The collectivization of agriculture in the USSR was the process of uniting small individual peasant farms into large collective farms through production cooperation.
Most leaders of the Soviet Union followed Lenin's thesis that small-scale peasant farming "daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale" gives birth to capitalism. Therefore, they considered it dangerous to base the dictatorship of the proletariat for a long time on two different foundations - state (socialist) large-scale industry and small individual peasant farming. The opinion of the minority, who believed, following Bukharin, that an individual peasant, including a wealthy one (kulak), could “grow” into socialism, was rejected after the boycott of grain procurements in 1927. The kulak was declared the main internal enemy of socialism and Soviet power. The economic necessity of collectivization was justified by the fact that the individual peasant was unable to meet the demand of the growing urban population with food, and industry with agricultural raw materials. The introduction of the card system in cities in 1928 strengthened this position. In a narrow circle of party and state leadership, collectivization was seen as the main lever for pumping funds from the countryside for industrialization.
Forced industrialization and complete collectivization became two sides of the same course towards creating an independent military-industrial power with a maximally nationalized economy.
The beginning of complete collectivization. 1929
On the 12th anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin published an article in Pravda, “The Year of the Great Turning Point,” in which he set the task of speeding up collective farm construction and carrying out “complete collectivization.” In 1928-1929, when under conditions of “emergency” the pressure on individual farmers sharply increased, and collective farmers were provided with benefits, the number of collective farms increased 4 times - from 14.8 thousand in 1927 to 70 thousand by the fall of 1929 The middle peasants went to collective farms, hoping to wait out the difficult times there. Collectivization was carried out through the simple addition of peasant means of production. Collective farms of the “manufacturing type” were created, not equipped with modern agricultural machinery. These were mainly TOZs - partnerships for joint cultivation of land, the simplest and temporary form of a collective farm. The November (1929) plenum of the Central Committee of the Party set the main task in the countryside - to carry out complete collectivization in a short time. The plenum planned to send 25 thousand workers (“twenty-five thousand workers”) to the villages “to organize” collective farms. Factory teams that sent their workers to the villages were obliged to take patronage over the created collective farms. To coordinate the work of government institutions created for the purpose of restructuring agriculture (Zernotrest, Kolkhoz Center, Tractor Center, etc.), the plenum decided to create a new Union People's Commissariat - the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, headed by Ya.A. Yakovlev, Marxist agrarian, journalist. Finally, the November plenum of the Central Committee ridiculed the “prophecies” of Bukharin and his supporters (Rykov, Tomsky, Ugarov, etc.) about the inevitable famine in the country, Bukharin, as the “leader and instigator” of the “right deviation”, was removed from the Politburo of the Central Committee, the rest were warned that at the slightest attempt to fight against the line of the Central Committee, “organization measures” will be used against them.
On January 5, 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution “On collectivization and measures of state assistance to collective farm construction.” It planned to complete the complete collectivization of the grain regions in stages by the end of the five-year plan. In the main grain regions (North Caucasus, Middle and Lower Volga) it was planned to be completed in the fall of 1930, in other grain regions - a year later. The resolution outlined the creation of agricultural artels in areas of complete collectivization “as a transitional form of collective farm to the commune.” At the same time, the inadmissibility of admitting kulaks to collective farms was emphasized. The Central Committee called for organizing socialist competition to create collective farms and resolutely fight “all attempts” to restrain collective farm construction. As in November, the Central Committee did not say a word about observing the principle of voluntariness, encouraging arbitrariness by silence.
At the end of January - beginning of February 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted two more resolutions and instructions on the liquidation of the kulaks. It was divided into three categories: terrorists, resisters and the rest. Everyone was subject to arrest or exile with confiscation of property. “Dekulakization became an integral part of the collectivization process.
Progress of collectivization
The first stage of complete collectivization, which began in November 1929, lasted until the spring of 1930. The forces of local authorities and the “twenty-five thousanders” began the forced unification of individual farmers into communes. Not only the means of production, but also personal subsidiary plots and property were socialized. The forces of the OGPU and the Red Army evicted “dispossessed” peasants, which included all the dissatisfied. By decision of the secret commissions of the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, they were sent to special settlements of the OGPU to work according to economic plans, mainly in logging, construction, and mining. According to official data, more than 320 thousand households (more than 1.5 million people) were dispossessed; According to modern historians, about 5 million people were dispossessed and exiled throughout the country. The discontent of the peasants resulted in mass slaughter of livestock, flight to the cities, and anti-collective farm uprisings. If in 1929 there were more than a thousand of them, then in January-March 1930 there were more than two thousand. Army units and aviation took part in suppressing the rebellious peasants. The country was on the brink of civil war.
The mass indignation of peasants over forced collectivization forced the country's leadership to temporarily ease the pressure. Moreover, on behalf of the Politburo of the Central Committee, in Pravda on March 2, 1930, Stalin published the article “Dizziness from Success,” in which he condemned the “excesses” and blamed the local authorities and workers sent to create collective farms for them. Following the article, Pravda published a resolution of the Central Committee of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (b) dated March 14, 1930, “On the fight against distortions of the party line in the collective farm movement.” Among the “distortions”, the violation of the principle of voluntariness was put in first place, then the “dekulakization” of the middle peasants and the poor, looting, wholesale collectivization, jumping from the artel to the commune, the closure of churches and markets. After the resolution, the first echelon of local collective farm organizers were subjected to repression. At the same time, many of the created collective farms were dissolved, their number was reduced by approximately half by the summer of 1930, they united a little more than 1/5 of the peasant farms.
