Stalin. Part 13: From plow and torch to tractors and collective farms
Money for industrial construction was urgently needed. They weren't there. After the Hague, there was no reason to count on loans, since the USSR did not intend to pay the bills of the tsarist government. The country could not carry out industrialization through internal loans, the majority of the population was poor. It remains to turn to mother earth …
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Money for industrial construction was urgently needed. There were none. After the Hague, there was no reason to count on loans, since the USSR did not intend to pay the bills of the tsarist government. The country could not carry out industrialization through internal loans, the majority of the population was poor. Thus, the traditional route was excluded. They sold art objects, confiscated valuables from the church, introduced a regime of severe economy, even tried to replenish the budget by selling vodka, alas, everything obtained by these methods was negligible in comparison with the needs of industry.
All that remains is to turn to mother land, the only producer of liquid values, but what about the peasantry, which has barely recovered from the horrors of the surplus appropriation system? Initially, it was planned to carry out a phased and voluntary collectivization. The idea failed. The poorest strata, who did not know how and, to be honest, did not want to work, went to collective farms. It was proposed to raise the price of bread, to financially interest the peasants.
1. As you sink, so you burst
Practice has shown the opposite: as soon as they went beyond the level of the minimum necessary consumption, the peasants stopped developing their economy, reduced crops, and slaughtered livestock. The increase in the tax burden on the peasantry did not help either. Large farms preferred to split up into small ones, just to hide income and not pay taxes. What is the matter and what kind of crooks were these peasants?
Of course, they weren't any cunning crooks. The paradox was in the structure of their mental, in the properties of the muscle vector. The muscular peasant at the beginning of the last century was forced to work hard to provide for the basic needs of his family: to eat, drink, breathe, sleep. In accordance with their vector desires, the peasants provided themselves with consumption, not accumulation. Profit-making is not at all prescribed in the muscular psyche.
If suddenly (as a result of a good harvest or additional labor of grown up sons) surplus of edibles arose, the rural worker, accustomed to the unpredictability of the landscape, preferred to postpone a piece for a rainy day, than to give it somewhere upstairs, to an incomprehensible (foreign) state. No exhortations of agitators acted, they listened to the newcomers from the city on the principle of "shallow, Emelya", but listened to their own, the villagers, who said: don't be a fool, hide, cut the cattle, let the children eat from the belly, just don't give it away.
The psychic unconscious, developed over the centuries, dictated a clear algorithm of behavior: both trampled and burst. If labor costs exceeded this balance, labor was reduced, and no extra labor or food is needed [1]. For this reason, the transfer of peasant farms both on the rails of making a profit and on giving back to the state under conditions of manual labor was impossible. Muscular peasants did not want to fit into commodity-money schemes, preferring a simple and visual exchange in kind: bread and eggs for boots and quilted jackets. However, they preferred to be sewn here, in the village, at their "for grub". Driven together with their cattle forcibly to collective farms, the peasants still looked after their cows, nobody needed someone else's cattle.
2. Collectivization as the only condition for survival
In addition to all this, the industry required not only money, but also an influx of labor. Muscular peasants, tied to their land and water at the level of trace elements, did not want to leave their homes, even if they had to work to the limit, so as not to die of hunger. Better your own impoverished village than a strange city. It was necessary to create such conditions in the countryside to ensure the migration of the rural population to the cities, to the construction sites of the first five-year plan.
In a vicious circle, when agriculture required saturation with technology, and the production of technology required the development of industry, which needed a developed agriculture to export its products and purchase machine tools and technology, in an atmosphere of incessant struggle against the left and right, in an atmosphere of constant military threat from west and east, in a country where the muscle strength of the peasant was the main driving force of agriculture, Stalin did not seem to take decisive action, expecting results from the NEP. The famine of 1928 showed that a decision must be made immediately. And it was accepted: total collectivization solved all problems at once. The price was high. But the goods are not cheap either: preserving the integrity of the country in conditions unsuitable for survival in an extremely short time.
