Soviet Collectivisation and the Holodomor
Soviet collectivisation — the forced amalgamation of private peasant farms into collective farms (kolkhozy) — was launched as a state policy in December 1929 and implemented at breakneck speed through 1930 and 1931. Stalin had reversed his previous policy of cautious gradualism under pressure from economic crisis and ideological commitment to rapid industrialisation; the NEP (New Economic Policy) that had stabilised Soviet agriculture since 1921 was abruptly terminated. The process was catastrophically violent. 'Dekulakisation' — the destruction of the 'kulak' class (better-off peasants, defined expansively to include anyone who resisted collectivisation) — involved the deportation of approximately 1.8 million people to Siberia and Central Asia in 1930–31, where hundreds of thousands died from exposure and starvation. Peasants who resisted by slaughtering their livestock rather than surrendering them destroyed half of the USSR's livestock population in two years. The famine of 1932–33 was the consequence of collectivisation's failure combined with state grain procurement that extracted food from villages even as peasants starved. The Soviet state continued exporting grain internationally throughout the famine; internal passports were introduced in December 1932 specifically to prevent Ukrainian and Cossack peasants from fleeing to cities where food was more available. In Ukraine — the USSR's most productive agricultural region — the famine was most intense. Brigades searched villages for hidden food, removing anything edible. Between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians died between 1932 and 1933 — in some regions, a quarter to a third of the population. Post-Soviet archival research, including Anne Applebaum's Red Famine (2017), has established that the targeting of Ukraine was deliberate: policies specifically tightened in Ukraine in late 1932, including blacklisting villages that failed to meet grain quotas and prohibiting food imports into blacklisted areas. The Holodomor was covered up by the Soviet government; Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, actively denied reports of famine. The deliberate character of the famine and its specifically Ukrainian targeting remain contested in academic historiography, though 33 countries and the European Parliament have formally recognised it as genocide.
- Year: 1930 CE
- Category: Political