However, in the autumn of 1930, a new, more cautious stage of complete collectivization began. From now on, only agricultural artels were created, allowing the existence of personal, subsidiary farms. In the summer of 1931, the Central Committee explained that “complete collectivization” cannot be understood primitively, as “universal”, that its criterion is the involvement of at least 70% of farms in grain farming and more than 50% in other areas into collective farms. By that time, collective farms already united about 13 million peasant households (out of 25 million), i.e. more than 50% of their total number. And in the grain regions, almost 80% of the peasants were on collective farms. In January 1933, the country's leadership announced the eradication of exploitation and the victory of socialism in the countryside as a result of the liquidation of the kulaks.
In 1935, the Second All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers took place. He adopted a new Model Charter of the agricultural artel (instead of the 1930 Charter). According to the Charter, land was assigned to collective farms for “eternal use”; the basic forms of labor organization on collective farms (teams), its accounting and payment (by workdays), and the size of personal subsidiary plots (LPH) were established. The Charter of 1935 legislated new production relations in the countryside, which historians called “early socialist”. With the transition of the collective farm to the new Charter (1935-1936), the collective farm system in the USSR finally took shape.
Results of collectivization
By the end of the 30s. collective farms united more than 90% of peasants. Collective farms were serviced by agricultural machinery, which was concentrated on state machine and tractor stations(MTS).
The creation of collective farms did not, contrary to expectations, lead to an increase in agricultural production. In the 1936-1940s gross agricultural output remained at the level of 1924-1928, i.e. pre-collective farm village. And at the end of the first five-year plan, it turned out to be lower than in 1928. The production of meat and dairy products sharply decreased, and for many years, in the figurative expression of N.S. Khrushchev, “virgin meat land” was formed. At the same time, collective farms made it possible to significantly increase state procurement of agricultural products, especially grain. This led to the abolition of the rationing system in cities in 1935 and the increasing export of bread.
The course towards maximum extraction of agricultural products from the countryside led in 1932-1933. to mortal famine in many agricultural areas of the country. There is no official data on the victims of artificial famine. Modern Russian historians estimate their numbers differently: from 3 to 10 million people.
The mass exodus from the village exacerbated the difficult socio-political situation in the country. To stop this process, as well as to identify fugitive “kulaks” at the turn of 1932-1933. A passport regime with registration in a specific place of residence was introduced. From now on, it was possible to move around the country only if you had a passport or a document officially replacing it. Passports were issued to residents of cities, urban-type settlements, and state farm workers. Collective farmers and individual peasants were not issued passports. This attached them to the land and collective farms. From that time on, it was possible to officially leave the village through state-organized recruitment for five-year construction projects, study, service in the Red Army, and work as machine operators in MTS. The regulated process of forming workers has led to a decrease in the growth rate of the urban population, the number of workers and employees. According to the 1939 census, with a total population of the USSR of 176.6 million people (historians put the figure at 167.3 million), 33% of the population lived in cities (versus 18%, according to the 1926 census).
How did collective farmers live in the 30s?
First, we need to separate exactly what period of “Stalinist collective farms” we are talking about. The first years of young collective farms are strikingly different from mature collective farms of the late 30s, not to mention the post-war collective farms of the early 50s. Even collective farms of the mid-30s of the twentieth century are already qualitatively different from collective farms literally 2-3 years ago.
Collective farm 30s. Caption to photo by Yu. Dolgushin:
A collective farm is a collective farm. It works well when people work in it, but it doesn't work well when people are idle.
The period of organizing any new business “from scratch” necessarily goes through a very difficult period, which not everyone manages to successfully complete. But it’s like that everywhere and always. The same thing happens everywhere under capitalism. There are as many life stories as you like about how, for example, a farmer at first lived poorly and from hand to mouth, and then settled down and began to quickly get rich. Or an entrepreneur who lived with his family in a squalid apartment with bedbugs and cockroaches, but invested all his money and effort into developing his business. This topic is constantly discussed in books and films - how you lived poorly at the beginning, then got rich, which means you need to work better, behave correctly and everything will work out. It would be more than strange to throw a hysteria about how poorly they lived “back then” and, on the basis of this, blame, for example, America and capitalism. Such a propagandist would rightly be mistaken for an idiot. The same thing happened to collective farms, and propaganda has been tirelessly hysterical for decades about the difficulties of the organizational period. What is accepted with puppyish delight “in countries with market economies” as an example of reasonable and economic behavior under capitalism.
Collective farms were not state enterprises, but associations of private individuals. As in any similar organizations, a lot depended on the hard work and skills of the employee-owners themselves and, of course, on the leadership they chose. It is obvious that if such an organization consists of drunkards, slackers and incompetents, and is headed by a worthless leader, then the employee-shareholders will live very poorly in any country. But again, what in countries on the “high road of civilization” is accepted with delight as an example of justice, in relation to the USSR is presented as an example of a nightmare, although the reasons for the failure of such an organization are the same. Some crazy demands are being made on the Soviet Union, invented from the dull heads of anti-Sovietists, it is implied that absolutely all collective farms should be provided with simply paradise, regardless of the efforts of the workers themselves, and all collective farmers, according to their ideas, live not just better than farmers in the warmest, fertile and developed countries, and live better than the best farmers.