Now there are a lot of opinions and discussions on the cruelty and inadmissibility of the measures taken by Stalin. Even some mathematical models of the development of the USSR are being created, ostensibly proving that even without the horrors of collectivization it was possible to solve the set tasks. Systematically, we see quite clearly: no mathematical model, no reasoning from the standpoint of today makes it possible to come closer to understanding what was happening in those years.
It is impossible to make the muscular psychic work for the benefit of strangers, the muscle does not have such a desire. It is impossible to teach a muscle to think in abstract categories of state benefit and common good. It is impossible in the 30s to think in the categories that we are thinking now. The concepts of cruelty when the fratricidal civil war had not yet died down throughout the country, and in our time, sewing blouses for homeless cats differ by a colossal amount, developed since then by the visual culture of mankind and the Soviet elite culture in particular.
Collectivization was the only possible solution, and it made no sense to carry it out more gently for the reasons stated above, namely, because of the specific muscular psychology of the peasantry. Had Stalin been a few years late with collectivization and industrialization, and it would have been impossible to win the Great Patriotic War.
With an iron hand, at the cost of thousands of sacrifices, reducing consumption to negligible values, increasing accumulation to extreme values, forcing people from under the whip to work for returns, for wear and tear (he forced not only peasants and workers, but also the party apparatus, and himself, worked around the clock, He did not know another regime), Stalin achieved that the USSR managed to make a colossal leap forward and practically catch up with the West in key positions of industrial development, significantly increase agricultural production, and expand the cultivated areas. The five-year collectivization plan was overfulfilled by more than twice, the grain procurement plan was overfulfilled, “the state guaranteed sales and power supply to agriculture, not comparable to the early feudal wooden plow” [2].
It is also important to note the beginning of the education of a new person - the Soviet. The lessons of collectivization have shown that it is time to put an end to the medieval way of life in the heads of the working people. For the first time, cinema came to public service - the most visual and effective agitation for the most muscular people. The titles of the tapes of those years are eloquent: "Breakthrough", "Those that have seen", "Son of the State". The most significant film of the 1930s. there was, probably, a silent tape on the first two books of the epic novel by MA Sholokhov "Quiet Don", the first talented visual imprint of events in the village, tragic and heroic at the same time.
Continue reading.
Other parts:
Stalin. Part 1: Olfactory Providence over Holy Russia
Stalin. Part 2: Furious Koba
Stalin. Part 3: Unity of opposites
Stalin. Part 4: From Permafrost to April Theses
Stalin. Part 5: How Koba became Stalin
Stalin. Part 6: Deputy. on emergency matters
Stalin. Part 7: Ranking or the Best Disaster Cure
Stalin. Part 8: Time to Collect Stones
Stalin. Part 9: USSR and Lenin's testament
Stalin. Part 10: Die for the Future or Live Now
Stalin. Part 11: Leaderless
Stalin. Part 12: We and They
Stalin. Part 13: From plow and torch to tractors and collective farms
Stalin. Part 14: Soviet Elite Mass Culture
Stalin. Part 15: The last decade before the war. Death of Hope
Stalin. Part 16: The last decade before the war. Underground temple
Stalin. Part 17: Beloved Leader of the Soviet People
Stalin. Part 18: On the eve of the invasion
Stalin. Part 19: War
Stalin. Part 20: By Martial Law
Stalin. Part 21: Stalingrad. Kill the German!
Stalin. Part 22: Political Race. Tehran-Yalta
Stalin. Part 23: Berlin is taken. What's next?
Stalin. Part 24: Under the Seal of Silence
Stalin. Part 25: After the War
Stalin. Part 26: The Last Five Year Plan
Stalin. Part 27: Be part of the whole
[1] Even the Great Patriotic War did not force all the collective farmers to push themselves up: only in 5 months of 1942 those who did not work out a minimum of workdays were brought to justice. There were 151 thousand of them, of which 117 thousand were convicted. After the war, in the summer of 1948, 12 thousand collective farmers were expelled from the RSFSR alone by decision of the collective farm meeting for evading work (S. Mironov).
[2] S. Rybas
