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102-569: The OGPU played an important role in the Soviet Union's forced collectivization of agriculture under the leadership of Joseph Stalin , crushing resistance and deporting millions of peasants to the growing network of Gulag forced labor camps. The OGPU operated both inside and outside the country, persecuting political criminals and opponents of the Bolsheviks such as White émigrés , Soviet dissidents , and anti-communists . Following

204-550: A better life but was actually signing them up for Hell. Peasants feared that if they joined the collective farm they would be marked with the stamp of the Antichrist. They faced a choice between God and the Soviet collective farm. Choosing between salvation and damnation, peasants had no choice but to resist the policies of the state. These rumours of the Soviet state as the Antichrist functioned to keep peasants from succumbing to

306-423: A class. The methods Stalin used to eliminate the kulaks were dispossession, deportation, and execution. The term "Ural-Siberian Method" was coined by Stalin, the rest of the population referred to it as the "new method". Article 107 of the criminal code was the legal means by which the state acquired grain. The Soviet government responded to these acts by cutting off food rations to peasants and areas where there

408-498: A direct admission that ten million people perished as a result of collectivization. Since the second half of the 19th century, Siberia had been a major agricultural region within Russia, espеcially its southern territories (nowadays Altai Krai , Omsk Oblast , Novosibirsk Oblast , Kemerovo Oblast , Khakassia , Buryatia , Irkutsk Oblast ). Stolypin's program of resettlement granted a lot of land for immigrants from elsewhere in

510-528: A fairly negative impact upon their arrival as the peasants brought with them their habits from the farms. They struggled with punctuality and demonstrated a rather poor work ethic, which hindered their ability to perform in the workplace. In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method of grain procurement, resistance to grain seizures became widespread with some violent incidents of resistance. Also, massive hoarding (burial

612-555: A judge. The OGPU's powers increased greatly in 1926, when the Soviet criminal code  [ ru ] was amended to include Article 58 , a section on anti-state terrorism . The provisions were vaguely written and very broadly interpreted. Even before then, OGPU had set up tribunals to try the most exceptional cases of terrorism, usually without calling any witnesses. In time, the OGPU's de facto powers grew even greater than those of

714-405: A million migrated to other regions of Central Asia and 1.5 million to China. Of those who remained, as many as a million died in the resulting famine. In Mongolia , a so-called 'Soviet dependency', attempted collectivization was abandoned in 1932 after the loss of 8 million head of livestock. Historian Sarah Cameron argues that while Stalin did not intend to starve Kazakhs, he saw some deaths as

816-496: A more urban and industrial look insulted peasant women. After local activists in a village in North Caucasus actually confiscated all blankets, more fear dispersed among villagers. The common blanket meant that all men and women would sleep on a seven-hundred meter long bed under a seven-hundred-meter long blanket. Historians argue that women took advantage of these rumours without actually believing them so they could attack

918-510: A necessary sacrifice to achieve the political and economic goals of the regime. Cameron believes that while the famine combined with a campaign against nomads was not genocide in the sense of the United Nations (UN) definition, it complies with Raphael Lemkin 's original concept of genocide, which considered destruction of culture to be as genocidal as physical annihilation. Historian Stephen Wheatcroft criticized this view in regard to

1020-597: A public decree that any and all opposition views should be considered dangerous and gave the OGPU the authority to seek out "hostile elements." That led in March 1928 to the Shakhty Trial , which saw the prosecution of a group of supposed industrial saboteurs allegedly involved in a hostile conspiracy. That would be the first of many trials during Stalin's rule. The OGPU planned and set up the Gulag system, and also became

1122-606: A revolt was put down by the Red Army in 1929 . It has since been perceived by historians such as Lynne Viola as a Civil War of the peasants against the Bolshevik Government and the attempted colonization of the countryside. In 1928 within Soviet Kazakhstan, authorities started a campaign to confiscate cattle from richer Kazakhs, who were called bai, known as Little October. The confiscation campaign

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1224-472: A scathing portrait of him: "The impression he made on me could best be described by saying that he made none at all. He seemed like a poor sketch for an unfinished portrait. Only now and then would an ingratiating smile or secret play of the eyes betray his eagerness from insignificance ... No-one took any notice of Menzhinsky, so quietly toiling away over his papers." He was master of more than 10 languages (including Korean , Chinese , Turkish , and Persian ,

1326-435: A single famine responsible for 3 to 5 million deaths. Some peasants viewed collectivization as the end of the world. By no means was joining the collective farm (also known as the kolkhoz ) voluntary. The drive to collectivize understandably had little support from experienced farmers. The oversimplified intent was to withhold grain from the market and increase the total crop and food supply via state collective farms, with