In order to compare the life of a collective farmer, you need to have some kind of sample for comparison and the parameters by which such a comparison is made. Anti-Sovietists always compare some speculative worker of unknown qualities from the worst collective farm with a pre-revolutionary kulak or, in extreme cases, a very wealthy peasant, and not at all with the poor man of tsarist Russia without any equipment, which would be fair - the lower income strata are compared. Or there is a comparison of the poorest collective farmers with wealthy hereditary farmers from the USA, and not semi-bankrupts whose farm is mortgaged for debts. The reasons for this cheap fraud are understandable - after all, then it will be necessary for the lowest layer of peasants to take into account the benefits that they did not have even close to in the countries along the “highway”, such as free medical care, education, nurseries, kindergartens, access to culture and etc. It will be necessary to take into account natural conditions and the absence of wars and destruction and other factors. If we compare wealthy peasants from capitalist countries, then we should compare their lives with rich millionaire collective farmers from collective farms. But then it will immediately become clear that the comparison, even in unfavorable historical conditions for us, will not be in favor of the enemies of the USSR. That is, here, as elsewhere, the anti-Soviet people are ordinary swindlers. Let me emphasize once again that Soviet socialism never promised anyone a heavenly life; all it promised was the maximum achievable equality of opportunity given the given development of society and fair pay according to work and abilities. The rest is delusional fantasies of inadequate citizens or manipulative propaganda of conscious enemies.
2. Soviet women collective farmers of the Klisheva collective farm (Moscow region)
Selzozartel in the early 30s became the main, and soon the only form of collective farms in agriculture - before that, collective farms were often called all forms of joint farming. The first Charter of the agricultural artel was adopted in 1930, and its new edition was adopted in 1935 at the All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers-Shock Workers. The land was assigned to the artel for indefinite use and was not subject to sale or lease. All workers who had reached the age of 16 could become members of the artel, except for former exploiters (kulaks, landowners, etc.), but in certain cases the admission of “former” workers to collective farms was allowed. The chairman and the board were elected by a general vote of the artel members. In order to understand how the artel existed, you need to understand how it disposed of its products. The products produced by the agricultural artel were distributed as follows:
“From the crops and livestock products received by the artel, the artel:
a) fulfills its obligations to the state for the supply and return of seed loans, pays in kind to the machine and tractor station for the work of the MTS in accordance with the concluded agreement having the force of law, and fulfills contracting agreements;
b) provides seeds for sowing and fodder to feed livestock for the entire annual need, as well as to insure against crop failure and lack of food, creates inviolable, annually renewable seed and feed funds in the amount of 10-15 percent of the annual need;
c) creates, by decision of the general meeting, funds to help disabled people, old people who have temporarily lost their ability to work, needy families of Red Army soldiers, for the maintenance of nurseries and orphans - all this in an amount not exceeding 2 percent of gross output;
d) allocates, in amounts determined by the general meeting of members of the artel, part of the products for sale to the state or to the market;
e) the entire rest of the harvest of the artel and its livestock products is distributed by the artel among the members of the artel according to workdays.”
Let us note that everything is completely fair and exactly the same mechanism works in enterprises of all countries - first, contractual obligations, taxes, funds aimed at maintaining the functioning of the organization, development funds, social assistance, and the rest can already be divided between shareholders. An indicative fact is caring for the disabled, orphans, old people, etc. lay on the agricultural farm, the village perceived this as completely normal - caring for the weak “with the whole world” (that is, the community) was fully consistent with the mentality of the Russian peasant. It was precisely on the suppression of the fact that the artel cared for dependents (as, for example, in the nursery) that the hysteria raised during perestroika was based that “collective farmers in the Stalinist USSR did not receive pensions.” They did not receive a state pension, because their native collective farm, which knew them well, was obliged to take care of them, and abstract payments were not given from pension funds. During the time of Stalin, collective farms had very large economic and managerial autonomy, which was severely curtailed during the time of Khrushchev. That’s when it was necessary to introduce pensions for collective farmers, because collective farms, undermined by administrative dictates, began to experience financial difficulties.
From the history of my family - in the village where my grandmother was from in the Southern Urals, in the mid-20s, one of the first collective farms was organized, or more precisely, initially it was a commune, then transformed into a collective farm. My great-grandfather, who was blind in the early 20s after being wounded in the Russo-Japanese War, lived there. Both of his sons and son-in-law (my grandfather) fought in the White Army. One son died, a daughter and her family and another son left the village (by the way, no one did anything to them during the war on the side of the whites), and the great-grandfather was very wealthy (but not a fist). The collective farm did this - the great-grandfather’s house and its plot were, by the decision of the “peace”, transferred to two poor families (yes, the house was that size), who lost their breadwinners in the First World War and the Civil War, and the great-grandfather was taken by the commune (collective farm) for a full lifelong maintenance. He was given a room in the house, every day a collective farm girl came to cook and look after him, whose family was counted for work days when they appeared (before that, food in the agricultural commune was distributed equally). He lived like this until he died from the consequences of his wound in the early 30s.
The principle of workdays was very simple and fair. The average workday was viewed as the result of the work not of an average, but of a weak worker. In order to standardize payment terms, in 1933 the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the USSR issued decrees that recognized the practice of workdays, already established on collective farms, as the official form of calculating wages. Once again, workdays were precisely a people’s invention, a practice already established in reality, and not a scheme invented by “Stalin’s cannibals” to “torture the peasants to the collective farm gulag.” Agricultural work was divided into 7 levels with coefficients from 0.5 to 1.5. More skilled or difficult work could pay a maximum of three times more than the easiest and unskilled work. Blacksmiths, machine operators, and management staff of the collective farm administration earned the most workdays. Collective farmers earned the least in auxiliary unskilled jobs, which is quite fair. For work from dawn to dusk and increased output, additional workdays were recorded.
