Stalinist Russia Grad Class Papers #1

Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Paperback: 416 pages

Published: 1996

ISBN-10: 0195104595

    

      Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization is a detailed and excellent work on the Soviet policy of collectivization and its effects on the rural population in the Soviet Union, although primarily focused on Russia, in the 1930s. The author contends that dekulakization and collectivization was such a devastating, violent and all-encompassing brutal assault on the peasant values by the regime that it left no real chance for meaningful resistance. Instead the peasantry used indirect strategies for survival and in the process sent ripples back affecting Soviet society and the government to which it reacted in kind.

      Fitzpatrick states that violent uprisings against collectivization were rare in the Russian heartland both because of the ruthless nature of Stalinism and the lack of a potential fighting force as young peasant males left en masse to work in towns or on the new industrial construction sites.  Instead, some of the most common methods of struggling against repression employed by the collectivized peasants included missing work, shirking, sabotaging or stealing from the collective farm (kolkhoz), attempts to obtain a seasonal working permit to urban areas (otkhod) which often resulted in permanent resettlement in the cities, retaining mixed household with one family member working for the kolkhoz and the other as independent as well as more traditional methods of bribery, illegal profiteering, activism, denunciations, and sometimes violence. 

Fitzpatrick’s work represents an in-depth analysis and discussion on dekulakization and collectivization citing various sources and providing ample historical evidence from not only the central Russian region, but also from non-Black Earth belt, Ukraine, Siberia and North Caucasus.  These strategies of passive resistance occurred everywhere in the USSR throughout the 1930s and are documented by her through newspaper articles, achieve documents, peasant letters and others presented in the book.

      Even though the peasants could not stop the collectivization drive outright or protest against their treatment by the government as second class citizens (they still had no state benefits comparable to workers’, passports, and were paid in kind for their kolkhoz work, etc.) they were still able to put pressure on the system to which it reacted, sometimes bending to the will of the peasants and sometimes squeezing them further. 

      In March 1930 Stalin called for a halt in “excesses” of collectivization declaring his policy of “Dizzy with Success,” in 1935 he supported the extension of maternity leave for kolkhozniks, and allowed dekulakized families to come back and join the kolkhoz in their old villages. However, typical of the duplicity and confusion of the Stalinist era, many restrictions and repressive policies that demoralized peasants remained (for example collectivized household could not own a horse, repression of religion, etc).  During the winter 1932-33, the regime punished the peasantry for not meeting procurement targets and sent brigades to extort anything that was left causing a famine in Ukraine. One of the reasons that internal passports were introduced in the Soviet Union in 1933 was to stop starving peasants from leaving the countryside for town in search for food and thus revealing the magnitude of the famine. Also, for the same exact reason, in 1933 the government hastily passed a new otkhod law that was much more restrictive.   Of course the peasantry understood this and was very hostile to Stalin himself, more so than even to the regime itself.

      I think that one of the most important contribution by Sheila Fitzpatrick to our knowledge about collectivization in the Soviet Union is her scholarship on various aspects of the village life and how collectivization has affected it and its different classes, genders, occupations, and even its reflection on different concepts directly related to kolkhoz (for example, oblast, raion, rural soviet, village, kolkhoz, brigades, households, and finally individual peasants, etc.)

Dr. W: Don't end with a sentence that addresses issues not discussed in your essay! A strong critique except for a weak concluding sentence. A-