1428-465: A source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained quite small, but the Bolsheviks began to take aim at the kulaks , peasants with enough land and money to own several animals and hire a few labourers . Kulaks were blamed for withholding surpluses of agricultural produce. Clearly identifying this group

1530-421: A temporary halt to the process: It is a fact that by February 20 of this year 50 percent of the peasant farms throughout the U.S.S.R. had been collectivized. That means that by February 20, 1930, we had overfulfilled the five-year plan of collectivization by more than 100 per cent.... some of our comrades have become dizzy with success and for the moment have lost clearness of mind and sobriety of vision. After

1632-458: A year in kind and then in cash, but salaries were very small and at times farmers went unpaid or even ended up owing money to the kolkhoz. Farmers still had small pieces of land (not larger than 0.5 ha) around their houses where they grew food for themselves. Along with collectivization, the government tried to uproot the custom of living in individual farmsteads by resettling people in villages. However this process failed due to lack of money since

1734-416: Is that the total death toll (both direct and indirect) for Stalin's collectivization program was on the order of 12 million people. There is a popular story that at the 1945 Yalta Conference when Winston Churchill asked Joseph Stalin how many died in the famine, the Soviet leader responded with a shrug , a gesture that on account of Stalin's raised hands having 10 fingers, has been cited by historians as

1836-561: The Dekulakization campaigns during the First Five-Year Plan through extrajudicial special troikas of local OGPU agents, Communist Party officials, and state procurators with the authority to sentence suspects to exile or death without a formal trial in the Soviet judicial system . OGPU troops took part in Soviet invasion of Xinjiang . Menzhinsky's health had deteriorated rapidly during his directorship of

1938-457: The Holodomor famine. Due to the high government production quotas , peasants received, as a rule, less for their labour than they did before collectivization, and some refused to work. Merle Fainsod estimated that, in 1952, collective farm earnings were only one-fourth of the cash income from private plots on Soviet collective farms. In many cases, the immediate effect of collectivization

2040-886: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1902. During the 1905 revolution , Vera Menzhinsky worked alongside Nadezhda Krupskaya , Vladimir Lenin 's wife, who was secretary of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, while her brother joined the Bolshevik military organisation, until he was caught in a police raid in July 1906. He was released after two weeks in prison, after going on hunger strike, and emigrated. He lived in Belgium, Switzerland, France, United States, working in foreign branches of

2142-618: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902. He emigrated from Russia in 1907, and spent the next decade in Europe and the United States. After the 1917 February Revolution , he joined the Cheka in 1919, and in 1923 was promoted to its deputy under Felix Dzerzhinsky . After his death in 1926, Menzhinsky became head of the Cheka's successor, the OGPU. He worked to crush resistance in

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2244-431: The ascension of Joseph Stalin . It began during and was part of the first five-year plan . The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase

2346-653: The kolkhozes were rewarded with higher quality land and tax breaks, whereas peasants were unwilling to join the kolkhozes were punished with being given lower quality land and increased taxes. The taxes imposed on the peasants was primarily to fund the industrial blitz that Stalin had made a priority. If these lesser forms of social coercion proved to be ineffective then the central government would resort to harsher forms of state coercion. Stalin had many kulaks transported to collective farms in distant places to work in agricultural labour camps. In response to this, many peasants began to resist, often began arming themselves against

2448-474: The 1980s, when Soviet farmers averaged about 10 percent of the output of their counterparts in the United States. To make matters worse, tractors promised to the peasants could not be produced due to the poor policies in the Industrial sector of the Soviet Union. When quotas were not met, Stalin enforced collectivization by sending special regimes to confiscate any food they can find. The kulaks argued to

2550-626: The Cheka. The OGPU achieved perhaps its most spectacular success with the Trust Operation of 1924–1925. OGPU agents contacted White émigrés and anti-communists in Western Europe and pretended to represent a large group, known as "the Trust", working to overthrow the communist régime. Exiled Russians gave "the Trust" large sums of money and supplies, as did foreign intelligence agencies. Soviet agents finally succeeded in luring one of

2652-577: The Communist Party repeatedly said that collectivization would not occur forcibly, but rather voluntarily and by example. To encourage collectivization high taxes were enforced and new farms were given no government support. But after 1945 the Party dropped its restrained approach as the voluntary approach was not yielding results. Latvians were accustomed to individual holdings ( viensētas ), which had existed even during serfdom, and for many farmers,