3. Issuance of bread for workdays. Ukraine, Udachnoe village, 1932
A huge amount of lies has been heaped up around workdays in recent years. The number of compulsory workdays for “disenfranchised slaves” was 60(!)-100 (depending on the area) in the 30s. Only during the War the number of compulsory workdays was increased to 100-150. But this is a mandatory norm, but how long did the peasants actually work? Here's how much: the average output per collective farm household in 1936 was 393 days, in 1937 - 438 (197 workdays per worker), in 1939 the average collective farm household earned 488 workdays.
In order to believe that “they didn’t give anything for workdays,” you have to be weak-minded in a clinical sense - the average peasant worked 2-3 times more than was required according to the norm, therefore, payment depended on the quantity and quality of labor and this was sufficient motivation to give multiple output. If they really didn’t give anything for workdays, then no one would work more than the norm.
It is significant that with the beginning of the destruction of the Stalinist System by Khrushchev in 1956, the number of compulsory workdays was increased to 300-350. The results were not long in coming - the first problems with the products appeared.
What did the “Stalinist collective farms” do with those who did not meet the workday quota? Probably they were immediately sent to the Gulag or straight to the execution range? It’s even worse - the matter was examined by the collective farm commission and if no valid reasons were found (for example, the person was sick), then they were shamed at the collective farm meeting and if they systematically violated the standards (usually for more than 2 years in a row), by decision of the meeting they could be expelled from the collective farm with the confiscation of their personal plot . No one could deprive a collective farmer of his housing. The human right to housing was guaranteed by the Constitution of the USSR. Naturally, in reality, a person rejected by the rural community left the village, as happens everywhere in the world. It’s only in the minds of citizens divorced from reality that life in a village community is a popular pastoral; in fact, it is very strict with very clear unwritten rules that are best not to be broken.
4. Friendly trial of malingerers on a collective farm. Ukraine, Kyiv region. 1933
How much did the collective farmers earn for workdays, and for a quarter of a century all sorts of crooks in the media have been going into hysterics, talking about “starving collective farmers,” and when the crooks are pressed with facts, then as an argument they pull out the stories of unnamed grandmothers who “remember” that “for workdays nothing They didn’t give it.” Even if we exclude completely invented characters, then in order to more or less realistically assess the surrounding reality and directly earn workdays (16 years old) during the most difficult period for collective farms in the early 30s, the average grandmother-storyteller had to be, at the latest, 1918 -1920 years of birth. No matter who you listen to, before the Revolution they all had two cows, a huge house covered with iron, two horses, the most modern equipment and a couple of acres of land. I wonder where all these citizens came from, if before the Revolution in the village there were 65% of the poor, who in almost 100% of cases plowed the plow, and 20% of the land-poor middle peasants, who could not even have two cows? Wealthy middle peasants made up only 10% of the population, and kulaks 5%. So where did these "old wives' tales" come from? If we assume her honesty (although we do not count the false information given by the “grandmothers”) and the honesty of those retelling her stories even in the 90s, then the adequacy of the picture described can hardly be called high. A lot of questions will remain unclear - what kind of family the person lived in, how well the family worked, how many workers there were, how successful the collective farm itself was, what specific years we are talking about, and so on. Obviously, everyone wants to present their family in a favorable light, because few people will say “dad was an armless lazybones, and the whole family was like that, so we weren’t paid a damn thing,” and “the chairman whom my parents chose was a rakish and drunkard, but He was a warm-hearted man, dad and mom loved to drink with him,” “he stole and gave to others, that’s the only reason they didn’t die of hunger.” In this case, it is obvious that the causes of material difficulties in the family have nothing to do with the collective farm organization of labor. Although for such citizens, it is clear that the Soviet Government is to blame for everything. By the way, what is her “fault” is that such citizens generally survived, grew up and often learned. In the God-saved-which-we-lost, the fate of families of incompetents and lazy people developed, as a rule, in a very sad way. But in tsarist Russia this is enthusiastically accepted as a model of justice, and a much better life for the same citizens in Stalin’s collective farms causes fits of hatred.
But there is a lot of evidence of stories that paint a completely different picture, both from family stories and testimonies of collective farmers of those years, collected by scientists as expected. Here is an example of such testimony about how collective farms lived in the early-mid 30s:
“The majority of Kharlamov peasants considered the collective farm to be a cell of a fair social order. The feeling of unity, joint work and the prospect of improving the culture of agriculture and the culture of life in the conditions of the collective farm system was inspiring. In the evenings, collective farmers went to the reading hut, where the hut owner read newspapers. Lenin's ideas were believed. On revolutionary holidays, the streets were decorated with calico; on the days of May 1 and November 7, crowded columns of demonstrators from all over Vochkom with red flags walked from village to village and sang... At collective farm meetings they spoke passionately, frankly, the meetings ended with the singing of the “Internationale”. We walked to and from work singing songs.”
What is significant is that the excerpt given is not from “Stalinist propaganda” - but these are the memories of collective farmers, collected by honest and independent researchers who are very hostile to the Stalinist period as a whole. I might add that my relatives said the same thing. Now it will seem surprising - but people went to work on a collective farm or factory with joy and sang along the way.
