Collectivisation and industrialisation

'Come and join our kolkhoz!'
Soviet poster from the 1930s

The end of NEP

The period 1929-32 saw an industrialisation drive accompanied by the collectivisation of agriculture – at first voluntary and then forced. The essence of the policy – the abandonment of NEP – was popular with many party members. Stalin was able to play on the disillusionment with NEP and the restlessness of the party’s youth, nostalgic for the heroic days of the civil war. But this meant destroying a policy that had generated some economic development and relative political freedom. 

The collectivisation of agriculture

At the 15th Party Conference in December 1927, the leadership was developing what was to become the 1st Five Year Plan for industry. For this policy to succeed there would have to be a guaranteed supply of grain, which would have to come from the labour of the peasants. They numbered about 108 million people and were still more than 92 per cent of the population. During the period of NEP many of the better-off peasants had flourished. About 5.9 million were classed as rich peasants (kulaks: the Russian for ‘fist’). 

In 1929 the First Five Year Plan was introduced. It involved the voluntary entry of peasants into collective farms (kolkhozes) within five years. By the end of the year about 4.5 million had joined.

The war on the kulaks

However, Stalin was impatient with what he saw as the slow pace of voluntary collectivisation. A much greater transformation was underway, the enforced mass collectivisation that has been described by some historians as the second Soviet revolution. This was class warfare: the party had to control the countryside and the peasant had to be subordinate to the industrial worker.

On January 1930 the Politburo decreed that kulak property was to be confiscated and their land transferred to the kolkhoz. To break the kulaks’ resistance the regime revived the old tsarist tradition of the administrative deportation order, and 25,000 party activists descended on the villages to enforce these decrees.


By July 1930 over 320,000 households had been subjected to dekulakisation. Entire families were uprooted. Some were shot. Between 1930 and 1933 over two million were exiled to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other underpopulated regions, where they lived out the rest of their lives as ‘special exiles’, forbidden to leave their villages. A further 100,000 were sent to the Gulag.

However, the new giant farms proved unworkable because they lacked machinery. When the much-heralded tractors finally arrived, they often broke down. There were no spare parts and no-one knew how to repair them. On 2 March 1930 Stalin published in Pravda an article entitled (incredibly) ‘Dizzy with Success’ in which he backtracked on the collectivisation policy and reintroduced the voluntary principle. The result was that, given the choice, peasants deserted the collective farms in droves. The policy therefore had to be renewed - and this time the compulsion was here to stay.

Collectivisation enforced

The old village community, the mir, was abolished and its place taken by the kolkhoz administration, headed by the appointed Chairman, replacing the peasants’ traditional leadership that had been removed by deportation. By 1932, 62 per cent of peasant households had been collectivised. By 1937, it was 381,000 households (93 per cent).


In the short term, the policy was a disaster. The collective farms had to deliver set amounts of grain to the state. Wages were very low and the peasants were paid in kind. The prices offered for grain and other products were about ten times lower than the market level. In an act of passive resistance, they hid their grain and slaughtered their draught animals. Livestock numbers fell dramatically.

Hidden grain stores uncovered.

The Holodomor

The situation in the key agricultural areas of the country, Ukraine, the Don region, Kazakhstan and the north Caucasus, was further aggravated by a drought. In 1933 full-scale famine reached the Ukraine, where according to recent estimates, more than 3.9 million died. In Ukraine today this is known as the ‘Holodomor’, ‘killing by hunger’.  

Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933
Public domain.

The authorities made a terrible situation even worse. The famine was officially denied, so no foreign aid came in. The Law for the Protection of Socialist Property, passed on 7 August 1932, made it a criminal offence to steal even an ear of grain from the harvest, with a penalty of execution and confiscation of property, or ten years in exile. The secret police, the OGPU, sent in squads of men to enforce the policy and kept a tally of deaths. 

They took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, anything in the oven and anything in the cupboard, farm animals and pets. (Anne Applebaum, Red Hunger. Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017), p. xxiv.)

