“Industrialization was put upon the order of the day. Self-satisfied quietism was replaced by a panic of haste. The half-forgotten slogan of Lenin, "catch up with and outstrip," was filled out with the words, "in the shortest possible time." The minimalist five-year plan, already confirmed in principle by a congress of the party, gave place to a new plan, the fundamental elements of which were borrowed in toto from the platform of the shattered Left Opposition. Dnieperstroy, only yesterday likened to a gramophone, today occupied the center of attention. After the first new successes the slogan was advanced : "Achieve the five-year plan in four years." The startled empirics now decided that everything was possible. Opportunism, as has often happened in history, turned into its opposite, adventurism...
The press which only yesterday had been denying the existence of the kulaks, today, on a signal from above, discovered them not only in the villages, but in the party itself. It was revealed that the communist nuclei were frequently dominated by rich peasants possessing complicated machinery, employing hired labor, concealing from the government hundreds and thousands of pounds of grain, and implacably denouncing the "Trotskyist" policy. In order to feed the cities, it was necessary immediately to take from the kulak the daily bread. This could be achieved only by force. The expropriation of the grain reserve, and that not only of the kulak but of the middle peasant, was called, in the official language. "extraordinary measures!' This phrase is supposed to mean that tomorrow everything will fall back into the old rut. But the peasants did not believe these fine words, and they were right. The violent seizures of grain deprived the well-off peasants of their motive to increased sowings. The hired hands and the poor peasants found themselves without work. Agriculture again arrived in a blind alley, and with it the state. It was necessary at any cost to reform the "general line."
Stalin and Molotov, still giving individual farming the chief place, began to emphasize the necessity of a swifter development of the soviet and collective farms. But since the bitter need of food did not permit a cessation of military expeditions into the country, the program of promoting individual farms was left hanging in the air. It was necessary to "slip down" to collectivization. The temporary "extraordinary measures" for the collection of grain developed unexpectedly into a program of "liquidation of the kulaks as a class." From the shower of contradictory commands, more copious than food rations, it became evident that on the peasant question the government had not only no five-year plan, but not even a five months' program. According to the new plan, drawn up under the spur of a food crisis, collective farms were at the end of five years to comprise about 2o per cent of the peasant holdings. This program-whose immensity will be clear when you consider that during the preceding ten years collectivization had affected less than 1 per cent of the country-was nevertheless by the middle of the five years left far behind. In November 1929, Stalin, abandoning his own vacillations, announced the end of individual farming. The peasants, he said, are entering the collective farms "in whole villages, counties and even provinces." Yakovlev, who two years before had insisted that the collectives would for many years remain only "islands in a sea of peasant holdings," now received an order as People's Commissar of Agriculture to "liquidate the kulaks as a class," and establish complete collectivization at "the earliest possible date." In the year 1929, the proportion of collective farms rose from 1.7 per cent to 3.9 per cent In 1930 it rose to 23.6, in 1931 to 5 2.7, in 1932 to 61.5 per cent.
At the present time hardly anybody would be foolish enough to repeat the twaddle of liberals to the effect that collectivization as a whole was accomplished by naked force. In former historic epochs the peasants in their struggle for land have at one time raised an insurrection against the landlords, at another sent a stream of colonizers into untilled regions, at still another rushed into all kinds of sects which promised to reward the muzhik with heaven's vacancies for his narrow quarters on earth. Now, after the expropriation of the great estates and the extreme parcellation of the land, the union of these small parcels into big tracts had become a question of life and death for the peasants, for agriculture, and for society as a whole… The problem, however, is far from settled by these general historic considerations. The real possibilities of collectivization are determined, not by the depth of the impasse in the villages and not by the administrative energy of the government, but primarily by the existing productive resources-that is, the ability of the industries to furnish large-scale agriculture with the requisite machinery. These material conditions were lacking. The collective farms were set up with an equipment suitable in the main only for small scale farming. In these conditions an exaggeratedly swift collectivization took the character of an economic adventure...
Twenty-five million isolated peasant egoisms, which yesterday had been the sole motive force of agriculture-* weak like an old farmer's nag, but nevertheless forces the bureaucracy tried to replace at one gesture by the commands of two thousand collective farm administrative offices, lacking technical equipment, agronomic knowledge and the support of the peasants themselves. The dire consequences of this adventurism soon followed, and they lasted for a number of years. The total harvest of grain, which had risen in 1930 to 835 million hundredweight, fell in the next two years below 700 million. The difference does not seem catastrophic in itself, but it meant a loss of just that quantity of grain needed to keep the towns even at their customary hunger norm. In technical culture the results were still worse. On the eve of collectivization, the production of sugar had reached almost 109 million pounds,· and at the height of complete collectivization it had fallen, owing to a lack of beets, to 48 million pounds-that is, to half of what it had been. But the most devastating hurricane hit the animal kingdom. The number of horses fell 55 per cent-from 34.6 million in 1929 to 15.6 million in 1934. The number of horned cattle fell from 30.7 million to 19.5 million-that is, 40 per cent. The number of pigs, 55 per cent ; sheep, 66 per cent. The destruction of people -by hunger, cold, epidemics and measures of repression-is unfortunately less accurately tabulated than the slaughter of stock, but it also mounts up to millions. The blame for these sacrifices lies not upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling methods with which it was carried through. The bureaucracy foresaw nothing. Even the constitutions of the collectives, which made an attempt to bind up the personal interests of the peasants with the welfare of the farm, were not published until after the unhappy villages had been thus cruelly laid waste.”