5. Collective farm youth. 1932, Shagin
But all personal memories, even those recorded as they should be, have their limitations - they can be overlaid with subsequent memories, emotions, superimposed interpretation, selective perception, propaganda from the times of “perestroika,” the desire to tell something that does not go beyond the scope of public opinion, and so on. Is it possible to objectively assess how collective farmers lived in reality? Yes, quite, statistical data and serious scientific research are more than enough to talk about this as an established fact.
6. An amateur peasant brass band on a poor Jewish collective farm. Ukraine 1936, Panin
The gradation of collective farms in terms of wealth and, accordingly, the average standard of living in them is subject, on average, to the famous Gaussian distribution, which is not surprising; this was well known back in Stalin’s times. Averaged over the years, 5% of collective farms were rich, successful collective farms, adjacent to them were approximately 15% of strong, wealthy collective farms, on the other hand, 5% of poor collective farms, adjacent to a slightly more successful 15% of poor fellows, and about 60% were middle peasant collective farms. It is probably obvious to even the average intelligent person that the level of income and life of peasants on rich collective farms was much higher than the level of living of peasants on poor collective farms, and to talk about how they lived on an average collective farm is to significantly distort the picture, as in the expression “average temperature in a hospital.” Averaged data will show the standard of living of the average collective farmer in approximately 60% of collective farms and nothing more. Let's see how much higher the standard of living of peasants on various collective farms was than before the Revolution and why. After all, we are assured that in the USSR there was leveling and people were “completely uninterested in working.” Yeah, “completely uninterested,” but nevertheless, on average in the country, the norm for workdays (50-100) was exceeded by 3-5 times.
The average collective farm household by 1940 was 3.5 people, against 6 in Tsarist Russia - the fragmentation of farms began immediately after the Civil War after the division of landowners and royal lands. , and in 1932 the average peasant family consisted of approximately 3.6-3.7 people. The critical famine limit in tsarist Russia was approximately 245 kg per person (15.3 poods) - without taking into account feed grain for livestock and poultry, but by tsarist standards it was not even considered a famine limit; tsarist Russia reached this level only in a matter of years at the end of its existence. The limit of mass starvation by the standards of Tsarist Russia was 160 kg per person, this is when children began to die from malnutrition. That is, on average, a collective farm peasant in the USSR received about as much bread for workdays in 1932 as was enough to literally not die of hunger (162 kg). However, the tsarist peasant grew little else besides grain in grain-growing areas - almost all the land available for sowing grain was used for grain, the energy value of wheat in our climate is the highest in relation to the yield. So, the average peasant in Tsarist Russia, the most favorable years of 1910-1913, consumed 130 kg of potatoes per capita per year, 51.4 kg of vegetables and fruits.
What about the Soviet collective farmer? In the worst years of 1932-1933, the average peasant farm received 230 kg of potatoes and 50 kg of vegetables from the collective farm, that is, 62 and 13.7 kg per person.
However, the output received by the peasant is not at all exhausted by what he earned during his workdays. The second, and in some cases, the first in importance, income of the collective farm peasant is the product of his personal farmstead. However, for now we are talking about the “average peasant” of the average collective farm. From personal farming in 1932-1933, collective farm peasants received per capita an average of approximately 17 kg of grain, potatoes - 197 kg, vegetables - 54 kg, meat and lard - 7 kg, milk - 141 liters. (ibid.)
That is, if we compare Russia in the most prosperous years and the USSR in the most unfavorable years of 1932-1933, then the picture of average food consumption in rural areas will be as follows:
The first column is Klepikov’s data on the best years of Tsarist Russia, the last column is Tsarist Russia of the 20th century on average according to Data for Russia before 1910, Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky brought 212 kg per capita at a State Duma meeting.
That is, the peasants of the USSR 1932-1933. they began to eat much more potatoes, but less bread, compared to tsarist Russia. The average calorie content of wheat varieties of those years was about 3100 kcal/kg, potatoes 770 kcal/kg, that is, approximately 1 to 4. If we take the difference between the USSR in 1932 and the best years of tsarist Russia in potato consumption and convert it into effective calories for grain, then this of conventional grain, the average collective farmer would consume exactly 212 kg - exactly as much as the tsarist peasant of the early twentieth century ate.
Plus, the Soviet peasant received other products and agricultural products from the collective farm - milk, hay, etc., but I could not find data on this for 1932-33. Also, a Soviet collective farmer received an additional 108 rubles for workdays per year, which was slightly higher than the average monthly salary in industry in 1932. In latrine fisheries and other cooperatives, the average Soviet collective farmer in 1933 (no data for 1932) received 280 rubles. in a year. That is, in total, the average peasant earned about 290 rubles per year - almost a quarter of the annual income of the average worker, and the tsarist peasant, in order to get money, had to sell part of the harvest.
As we can see from the above data, there was no universal catastrophe in the countryside in the early years of collective farms. It was hard, yes. But life was hard for the whole country after the Civil War and the “skillful” tsarist rule. In general, the food situation on collective farms in 1932-1933 was approximately the same as the average for Tsarist Russia, but noticeably worse than in Russia in 1913 or the USSR during the best years of the late NEP.
That is, on average, no catastrophic famine looms, despite the “old wives’ stories” and the hysterics of all sorts of historical scammers. Fans of the USSR of the Stalinist period are also wrong, claiming that everything was fine and serious problems in the countryside are the slander of enemies. This is wrong. On average collective farms in 1932-1933 they lived from hand to mouth for two years, this is indeed confirmed by a simple analysis. Alas, life from hand to mouth has been common in Russia for the last couple of centuries. The years 1932-1933 cannot be called a good life in a material sense; the same thing was a nightmare and poverty. We absolutely must not forget that the Soviet peasant received free medical care and education, kindergartens and nurseries, which even very wealthy peasants could not dream of in tsarist times, and we must also not forget about the sharply increased level of culture in the countryside. In moral and spiritual terms, in terms of social security, the village of 1932-1933 began to live simply incomparably better than the royal village and much better than the Soviet village during the late NEP.