2754-551: The Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg University in 1898, and practised law in Yaroslavl , while dabbling in literature. He had a novel published in 1905. In February 1905, his young daughter died of a cerebral haemorrhage. The trauma ended his ten-year marriage, and he left Yaroslavl to join his unmarried sisters, Vera and Ludmila, who shared an apartment that was a popular meeting place for revolutionaries. Menzhinsky had joined

2856-700: The Kazakhs. Most historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization and the resistance of the peasants significantly contributed to the Great Famine of 1932–1933, especially in Ukraine , a region famous for its rich soil ( chernozem ). This particular period is called " Holodomor " in Ukrainian. During the similar famines of 1921–1923, numerous campaigns – inside the country, as well as internationally – were held to raise money and food in support of

2958-644: The OGPU and Stalin tended to deal with his first deputy, Genrikh Yagoda , who essentially took over as head in the late 1920s. Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid until his death in May 1934, for which Yagoda would later be blamed in the Trial of the Twenty One . In July 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, the OGPU was dissolved and reincorporated into the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD),

3060-556: The OGPU's first chief. The OSNAZ ( ОСНАЗ ), a militarised section of the Cheka, had originated in 1921; it became a component of OGPU. The OGPU, like the GPU before it, was in theory supposed to operate with more restraint than the Cheka, which had orchestrated the Red Terror from 1918 to 1922. Unlike the Cheka, the OGPU could not shoot " counter-revolutionaries " at will, and most suspected political criminals had to be brought before

3162-527: The RSDLP. When the Bolshevik faction split over the issue of whether to put up candidates for election to the Duma . Menzhinsky joined the "boycottists", led by Lenin's rival, Alexander Bogdanov , and joined the editorial board of their journal Vpered , but when the Vpered faction split, Menzhinsky aligned himself with the self-proclaimed "Orthodox Marxists", Grigory Aleksinsky and Mikhail Pokrovsky , rejecting

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3264-534: The Russian throne, when it becomes vacant, but also the sole heir of the Socialist International. Should he ever come to power, the mischief he would do would not be much less than that of Paul I . The Leninist are not even a faction, but a clan of party gypsies who hope to drown the voice of the proletariat with their screams. Trotsky who knew Menzhinsky from when they were exiles, in 1920, left

3366-453: The Soviet Union had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed, "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions." Apart from ideological goals, Joseph Stalin also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialization which required larger surpluses to be extracted from

3468-406: The Soviet famine because he believes that the nominally stated high expectations of central planners was sufficient to demonstrate their ignorance of the ultimate consequences of their actions and that the result of them would be famine. Niccolò Pianciola goes further than Cameron and argues that from Lemkin's point of view on genocide all nomads of the Soviet Union were victims of the crime, not just

3570-641: The Soviet government's arm for the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church , the Greek Catholics , the Roman Catholic Church , Islam and other religious organizations, in an operation headed by Yevgeny Tuchkov . The OGPU was also the principal secret police agency responsible for the detection, arrest, and liquidation of anarchists and other dissident left-wing factions in the early Soviet Union. It also enforced

3672-409: The Soviet state continued to undermine the church through expropriations and repression. They cut off state financial support to the church and secularized church schools. Peasants began to associate Communists with atheists because the attack on the church was so devastating. The Communist assault on religion and the church angered many peasants, giving them more reason to revolt. Riots exploded after

3774-614: The Soviets planned to move houses as well. Sources: Sotsialisticheskoe sel'skoe khoziaistvo SSSR , Gosplanizdat, Moscow-Leningrad, 1939 (pp. 42, 43); supplementary numbers for 1927–1935 from Sel'skoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1935 , Narkomzem SSSR, Moscow, 1936 (pp. 630, 634, 1347, 1369); 1937 from Great Soviet Encyclopedia , vol. 22, Moscow, 1953 (p. 81); 1939 from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1917–1987 , Moscow, 1987 (pp. 35); 1940 from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR 1922–1972 , Moscow, 1972 (pp. 215, 240). The official numbers for

3876-639: The USSR ( Объединённое государственное политическое управление при СНК СССР , Ob"yedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye pri SNK SSSR ), though the name is also translated as the All-Union State Political Administration or as Unified State Political Directorate. Felix Dzerzhinsky , who had served as the chairman of the State Political Directorate and of the Cheka, was appointed as

