Collectivization, Soviet

Hard-working and successful small farmers remained productive and were an affront to Soviet collectivism. Referring to these enterprising farmers as kulaks (clenched fist in Russian), Stalin orchestrated the liquidation of kulaks as a class. Thousands were executed, and millions were deported to Siberia or Central Asia. 

Conquest, Robert. 1986. The Harvest of Sorrow Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York Oxford University Press. 

We shall examine in some detail two notorious schemes of agrarian simplification—collectivization in Soviet Russia and ujamaa villages in Tanzania—searching both for the larger political logic of their design and for the reasons behind their manifold failures as schemes of production. First, however, it may help to provide a schematic illustration of this process from the history of Southeast Asia, which reveals a... 

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture was an extreme but diagnostic case of authoritarian high-modernist planning. It represented an... 

That collectivized agriculture persisted for sixty years was a tribute less to the plan of the state than to the improvisations, gray markets, bartering, and ingenuity that partly compensated for its failures. Just as an informal Brasilia, which had no legitimate place in official plans, arose to make the city viable, so did a set of informal practices lying outside the formal command economy—and often outside Soviet law as well—arise to circumvent some of the colossal waste and... 

Drawing on the history of Soviet collectivization, I shall now venture a few more frankly speculative ideas about the institutional logic of authoritarian high modernism. Then I shall suggest a way of grasping why such massive social bulldozing may have worked tolerably well for some purposes but failed dismally for others—an issue to which we shall return in later chapters. 

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