7. Meeting of collective farmers, Donetsk region, mid-30s
It is not difficult to guess that teachers in schools, professors in institutes, doctors in hospitals, librarians in libraries and all other workers had to be paid and, moreover, trained, not only for free, but also by paying a stipend, as was the case in the USSR. It’s just that the Soviet state redistributed the taxes received, surplus value and other funds not among a narrow group of rich people, but returned them to the people in one form or another, and for those who wanted to appropriate the people’s property there were GULAG and NKVD. We missed one more “small” detail - peasants “robbed” by Soviet Power for the first time in history received absolutely the same rights as other classes or, more correctly, social groups - there are countless peasant children who made not just a dizzying, but a fantastic career under the Soviet Authorities. Some have achieved what is beyond fantasy in any state - young peasants have grown to the level of the state elite of the highest level. Absolutely all roads were open for the Soviet peasant - peasants became doctors, engineers, professors, academicians, military leaders, cosmonauts, writers, actors, painters, singers, musicians, ministers... By the way, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin - come from peasant backgrounds.
If we take into account the sharply increased level of mechanization and the much more reasonable organization of labor, life in the countryside has become somewhat easier than before collectivization, taking into account both the much more reasonable collective farm organization of labor, as well as the services received on the collective farm for the same workdays, for example, the delivery of building materials or plowing the garden plot. For those who think that this is a trifle, I strongly recommend that you personally dig up half a hectare of arable land with a shovel for a more adequate perception of reality. Falsifiers who describe the “horrors of the collective farm gulag” and “collective farm slavery” are trying to present the matter as if what they received for workdays was the only source of food for collective farmers. This is very wrong. We have already shown the great contribution of personal farming, which was an integral part of collective farm life. But even this is not all. There were several other quite noticeable food sources that did not exist before. Almost everywhere on collective farms during the period of field work, food was organized at the expense of the collective farm for all able-bodied workers - collective farm canteens for teams working in the field. This was very reasonable - the average labor cost to prepare food for 50 people is many times less than if everyone cooks individually. Schools had reduced or free lunches, food in kindergartens and nurseries was practically free and came from collective farm funds, and in their absence, from district, regional, republican and, further, state funds.
8. Komsomol members and collective farm workers protect seed and insurance funds, p. Olshana, Kharkov region, 1933
Also completely ignored are the relief funds that were put in place when the food situation became dangerous. The collective farm was given grain loans or gratuitous assistance, as, by the way, were individual farmers; in addition, food was given to collective farm canteens, schools, nurseries and kindergartens. However, at the very beginning of its formation, this system was ineffective in a number of places, for example, in Ukraine in the early 30s, where local authorities hid the real catastrophic state of affairs and aid from the state reserve began to be allocated too late. It is to these funds that the famous hysterical “memoirs of grandmothers” refer to the topic, “they didn’t give anything away,” but when asked how you stayed alive, they answer the question “somehow survived.” This “somehow” refers to state and inter-collective farm assistance organized by the Soviet Government, which is not noticed point-blank by unworthy people.
9. Collective farm "New Life". 1931. Shagin
In general, if we take into account the sharply increased level of mechanization and a much more reasonable organization of labor (canteens, kindergartens, collective plowing of plots, etc.), then living in the countryside has become noticeably easier than before collectivization, even in 1932-1933.
When Russia’s ill-wishers write about collective farms, they immediately declare their low efficiency and always declare the destruction of the peasantry by the Bolsheviks.
In fact, the Bolsheviks saved all of Russia from destruction by the West, including the peasantry, which made up the bulk of the country’s inhabitants.
To understand this, one must distinguish February 1917, when Russia, with the help of the West, was dismembered into dozens of territorial and national entities, from October 1917, after which the collapsed Russian state began to be assembled and was assembled for four years from 1918 to 1922.
By reuniting the Russian lands, the Bolsheviks saved the country from imminent destruction and destroyed all the intricacies of the West’s conspiracy against Russia. The peasants were also saved. The peasants were not only preserved, but also united into large communities, collective farms, where they lived, undoubtedly, better than in tsarist Russia.
It was after the revolution that the peasants received landowners' lands, and the issue of landless peasants, which was tearing Russia apart, was resolved.
Collective farms received land for perpetual use, and collective farmers worked on their land on the collective farm and on their land on their personal plots. What kind of de-peasantization is this when a peasant works on the land!?
Without collectivization, Russia and the Russian nation would have disappeared from the face of the earth. Why? Because the USSR would not have been able to provide itself with bread and build before the war of 1941-1945. 12.5 thousand large industrial enterprises, which during the Great Patriotic War produced twice as much military equipment and other weapons than the total of enterprises in Germany and the rest of Europe united by Hitler.
The population of the European states opposing us in 1941 was well over 300 million people. (in the USSR as of June 20, 1941 - 195 million people).
Collectivization was vitally necessary, since grain production in the USSR stopped at the level before the start of the First World War: 1913 - 76.5 million tons; 1925 - 72.5; 1926 - 76.8; 1927-72.3; 1928 - 73.3; 1929-71.7.
That is why in 1927, at the XV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, J.V. Stalin put forward the task of fully developing the collectivization of agriculture.