3978-643: The USSR. After these deportations, the pace of collectivization increased as a flood of farmers rushed into kolkhozes. Within two weeks 1740 new kolkhozes were established and by the end of 1950, just 4.5% of Latvian farmsteads remained outside the collectivized units; about 226,900 farmsteads belonged to collectives, of which there were now around 14,700. Rural life changed as farmers' daily movements were governed by plans, decisions, and quotas formulated elsewhere and delivered through an intermediate non-farming hierarchy. The new kolkhozes, especially smaller ones, were ill-equipped and poor – at first farmers were paid once

4080-664: The Ukrainian people". After the Soviet Occupation of Latvia in June 1940, the country's new rulers were faced with a problem: the agricultural reforms of the inter-war period had expanded individual holdings. The property of " enemies of the people " and refugees , as well as those above 30 hectares, was nationalized in 1940–44, but those who were still landless were then given plots of 15 hectares each. Thus, Latvian agriculture remained essentially dependent on personal smallholdings, making central planning difficult. In 1940–41

4182-533: The activists sent from the towns. As a form of protest, many peasants preferred to slaughter their animals for food rather than give them over to collective farms, which produced a major reduction in livestock. Collectivization had been encouraged since the revolution, but in 1928, only about 1% of farmland was collectivized, and despite efforts to encourage and coerce collectivization, the rather optimistic first five-year plan only forecast 15 per cent of farms to be run collectively. The situation changed quickly in

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4284-399: The affected areas was restricted. According to Stalin in his conversation with the prize-winning writer Mikhail Sholokhov , the famine was caused by the excesses of local party workers and sabotage, I've thanked you for the letters, as they expose a sore in our Party-Soviet work and show how our workers, wishing to curb the enemy, sometimes unwittingly hit friends and descend to sadism. ...

4386-435: The agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial workforce and to pay for imports of machinery (by exporting grain). Social and ideological goals would also be served through the mobilization of the peasants in a co-operative economic enterprise that would provide social services to the people and empower the state. Stalin was suspicious of the peasants, viewing them as a major threat to socialism. Stalin's use of

4488-546: The autumn of 1929 and the winter of 1930. Between September and December 1929, collectivization increased from 7.4% to 15%, but in the first two months of 1930, 11 million households joined collectivized farms, pushing the total to nearly 60%. To assist collectivization, the Party decided to send 25,000 "socially conscious" industry workers to the countryside. This was accomplished from 1929 to 1933, and these workers have become known as twenty-five-thousanders ("dvadtsat'pyat'tysyachniki"). Soviet officials had hoped that by sending

4590-519: The closing of churches as early as 1929. Identification of Soviet power with the Antichrist also decreased peasant support for the Soviet regime. Rumors about religious persecution spread mostly by word of mouth, but also through leaflets and proclamations. Priests preached that the Antichrist had come to place "the Devil's mark" on the peasants and that the Soviet state was promising the peasants

4692-515: The collective farm "under the guise of irrational, nonpolitical protest." Women were less vulnerable to retaliation than peasant men, and therefore able to get away with a lot more. Peasant women were rarely held accountable for their actions because of the officials' perceptions of their protests. They "physically blocked the entrances to huts of peasants scheduled to be exiled as kulaks , forcibly took back socialized seed and livestock and led assaults on officials." Officials ran away and hid to let

4794-451: The collectivization process served to not only address the grain shortages, but his greater concern over the peasants' willingness to conform to the collective farm system and state mandated grain acquisitions. This demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2-million-ton shortfall in grains purchased by the Soviet Union from neighbouring markets. Stalin claimed

4896-456: The collectivized areas (the column with per cent of sown area in collective use in the table above) are biased upward by two technical factors. First, these official numbers are calculated as a per cent of sown area in peasant farmsteads, excluding the area cultivated by sovkhozes and other agricultural users. Estimates based on the total sown area (including state farms) reduce the share of collective farms between 1935 and 1940 to about 80%. Second,

4998-498: The collectors that starvation was inevitable, but they still seized everything edible from the kulaks to make up for the quotas, regardless if the kulaks had anything for themselves. Although there were recorded instances of people hiding food, this was out of survival. One notable instance was a mother hiding flour under her baby's cradle. When the brigade found it, she cried and beg saying her baby would die of hunger without it. The brigade took it anyway. Stalin falsely denied there even

5100-400: The concept of proletarian culture developed by Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky . Writing in the Russian emigre journal, Our Echo in July 1910, Menzhinsky wrote: Lenin is a political Jesuit who over the course of many years has moulded Marxism to the aims of the moment ... Lenin, this illegitimate child of Russian absolutism, considers himself not only the natural successor to

