKP(B) accelerated collectivization exactly the moment it did was one of simple lack of time: by the end of 1926, the Bolsheviks knew WWII would happen soon. In this, everybody agreed, not just Stalin. The only difference was that, at the time, they believed the main belligerent and invader would be the British Empire, not a still very weak and submissive Germany.
If memory doesn't fail me, Trotsky, Zinoviev et al believed the British would invade not later than 1934. The Soviets started a frantic pro-war, anti-imperialist diplomatic campaign, led by Litvinov, in the international arena. It was very successful, but historians still debate to this day if it was the main factor that delayed WWII.
It is important to highlight that, by then, the Bolsheviks already were a serious entity with serious power: they had full access to the diplomatic channels of the Soviet State and had inherited all of the defunct Russian Empire's obligations and privileges. Those were not hysterical gibbering from some random crazy leftists: they knew they would be invaded and knew that it would mean WWII for a fact.
The Bolsheviks always knew forced collectivization was in the cards. Bukharin refuted it precisely because they had calculated how many lives it would have cost: some 23 million (not necessarily dead, but displaced). That's why he defended the “industrialization at a snail's pace”. Forced collectivization was definitely not Stalin's invention.
Everybody in Europe knew WWII would happen as soon as the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Liberals like to point out Keynes, but he was far from being a visionary: from documents of the time, it feels like it was written on the wall. We can attest that by the fact that all the major European powers started to rearm and modernize right after WWI. The big question was which side against which and exactly when and where it would be triggered. The British had a trigger in its hands: Poland. With Germany's acceptance to the League of Nations in 1926, the final piece of the puzzle for an invasion of the USSR led by the British was obtained.
In my opinion, the decisive factor that avoided an earlier WWII fought between a British Coalition and the USSR was a mix of economic and doctrinaire: from French and British documents, we know that they were not nearly rebuilt from WWI by the end of the 1920s or even the first half of the 1930s; France was specially traumatized by War and didn't want to fight another one. On the doctrinaire front -- and we know that because Neville Chamberlain's letters are published in full -- we have that the British elites, personified by the Conservative Party then in power, believed in the thesis that another world war would finish what the October Revolution started, i.e. complete the World Revolution, or at least the Revolution in Europe. Some of them believed that, was WWI prolonged by a few more years, World Revolution would have happened.
Things continued to get worse from the point of view of the Soviets through the 1930s, for obvious reasons. The Soviets knew and did read Hitler's Mein Kampf from the very beginning, and knew his ultimate plan was to invade and destroy the USSR and, more importantly, communism. By the end of the 1930s, things got desperate because the British and French continued to refuse an alliance with the USSR against Germany. This period coincided with the most accelerated and brutal phase of forced collectivization; it was also during this phase that the great purge of the Party and Red Army happened. The accelerated conclusion of forced collectivization catapulted Molotov to the de facto post of second most powerful man of the USSR.
Litvinov was sacked (if memory doesn't fail me, in 1937) and Molotov assumed his place. Molotov was not a diplomat and many people in the West use this episode as a demonstration of Stalin's anti-intellectualism and Asiatic ignorance, but they miss the point: Molotov wasn't there to make diplomacy, but only to “close shop” and formally start the processes of waging what would be WWII.
So, long story short, if you don't want to read this long comment: the Bolsheviks enforced collectivization simply because they lacked the time to do it by more peaceful, “organic” means.
"Stasis, or equilibrium of sorts, ensues" -- only until population growth did it's work. At some point all the land suitable for giving to landless farmers as homesteads would have been occupied-- no more free homesteads for landless laborers. Then extra children on existing homesteads would have felt strong pressure to go to the cities.
Dear Branco,
I am not sure you read Russian, and don't think this book has been translated into English, unfortunately.
OSTROVSKY A.V. “RUSSIAN VILLAGE AT THE HISTORICAL CROSSROADS”
This is what I would call a "closing" book in the eternal discussion of the "land problem" in Russia. Closing in the sense that it gives answers to the main points of that discussion.
The book can be found in Russian here
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://istmat.org/files/uploads/62087/ostrovskiy_a.v._rossiyskaya_derevnya.pdf
or here
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://istmat.org/files/uploads/62087/ostrovskiy_a.v._rossiyskaya_derevnya.pdf
By this gentleman.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%92%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87_(%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA)
Based on local statistics (very important difference, countrywide stats average out, which for a country like Russia just doesn't make sense) he shows that by 1914 Russia was sitting in the Malthusian trap up to it's nostrils. A very large proportion of population, located in the Northern European part of the country (majority, in fact) faced literal starvation risk year in, year out, with a negative trend even without plunging into WW1. And the author argues, very pursuasively, that the last chance to change course was in 1861. Once the government botched the emancipation of serfdom, violent breakdown was baked in.