“Collective farms and state farms are, as is known,” noted J.V. Stalin in January 1928, “large farms capable of using tractors and machines. They are more commercial farms than landowner and kulak farms. It must be borne in mind that our cities and our industry is growing and will grow every year. This is necessary for the industrialization of the country. Consequently, the demand for bread will grow every year..." That is, the issue of industrialization is inextricably linked with the issue of collectivization.
In 1937, the gross grain harvest was already 97.5 million tons (according to American estimates, 96.3 million tons).
As a result of collectivization, all the problems mentioned above were solved. Industrial production grew at a pace unprecedented in the world, grain production increased, labor productivity rose sharply, as a result of which people were freed for industrialization.
For example, in 1929, 80 million people were engaged in agriculture, and in 1933, 56 million people remained in agriculture. However, both in 1929 and in 1934 the same grain harvest was obtained - 74 million tons. That is, the number of people employed in the agricultural sector decreased by about a third, but grain production remained at the same level.
Agriculture freed up 24 million pairs of workers for industry, which it desperately needed. It must be said that in the USSR, even forty years after collectivization, there were not enough workers, because the country was constantly building, developing, moving forward, overtaking the most developed countries. And no country in the world protected workers and peasants as much as in the USSR.
Thanks to collectivization, grain production increased by more than one third within five years, and by January 1941, the USSR was able to create a state reserve of 6.162 million tons of grain and flour.
Having entered a stable regime after the war, collective and state farms increased grain production in 1986/87 to 210 - 211 million tons, which ensured the food security of the USSR. The peasants of the USSR produced this grain, and liberals claim that the peasantry was destroyed.
Thus, by the second half of the 1980s, grain production was increased by more than three times, and the production of milk, eggs and industrial crops by 8-10 times.
The USSR increased agricultural production year after year, beginning to outstrip a country like the United States in the production of many types of crops.
Even liberals write that during the 8th Five-Year Plan from 1966 to 1970. the volume of agricultural products increased by 21%, but they immediately talk about a decline in agricultural production in 1970-1980.
Most readers immediately get the impression that in the period indicated above, that is, in the 9th and 10th five-year plans, the amount of agricultural products produced in the country decreased, while agricultural production during the indicated period increased annually.
For example, grain production in million tons in the 8th Five-Year Plan from 1966 to 1970. the average was 167.6, in the 9th – 181.6, in the 10th – 205 million tons. They call recession growth in production at a percentage lower than in the 8th Five-Year Plan.
In general, compared to 1917, gross agricultural output increased by 5.5 times by 1986, and 4 times compared to 1913, including crop production - 3.8 times, livestock products - 4.2 times.
They further write that agriculture became increasingly subsidized. Please note that in our country it became subsidized, while in Western countries it has long existed almost entirely on subsidies from the state budget, such as, for example, the armed forces. In the Western world, where conditions for agriculture are much more favorable compared to Russia, in all countries, without exception, agriculture receives large subsidies from the state.
Criticism of collective farms was of great importance in the destruction of the USSR. About agriculture, in most information on the Internet, historical and economic books published since 1985, you will not find the truth about collective farms and state farms of the USSR.
They write that the state allocated huge amounts of money for the development of agriculture, but the latter allegedly did not develop, that the money received from the sale of oil (as if at that time we lived from the sale of oil) and all the gold went abroad to buy grain. This is written about in the vast majority of books about USSR agriculture published in these years. But when we begin to look at the facts, we become convinced that what we are being told is not true. I don’t think that this untruth is caused by the insufficient competence of the authors. Perhaps there are some dropouts. Now they are available in abundance in all areas of knowledge. But it looks more like a conspiracy between Russia’s opponents. Hatred of our country and Western money gave rise to a lot of false books, articles and programs about agriculture in the USSR.
In fact, under Brezhnev, the USSR bought a small amount of feed grain abroad, since the USSR's cattle population exceeded that of the United States. In fact, the USSR was ahead of the United States in wheat production.
The minds of our citizens have been implanted with the idea that collective farms are extremely ineffective compared to farming. Collective farms (kolkhozes) are a Russian community at a new stage of development of society and the state. The same community that existed for centuries in Rus' and formed the basis of the socialist society that was built.
Criticism of collective farms, after the fictitious mass Stalinist repressions and the invented number of losses during the Great Patriotic War, can be called one of the main enemy attacks on the USSR. In total, tens of thousands of these strikes were inflicted, and today every day strikes are being struck against the Soviet Union, that is, against our great past. Moreover, criticism of the USSR and collective farms is based on information prepared in Western subversive centers.
We did not produce such ideological weapons as lies and did not use lies in the Cold War with the West. That's why we lost.
But it couldn’t be any other way, because we, Russians, belong to the most honest and noble nation on earth. And Russia has always been direct and honest in its foreign and domestic policies. Deceit and lies were completely unacceptable ideological techniques, both in Tsarist and Soviet Russia.
And the fact that only the community could provide food for Russia became obvious in the days of the post-Soviet widespread destruction of agriculture. “I’ll also make a reservation,” writes S.G. Kara-Murza, that I do not at all consider Soviet agriculture to be ideally organized - the possibilities for its improvement were great. But they could only be realized through development, and not through defamation and destruction of what we actually had. We are talking about the type of economy and the trend of its development within this type.
And if we compare it with the West, then we all had to, first of all, bow to our collective and state farms - in terms of efficiency, farmers were no match for them. For efficiency is the ratio of what is produced to what is put into production.”