5202-549: The countryside during Joseph Stalin 's forced agricultural collectivization . Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a member of the Polish nobility , was born into an Orthodox Christian Polish-Russian family of teachers. His father was a Russified Pole and a history lecturer. His mother was a woman of letters who sympathised with the revolutionaries. His brother was a tsarist official, working for the Ministry of Finance. He graduated from

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5304-467: The course of which leaders of large anti-Soviet centers abroad, Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly , were lured to the Soviet Union and arrested. Meanwhile, the Chekist , Menzhinsky was loyal to Joseph Stalin , whose personality cult had already begun to form, coinciding with several important purges in 1930 to 1931. Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid, suffering from acute angina since

5406-616: The criminal code. Many peasant families were forcibly resettled in Siberia and Kazakhstan into exile settlements , and some of them died on the way. Estimates suggest that about a million so-called ' kulak ' families, or perhaps some 5 million people, were sent to forced labour camps . On August 7, 1932, the Decree about the Protection of Socialist Property proclaimed that the punishment for theft of kolkhoz or cooperative property

5508-443: The destruction of crops and livestock. Readings and reinterpretations of Soviet newspapers labelled collectivization as a second serfdom . Villagers were afraid the old landowners/serf owners were coming back and that the villagers joining the collective farm would face starvation and famine. More reason for peasants to believe collectivization was a second serfdom was that entry into the kolkhoz had been forced. Farmers did not have

5610-660: The empire, creating a large portion of well-off peasants and stimulating rapid agricultural development in the 1910s. Local merchants exported large quantities of labelled grain, flour, and butter into central Russia and Western Europe. In May 1931, a special resolution of the Western-Siberian Regional Executive Committee (classified "top secret") ordered the expropriation of property and the deportation of 40,000 kulaks to "sparsely populated and unpopulated" areas in Tomsk Oblast in

5712-465: The esteemed grain-growers of your district (and not only of your district alone) carried on an 'Italian strike' (sabotage!) and were not loath to leave the workers and the Red Army without bread. That the sabotage was quiet and outwardly harmless (without blood) does not change the fact that the esteemed grain-growers waged what was in fact a 'quiet' war against Soviet power. A war of starvation, dear com[rade] Sholokhov. This, of course, can in no way justify

5814-660: The extent of collectivization of sown areas. Vyacheslav Menzhinsky Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky ( Russian : Вячесла́в Рудо́льфович Менжи́нский , Polish : Wiesław Rudolfowicz Mężyński ; 31 August [ O.S. 19 August] 1874 – 10 May 1934) was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who served as chairman of the OGPU , the secret police of the Soviet Union , from 1926 to 1934. Born to Polish parents in Saint Petersburg , Menzhinsky joined

5916-473: The famine. However, it's been pointed out that the registered deaths in the archives were substantially revised by the demographics officials. The older version of the data showed 600,000 fewer deaths in Ukraine than the current, revised statistics. In The Black Book of Communism , the authors claim that the number of deaths was at least 4 million, and they also characterize the Great Famine as "a genocide of

6018-572: The food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program , meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand. In October 1929, approximately 7.5% of

6120-650: The formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis. According to Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation . Other scholars have argued that the economic programme of Trotsky differed from the forced policy of collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928 due to the levels of brutality associated with its enforcement. The pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique and formed

6222-644: The formation of the Soviet Union in December 1922, the ruling Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) saw the need for a unified intelligence service to exercise control over state security throughout the new union. At the time, the State Political Directorate (GPU) served as the secret police for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and was successor to the Cheka . It

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6324-573: The government. The attacks on religion and the Church affected women the most because they were upholders of religion within the villages. Dovzhenko 's film Earth gives example of peasants' skepticism with collectivization on the basis that it was an attack on the church. Coiner of the term genocide , Raphael Lemkin , considered the repression of the Orthodox Church to be a prong of genocide against Ukrainians when seen in correlation to

6426-504: The grain had been produced but was being hoarded by "kulaks." Stalin tried to appear as being on the side of the peasants, but it did not help, and the peasants as a whole resented the grain seizures. The peasants did everything they could to protest what they considered unfair seizures. Instead of raising the price, the Politburo adopted an emergency measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain. The seizures of grain discouraged

6528-457: The household plots of kolkhoz members (i.e., collectivized farmsteads) are included in the land base of collective farms. Without the household plots, arable land in collective cultivation in 1940 was 96.4% of land in collective farms, and not 99.8% as shown by official statistics. Although there is no arguing with the fact that collectivization was sweeping and total between 1928 and 1940, the table below provides different (more realistic) numbers on