As the saying goes, if something can't go on, it stops. SOMETHING had to change in the way things were run. That SOMETHING turned out to be the October revolution and then collectivisation. Collectivisation by the way wasn't anything new really, first projects started to percolate in the Duma since 1910, once it became clear that Stolypins reforms are a dud, almost in exactly the same form as it later happened, minus repressions against the kulaki.
As for famines: a) your numbers are hugely exaggerated b) real numbers are roughly in line with the "normal" famine deaths trendline of the Russian empire, i.e. nothing new (if you exclude the famine of 1922 which was more about a breakdown of the entire economy rather than bolshevik rule/misrule or mother nature playing up). But famines are a different issue.
Newer apartments in nice clean brand new buidings and free health care looked more promising for the parents whoch wanted better future for their kids. Taking the property rights from the people and allocating of their estate in social economic cooperations paid back. Industrialisation was painful but fast and necessary even if some people couldn't survive it.. But the inequality between property owners and those who don't have property was falling. On the contrary inequality between entrepreneurs and normal people was perhaps not growing as much as in western Europe because Soviet Union had its grib on price manipulations, production planning etc.
Is this mechanism affecting African development? What are the data with respect to landlessness in Africa?
As far as I understand, land transfer after 1917 was not that drastic. Majority of land was already in peasants' hands by the end of Tsarist Russia.
Jean-Baptiste Say already pointed this out in his Cours d'Economie Politique (see below).
France was a country of many small landowners with few children; England was the opposite -> It was much more difficult to find workers for factories in France.
Before the Revolution, landowners numbers: 4 million in France vs. 30,000 in England.
Before 1830, total fertility rate <4 in France vs. > 5 in UK
Say was a textile entrepreneur around 1810: “ J'ai été forcé une fois de faire venir des ouvriers du département de l’Oise dans celui du Pas-de-Calais : ces deux départemens ne sont pas séparés par une fort grande distance ; j'avais eu soin de faire marcher ces ouvriers en famille, conséquemment avec ce qu'ils avaient de plus cher, de leur procurer des gains assurés, de faciliter leurs arrangemens, de leur rendre la vie douce. Cependant aucun ne résista à l'ennui, au malaise qu'on éprouve loin du pays natal. Au bout d'un certain nombre d'années, ils étaient tous , sans exception , retournés dans leur canton. Un canton différent, pour la classe laborieuse, est un pays étranger. »
(…) « dans les cantons cultivés par de grands entrepreneurs de culture , il y a moins de population rurale et plus de villes industrieuses et peuplées or, c'est dans les villes que se perfectionne la civilisation. »
There are two topics Dr M does not address in this argument:
(a) As DLR quote accurately notes, Malthusian squeeze should have still pushed significant numbers of peasants into industrial work. Those small farmers in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria were not landless. But those smallholdings could not support an infinitely expanding population. Dr M, do you have population demographic facts to go along with the landholding facts?
(b) What were the inheritance rules in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria? Did all children of these smallholders inherit equally? All male children? Only the first-born son? If the inheritance system is too equal, those smallholdings will become too small to support a family, and the too-small holder has to give it up and either move to the city or go to work as hired labor for someone with enough land to support the family and additional labor.
It was fascinating to reflect on how this mirrors the horrifying history of land dispossession in South Africa, particularly the 1913 Land Act which made it illegal for Black South Africans to buy or rent land in 93% of the country, which forced the majority of people into the service of white industrialists and farmers. There's a good summary of it on SA History Online: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/natives-land-act-1913
How did Serbia industrialize then? During the interwar period? What did Tito do to industrialize Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia? Sorry I don't know this history. I know about Tito, the horrible regime set-up by the Third Reich, and that is about it...
"The process whereby agricultural economies industrialized was wrenching. The displacement and unhappiness of the population dragged into industrial centers through either empty stomachs or outright terror.." except in China, where Mao decentralized industrialization, after eschewing the centralized, Soviet model and relying on peasants' innate intelligence to learn manufacturing.
The enclosure acts in England and the idea that everyone, starting with 4 years of age had to earn their keep and stop living of the commons land was forced industrialization.
Several factors led to starvation and death during Soviet industrialization, many of them not controlled by the soviets...
Sven Beckert discusses this issue in The Empire of Cotton to explain how countries like India, previously a world leader in the field, initially failed to industrialize cotton production.
Sure, capitalism is devlopment by violence !
Fascinating topic - would be interesting to look at how this sort of dynamic played out in Mexico. I understand that a big issue that contributed to the Mexican revolution was landgrabbing by powerful interests that was partly motivated / justified by the desire to turn small land holders into wage labourers either on large land holdings or by moving to cities.