Collectivization of Agriculture: Causes and Consequences

All the years of the revolution go farther away from us, and at the same time the younger generation understands less and less the events of those years. At the lessons of history in schools a certain number of hours are allocated for studying this complex and tragic period of time in the life of our state. However, unfortunately, today's youth do not have a full understanding of what happened in 1917 and after it. Let's try once again to plunge into the post-revolutionary era and it is popular to consider at least such a phenomenon as the collectivization of agriculture.

The reasons for the collectivization of agriculture were rooted in the task of committing an industrialization breakthrough, which was necessary for the Country of Soviets for self-assertion among the hostile foreign neighbors, who did not want to perceive it as a reality that had come true. From the very first moment that the Bolsheviks seized power, they welcomed the nationalization of all property that existed on the territory of the state. And the collectivization of agriculture was a form of appropriation of land, which turned into its sole possession. The creation of collective farms was not a one-time event, announced in 1929. The process of transforming individual farms belonging to prosperous peasants into collective Bolsheviks was already being prepared in the years of "War Communism." This is evidenced by the facts of the planting of communes, which appeared at that time, and the property there was only exclusively public. And although the transition to a new economic policy led to the collapse of the commune, still long before the "Great Crisis Year" there already existed a number of collective farms, uniting almost 4% of peasant households. These associations were called TOZs, i.e. Partnerships for joint land cultivation.

Calling the reasons for the collectivization of agriculture, one can not help but touch upon the problems of the grain procurement crisis that broke out in the USSR in 1927. Only large agrarian associations, which submitted to the state, made it possible to unhinderily withdraw all the harvested grain and unquestionably transfer the crop to the barn to provide workers with bread. Making a bet on the creation of a new kind of organization of agriculture, a precedent that the world did not yet know, the Bolsheviks were able to correctly choose the chief executor of the plans they had conceived. It was a poor people, radically opposed to the well-to-do layers of the village. And in support of her from the city were sent communists, twenty-five thousandths - fans of the revolutionary movement, who firmly believed in the nobility of their mission. And this led to the complete elimination of the collectivization of agriculture by the total elimination of the kulaks. In fact, under the motto of fighting the enemies of the revolution, there was an extermination of a stratum of the rural population, who knew the price of land and peasant labor.

The collectivization of agriculture divided the single village before the two opposing camps. In one of them there were members of the committees of the poor, who had nothing to do with their souls before. And in the other - fists, which, in turn, "sorted" into 3 groups: fists-counterrevolutionaries, who were arrested with all members of the family, large fists that were subject to deportation to the northern regions of the country and the rest - those who were resettled within that Region where they lived.

The criteria for dividing into these categories were very vague. However, from this tragedy, to which the complete collectivization of agriculture has come to an end, does not become less ambitious. In all, the collectivization of agriculture destroyed more than 1.1 million strong farms, on which the economy of a huge state, formerly called the Russian Empire, was actually held.