6630-692: The last one learned especially in order to read works by Omar Khayyám ). After the February Revolution of 1917, Menzhinsky returned to Russia in the summer of that year and joined the Mezhraiontsy , an independent faction whose leading figure was Leon Trotsky who merged with the Bolsheviks in August 1917. A few days after the Bolshevik Revolution , he was appointed People's Commissar for Finance. His first act in this post

6732-477: The late 1920s, which rendered him incapable of physical exertion. He conducted the affairs of the OGPU while lying upon a couch in his office at the Lubyanka , but rarely interfered in the day-to-day operation of the GPU. Stalin tended to deal with his first deputy Genrikh Yagoda , who essentially took over as head of the organization in all but name beginning in the late 1920s. Menzhinsky died on 10 May 1934, at

6834-523: The late 1950s did Soviet farm animal stocks begin to approach 1928 levels. Peasant slaughter of livestock was significant, for instance in the Central Black Earth Region 25% of cattle, 55% of sheep, 53% of pigs and 40% of chickens were slaughtered within the first three months of 1930. Despite the initial plans, collectivization, accompanied by the bad harvest of 1932–1933, did not live up to expectations. Between 1929 and 1932 there

6936-541: The leading anti-communist operators, Sidney Reilly , into Russia to meet with the Trust. Once in the Soviet Union in September 1925, Reilly was arrested and executed. The Trust was then dissolved, having become a huge propaganda success. Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 and was succeeded as chief of the OGPU by deputy chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky . From 1927 to 1929, the OGPU engaged in intensive investigations of an opposition coup d'etat . Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issued

7038-413: The main culprits. Women were given sentences to serve as a warning, not as a punishment. Because of how they were perceived, women were able to play an essential role in the resistance to collectivization. Collectivization did not just entail the acquisition of land from farmers but also the closing of churches, burning of icons, and the arrests of priests. Associating the church with the tsarist regime,

7140-597: The newly created interior ministry of the Soviet Union, becoming its Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) under the leadership of Yagoda. The OGPU would later be transformed into the more widely known Committee for State Security (KGB) in 1954. Collectivization in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union introduced forced collectivization ( Russian : Коллективизация ) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during

7242-628: The northern part of the Western-Siberian region. The expropriated property was to be transferred to kolkhozes as indivisible collective property and the kolkhoz shares representing this forced contribution of the deportees to kolkhoz equity were to be held in the "collectivization fund of poor and landless peasants" (фонд коллективизации бедноты и батрачества). A notable uprising against collectivisation in Siberia occurred in Buryatia, where

7344-587: The outrages, which, as you assure me, have been committed by our workers. ... And those guilty of those outrages must be duly punished. About 40 million people were affected by the food shortages including areas near Moscow where mortality rates increased by 50%. The center of the famine, however, was Ukraine and surrounding regions, including the Don , the Kuban , the Northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan where

7446-568: The peasant households were in collective farms, and by February 1930, 52.7% had been collectivised. The collectivization era saw several famines , as well as peasant resistance to collectivization. During the period of war communism introduced during the Russian Civil War the policy of prodrazvyorstka was introduced (the same policy was used even before the October Revolution during World War I ), which meant that

7548-565: The peasantry was obligated to surrender the surpluses of agricultural produce for a fixed price. When the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and specifically, with the replacement of prodrazvyorstka with less drastic prodnalog or "food tax." Leon Trotsky and the Opposition bloc had advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and

7650-401: The peasants and less grain was produced during 1928, and again the government resorted to requisitions, much of the grain being requisitioned from middle peasants as sufficient quantities were not in the hands of the " kulaks ." The impact that this had on poorer peasants forced them to move to the cities. The peasants moved in search of jobs in the rapidly expanding industry. This, however, had

7752-423: The peasants resulted in food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to pre-war production levels, the large estates which had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced manufactured goods, the peasants chose to consume their produce rather than sell it. As a result, city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before

7854-527: The plots awarded to them by the interwar reforms were the first their families had ever owned. Furthermore, the countryside was filled with rumours regarding the harshness of collective farm life. Pressure from Moscow to collectivize continued and the authorities in Latvia sought to reduce the number of individual farmers (increasingly labelled kulaki or budži ) through higher taxes and requisitioning of agricultural products for state use. The first kolkhoz

