page_title: History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)
section_title: Collectivization of agriculture
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953) / Economy / Collectivization of agriculture
caption_attribution_description: English: The choice of Soviet industrial planners was McCormick-Deering 15-30 (International Harvester), locally produced as KhTZ 15-30 in Kharkiv and STZ 15-30 in Stalingrad. The technology transfer, in forms of import and local productions of tractors, was technological backbone of the collectivization and industrialization programs during the first five-year plans. According to Antony C. Sutton “…in agriculture the transfer of Western technology was not notably successful. The hostility of the peasant, the collectivization of agriculture, the undue attachment to the imaginary massive economies of scale, and the misunderstanding of the factors making for success in Western large-scale agriculture made for ineffective transfer.” Українська: Радянське центральне планування зупинило свій вибір на McCormick-Deering 15-30 (виробництво International Harvester), який вироблявся в Харкові та Сталінграді як ХТЗ 15-30 та СТЗ 15-30. Трансфер технологій у формі імпорту та місцевого виробництва тракторів був основою програм колективізації та індустріалізації під час перших п'ятирічних планів. На думку Antony C. Sutton "... в сільському господарстві передача західних технологій була не надто успішною. Неприязне ставлення селянина, колективізація сільського господарства, необґрунтоване прихильність до уявних економії масштабу та нерозуміння факторів, що роблять успіх у західному великомасштабному сільському господарстві, зумовили неефективну передачу ".
context_page_description: The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 covers the period in Soviet history from the establishment of Stalinism through victory in the Second World War and down to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with aggressive economic planning, in particular a sweeping collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin consolidated his power within the party and the state and fostered an extensive cult of personality. Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization Communist Party served as Stalin's major tools in molding Soviet society. Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulag labor camps and during famine.
  World War II, known as "the Great Patriotic War" by Soviet historians, devastated much of the USSR, with about one out of every three World War II deaths representing a citizen of the Soviet Union. After World War II, the Soviet Union's armies occupied Eastern Europe, where they established or supported Communist puppet governments.
context_section_description: Under the NEP, Lenin had to tolerate the continued existence of privately owned agriculture. He decided to wait at least 20 years before attempting to place it under state control and in the meantime concentrate on industrial development. However, after Stalin's rise to power, the timetable for collectivization was shortened to just five years. Demand for food intensified, especially in the USSR's primary grain producing regions, with new, forced approaches implemented. Upon joining kolkhozes (collective farms), peasants had to give up their private plots of land and property. Every harvest, Kolkhoz production was sold to the state for a low price set by the state itself. However, the natural progress of collectivization was slow, and the November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee decided to accelerate collectivization through force. In any case, Russian peasant culture formed a bulwark of traditionalism that stood in the way of the Soviet state's goals.
  Given the goals of the first Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture in order to feed the rapidly growing urban population and to obtain a source of foreign currency through increased cereal exports. Given its late start, the USSR needed to import a substantial number of the expensive technologies necessary for heavy industrialization.
  By 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture had been collectivized. In many cases, peasants bitterly opposed this process and often slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms, even though the government only wanted the grain. Kulaks, prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Russian Far North (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak".  The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class—formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929—meant some executions, and even more deportation to special settlements and, sometimes, to forced labor camps.
  Despite the expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farm productivity, which did not return to the levels achieved under the NEP until 1940. The upheaval associated with collectivization was particularly severe in Ukraine and the heavily Ukrainian Volga region. Peasants slaughtered their livestock en masse rather than give them up. In 1930 alone, 25% of the nation's cattle, sheep, and goats, and one-third of all pigs were killed. It was not until the 1980s that the Soviet livestock numbers would return to their 1928 level. Government bureaucrats, who had been given a rudimentary education on farming techniques, were dispatched to the countryside to "teach" peasants the new ways of socialist agriculture, relying largely on Marxist theoretical ideas that had little basis in reality. Even after the state inevitably won and succeeding in imposing collectivization, the peasants did everything they could in the way of sabotage. They cultivated far smaller portions of their land and worked much less. The scale of the Ukrainian famine has led many Ukrainian scholars to argue that there was a deliberate policy of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Other scholars argue that the massive death totals were an inevitable result of a very poorly planned operation against all peasants, who had given little support to Lenin or Stalin. 
  Almost 99% of all cultivated land had been pulled into collective farms by the end of 1937.  The ghastly price paid by the peasantry has yet to be established with precision, but probably up to 5 million people died of persecution or starvation in these years.  Ukrainians and Kazakhs suffered worse than most nations.
  — Robert Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (2007) p. 145
  In Ukraine alone, the number of people who died in the famines is now estimated to be 3.5 million.
  The USSR took over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, which were lost to Germany in 1941, and then recovered in 1944. The collectivization of their farms began in 1948. Using terror, mass killings and depo
caption: Propaganda shows the use of tractors (in this case McCormick-Deering 15-30) as a backbone of collectivization. Soviet Ukraine, 1931
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "3264", "Image ImageLength": "4928", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D5100", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2018:05:07 20:39:07", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "312", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 3, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "1020", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1134", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4703", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "4", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Unidentified", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "800", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2018:03:09 10:28:24", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2018:03:09 10:28:24", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5906891/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "18/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "18", "EXIF SubSecTime": "20", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "20", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "20", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "746", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1262", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "988", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 2]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "27", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}