Some enterprising western journalists refused to be cowed by the official propaganda and reported the terrible sufferings they saw.  The first was the Toronto journalist, Rhea Clyman. Another was the British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who sent reports to the Manchester Guardian.

Collectivisation completed

By 1935 the constitution for collective farms defined each kolkhoz as an autonomous institution, in which decisions were made by a general meeting and the farm was run by a board of directors. In practice the kolkhoz enjoyed little autonomy since its goals were set by the party and government.

After 70 years of emancipation, the Russian peasant was returned to serfdom at the point of a gun. Norman Davis, Europe. A History (Oxford, 1996), p. 961

The beginnings of industrialisation

In May 1929, the 1st Five Year Plan was formally adopted at the 5th All-Union Congress of Soviets. In December 1932 it was decreed that the plan could be achieved in four years three months. The Plan focused on iron and steel, pushing the established metallurgical plants of Ukraine to maximum output and constructing massive new complexes like Magnitogorsk (‘magnet-mountain city’) in the southern Urals from scratch. 

Magnitogorsk: a new city for a new man

Modelled on Gary, Indiana, and raised on a virgin site,  the city had 250,000 workers, a quarter of whom were forced labourers, political prisoners, and kulaks, who worked under the eyes of the OGPU guards.

Ordinary workers at Magnitogorsk lived in barracks, eating one rationed meal a day. Engineers, brigade leaders, foremen and doctors lived on a third more food a day in a section with stone apartment buildings.

Peasants new to industrial working conditions suffered appalling accidents. Eighty percent of engine drivers suffered from TB. On the other hand, the elite – managers, political personnel, and local party and OGPU bosses – lived in a suburb known as ‘American city’. Around 400 German and American engineers supervised the construction of the plant. The Americans were paid in gold and shopped at foreigners’ stores. 

Morale was nevertheless high at Magnitogorsk. Workers attended schools in the evenings. There was a fierce pride in achievement. In a period when Europe was suffering mass unemployment, they had  jobs and sickness benefit. The hardships seemed a price worth paying.

The command economy: gigantomania

In the period of the Five Year Plans, the state took over almost total control of the economy, and this time (unlike the period of War Communism), the takeover was permanent. By the early 1930s even artisans and small shopkeepers had been put out of business or forced into state-supervised cooperatives. 

The theme of these years was ‘gigantomania’ – the Soviet Union had to produce more than any other country. Its plants must be the newest and biggest in the world. 

The Stakhanovite movement

On 31 August 1935, during the 2nd Five Year Plan (1933-7) a Donblast coal miner named Alexei Grigoryevitch Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in a single seven-hour shift, exceeding the average work norm by fourteen times. His achievement sparked a series of record-breaking performances in the coal industry. In early September he hewed 175 tons in a shift, only to be overtaken by another Donblast miner, who mined 240 tons. 

Stakhanov encourages a fellow worker
Library of Congress
Public domain.

Stakhanov became a national hero and in November the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites was held. But managers cut corners, safety was ignored, and poor performances aroused suspicion of sabotage. Alcoholism became a criminal offence. The working day became longer, and the working week was extended to seven days without any rise in salaries.

Industrialisation: a summary

In the period of the Five Year Plans, the emphasis was on heavy industry: metallurgy, electricity generation, transport. The Soviet Union's industrial production quadrupled. The industrial heart of the country shifted eastwards to Siberia.

The growth came at a cost. The consumer suffered and standards of living remained low compared with those of western Europe. The state was a monopoly employer and dictated working conditions and industrial targets. There was no room for dissent. The growth was probably only possible because of the lack of political freedom.

Conclusion: Stalin's achievements

1. Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, though at a heavy price in workplace casualties and environmental damage. 
2. The collectivisation of agriculture was accompanied by deportations, killings and famine, though by 1935 production was stepping up.
3. Historians are still arguing about the effectiveness of Stalin’s policies. The evidence from the Great Patriotic War can be interpreted in two ways: either the Soviet Union had the industrial strength to defeat Germany – or it was nearly defeated?