7956-459: The population of the affected regions. Nothing similar was done during the drought of 1932–1933, mainly because the information about the disaster was suppressed by Stalin. Stalin also undertook a purge of the Ukrainian communists and intelligentsia, with devastating long-term effects on the area. Many Ukrainian villages were blacklisted and penalized by government decree for perceived sabotage of food supplies. Moreover, migration of population from

8058-450: The publication of the article, the pressure for collectivization temporarily abated and peasants started leaving collective farms. By 1930 only 23.6% of peasants were collective farms, i.e., the numbers dropped by 50%. But soon collectivization was intensified again. In particular, March 1931 decrees "О совхозном строительстве" and "О колхозном строительстве" forbade peasants to leave collective farms. By 1936, about 90% of Soviet agriculture

8160-416: The revolution. To the peasants, the revolution was about giving more freedom and land to the peasants, but instead, they had to give up themselves, with any land or livestock they had to the centrally controlled ‘collective farm’ in accordance with the state's policies. Women were the primary vehicle for rumours that touched upon issues of family and everyday life. Fears that collectivization would result in

8262-458: The right to leave the collective without permission. The level of state procurements and prices on crops also enforced the serfdom analogy. The government would take a majority of the crops and pay extremely low prices. The serfs during the 1860s were paid nothing but collectivization still reminded the peasants of serfdom. To them, this "second serfdom" became code for the Communist betrayal of

8364-410: The riots run their course. When women came to trial, they were given less harsh punishments as the men because women, to officials, were seen as illiterate and the most backward part of the peasantry. One particular case of this was a riot in a Russian village of Belovka where protestors were beating members of the local soviet and setting fire to their homes. The men were held exclusively responsible as

8466-546: The socialization of children, the export of women's hair, communal wife-sharing, and the notorious common blanket affected many women, causing them to revolt. For example, when it was announced that a collective farm in Crimea would become a commune and that the children would be socialized, women killed their soon-to-be socialized livestock, which spared the children. Stories that the Communists believed short hair gave women

8568-497: The surplus funding future industrialization. The kulaks were coerced into giving up their land to make way for these collective farms or risk being killed, deported, or sent to labor camps . Inexperienced peasants from urban areas would then replace the missing workforce of the agriculture sector, which is now considered overstaffed, inefficient and import-dependent. Under Stalin's grossly inefficient system, agricultural yields declined rather than increased. The situation persisted into

8670-729: The toll was one million dead. The countryside was affected more than cities, but 120,000 died in Kharkiv , 40,000 in Krasnodar and 20,000 in Stavropol . Whilst there is no comprehensive official account of famine deaths known of, historians R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft used official archival soviet 'registered death' statistics of 2,577,065 deaths from all causes in Ukraine to extrapolate an 'excess registered mortality' of 1,544,840 from 1932 to 1933. Alec Nove claims that registration of deaths largely ceased in many areas during

8772-433: The twenty-five thousanders to the countryside that they would be able to produce grain more rapidly. Their hopes were that key areas in the North Caucasus and Volga regions would be collectivized by 1931, and then the other regions by 1932. Collectivization sought to modernize Soviet agriculture, consolidating the land into parcels that could be farmed by modern equipment using the latest scientific methods of agriculture. It

8874-427: The war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, but consuming 80% of what they grew (meaning that they ate 68% of the total). The Communist Party of

8976-466: Was a famine and prohibited journalists from visiting the collective farms. In order to cover up for the poor harvests, the Soviet government created a fierce propaganda campaign blaming the kulaks for the famine. The propaganda said they were creating an artificial food shortage by hiding crops only to sell them when prices were high. Rumors circulated in the villages warning the rural residents that collectivization would bring disorder, hunger, famine, and

9078-453: Was a massive fall in agricultural production resulting in famine in the countryside. Stalin and the CPSU blamed the prosperous peasants, referred to as ' kulaks ' (Russian: fist ), who were organizing resistance to collectivization. Allegedly, many kulaks had been hoarding grain in order to speculate on higher prices, thereby sabotaging grain collection. Stalin resolved to eliminate them as

9180-638: Was appointed Soviet consul general in Berlin, but in November, he was expelled, along with the Ambassador Adolph Ioffe . Posted to Ukraine, he joined Cheka in 1919, and five years later became a deputy chairman of its successor, the OGPU . After Felix Dzerzhinsky 's death in July 1926 Menzhinsky became the chairman of the OGPU. Menzhinsky played a great role in conducting the secret Trust and Sindikat-2 counterintelligence operations, in

9282-713: Was carried out by Kazakhs against other Kazakhs, and it was up to those Kazakhs to decide who was a bai and how much to confiscate from them. This engagement was intended to make Kazakhs active participants in the transformation of Kazakh society. More than 10,000 bais may have been deported due to the campaign against them. In areas where the major agricultural activity was nomadic herding, collectivization met with massive resistance and major losses and confiscation of livestock. Livestock in Kazakhstan fell from 7 million cattle to 1.6 million and from 22 million sheep to 1.7 million. Restrictions on migration proved ineffective and half

9384-408: Was collectivized. Later a number of authors suggested that this Stalin's article was picking scapegoats , putting the blame on rank-and-file functionaries for his own excesses and quenching the rising discontent. Stalin's efforts to implement agricultural collectivization played a significant role in the overall mortality figures attributed to his regime, notably evidenced by the Ukrainian famine,

9486-513: Was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed labourers (the basic Marxist definition of a capitalist ), and 82% of the country's population were peasants. According to Robert Conquest , the definition of "kulak" also varied depending on who was using it; "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres [~2 ha] more than their neighbors" were labeled kulaks" in Stalin's first Five Year Plan. The small shares of most of

9588-421: Was established only in November 1946 and by 1948, just 617 kolkhozes had been established, integrating 13,814 individual farmsteads (12.6% of the total). The process was still judged too slow, and in March 1949 just under 13,000 kulak families, as well as a large number of individuals, were identified. Between March 24 and March 30, 1949, about 40,000 people were deported and resettled at various points throughout

9690-490: Was held in common: Also, various cooperatives for the processing of agricultural products were installed. In November 1929, the Central Committee decided to implement accelerated collectivization in the form of kolkhozes and sovkhozes . This marked the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Peasants that were willing to conform and join

9792-637: Was often claimed that an American Fordson tractor (called "Фордзон" in Russian) was the best propaganda in favour of collectivization. The agricultural means of production (land, equipment, livestock) were to be totally "commonalised" ("обобществлены"), i.e. removed from the control of individual peasant households. The zeal for collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930, issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article Dizzy with Success ( Russian : Головокружение от успехов , lit.   'Dizziness from success'), in which he called for

9894-422: Was opposition to collectivization, especially in Ukraine . For peasants that were unable to meet the grain quota, they were fined five-times the quota. If the peasant continued to be defiant the peasants' property and equipment would be confiscated by the state. If none of the previous measures were effective the defiant peasant would be deported or exiled. The practice was made legal in 1929 under Article 61 of

9996-629: Was responsible to the Council of People's Commissars , which functioned as the highest executive body of the Soviet Union after the formation. On 15 November 1923, the GPU was dissolved and reformed into the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) with its jurisdiction covering the entirety of the Soviet Union. Its official full name was the Joint State Political Directorate under the Council of People's Commissars of

10098-423: Was the common method) and illegal transfers of grain took place. Faced with the refusal to hand grain over, a decision was made at a plenary session of the Central Committee in November 1929 to embark on a nationwide program of collectivization. Several forms of collective farming were suggested by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Narkomzem) , distinguished according to the extent to which property

10200-576: Was the death sentence, which "under extenuating circumstances" could be replaced by at least ten years of incarceration. With what some called the Law of Spikelets ("Закон о колосках"), peasants (including children) who hand-collected or gleaned grain in the collective fields after the harvest were arrested for damaging the state grain production. During the Famine of 1932–33 it's estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation. The implication

10302-792: Was the reduction of output and the cutting of the number of livestock in half. The subsequent recovery of the agricultural production was also impeded by the losses suffered by the Soviet Union during World War II and the severe drought of 1946 . However, the largest loss of livestock was caused by collectivization for all animals except pigs. The numbers of cows in the USSR fell from 33.2 million in 1928 to 27.8 million in 1941 and to 24.6 million in 1950. The number of pigs fell from 27.7 million in 1928 to 27.5 million in 1941 and then to 22.2 million in 1950. The number of sheep fell from 114.6 million in 1928 to 91.6 million in 1941 and to 93.6 million in 1950. The number of horses fell from 36.1 million in 1928 to 21.0 million in 1941 and to 12.7 million in 1950. Only by

10404-568: Was to drag a large sofa into his office, tacked a notice on it saying 'Commissariat of Finance', and lay down on it. Lenin came in and found him asleep. When officials at the Russian State Bank refused to recognise the new regime, Menzhinsky had the director and others arrested. According to G. von Schantz, Menzhinsky "personally conducted the wrecking of the Russian banks, a maneuver that deprived all opponents of Bolshevism of their financial means of warfare." In April 1918, Menzhinsky

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