Even in 1992, Russian collective farms sold grain at a price of slightly more than 10 rubles per kg, and in the United States in the same autumn they bought grain for 70 rubles per kg. The difference in price may be explained by the fact that, together with government subsidies and other investments, the cost of grain production by US farmers was 7 times higher than the cost of grain production by Soviet collective farms.
Collective farms were destroyed on purpose, just as faith in Stalin, socialism, and Soviet power were deliberately destroyed. The architect of perestroika, that is, the destruction of the USSR, A. N. Yakovlev wrote: “It takes will and wisdom to gradually destroy the Bolshevik community - the collective farm. There can be no compromise here, bearing in mind that the collective and state farm agro-GULAG is strong and infinitely lumpen. Decollectivization must be carried out legally, but harshly.”
The destruction of collective farms was carried out according to plan with the aim of destroying the Russian community, on which the Russian state rested for centuries.
TO When green grass grew in the spring, the vegetable bases somehow turned sour and finally disappeared completely. However, they were already being replaced by much more onerous business trips to a sponsored collective farm, the elderly inhabitants of which crawled out of their half-rotten huts and began spring field work. While plowing or sowing spring crops was going on, they usually did not need much help. However, from mid-June, when mowing of fodder grasses began in the meadows, and until October - the harvesting of late potatoes, cabbage and root crops - design institutes were literally in a fever from collective farm chaos. Moreover, autumn was also the peak of work on the vegetable base.
Almost all collective farm trips of townspeople were in one way or another connected with harvesting - hay, grain crops and especially vegetables. It happened that engineers were forced to care for cows and other animals; however, the townspeople did not know how to handle them at all, many received injuries and even mutilations, and the cattle, for their part, began to die so intensely that the authorities considered it best not to bring them together in the future.
A one-day trip was considered the easiest and most enjoyable.
Early in the morning a column of buses with flags rolled up to the doors of the institute. Several departments in full force loaded up there and, singing and joking, rode a hundred miles to a distant field, where elastic cylinders of zucchini gleamed dull white through the nettles and quinoa. The sun scorched, the grasshoppers chirped, the dew glistened, and fragrant vapors rose and spread from the wet grass. The dark speck of a truck stood out from a group of barns on the horizon; now diving into a hollow, now flashing glass on the next slope of a hillock, it rolled up with a growl towards a motley, almost resort-like crowd of townspeople.
The foreman in boots and with papers jumped out of the cab; a representative from the institute entered into negotiations; Finally, at his command, everyone somehow sorted out the chain and, stumbling and getting tangled in the grass, began to advance towards the forest. Women rummaged through the weeds with canvas mittens, men picked up cut zucchini and carried them to the road, where several more people loaded bags and, tying them with ropes, strainedly threw them into the back. From the retreating chain the victims came: some lost a knife in the weeds, some cut themselves, some fell nose-first into nettles. The drivers, smoking in a circle near the buses, smacked horse flies. The mountain of bags in the back gradually grew. Individual figures were already waving their arms from the edge of the forest. The foreman, having signed the paper and stamped out the cigarette butt, climbed back into the cab, and the truck roared away.
Tired figures wandered across the trampled field towards the buses, sometimes bending over for a missed zucchini. Sitting in groups on the side of the road, where it was cleaner, they munched sandwiches, drinking tea from thermoses. Meanwhile, the weather began to deteriorate, the drivers became impatient, and finally the entire column set off on the return journey.
ABOUT However, the overwhelming majority of collective farm work was carried out on a rotational basis.
Each Moscow organization was attached to a specific collective farm, which was most often located in the same direction from the city where the organization itself gravitated. An agreement was concluded on the provision of patronage assistance, on the basis of which the Moscow enterprise was obliged to send a certain number of employees to work for a certain period of time, and the collective farm provided them with housing, food, transportation and, like a vegetable base, payment for workdays.
The first batch was sent at the beginning of June to make hay, and after that their comrades, replacing each other, worked on the collective farm until mid-November, when the potato harvest ended and the snow was already falling with might and main; Thus, the total was just six months. The directorate of the institute distributed duties among departments in proportion to their numbers; there they scolded, but there was nowhere to go. Usually fifteen to twenty people went out in shifts, and the collective farm, based on the planned work, stipulated the proportion of men and women. The shift left for ten days to work on weekends; For Sunday, everyone was given three days off, for some reason two for Saturday, weekdays were equated to working at their place.
If vegetable warehouses caused equal disgust among all employees, then trips to the collective farm were regarded very differently. Some equated them to a natural disaster and could hardly hold back their tears. Others, on the contrary, were glad that they could escape from the family for a long time, abandon their hateful drawings, work with their hands in the fresh air, sunbathe during the day, and get drunk and build cupids in the evening. Therefore, there were always collective farm regulars, whom we even had to restrain so that they would not completely forget their profession. In any case, no one stayed for two shifts in a row. But despite the presence of enthusiasts, the rest of the staff (minus the most important, oldest and sickest) faced at least one long trip every year. These absences, superimposed on the holiday season, so depleted design organizations in the summer that work there was barely simmering.
Sometimes, as in the case of bases, the management hired fictitious workers who stuck around on the collective farm for a full term. However, the local authorities did not favor them, because they quickly became involved in the endless local drinking and no longer wanted to do anything.
On the appointed morning, a group of employees, dressed in old jackets, worn jeans and boots, with backpacks and bags, shuffled at the doors of the institute. Some, gathered in a circle, were talking animatedly, now and then leaning back in fits of laughter; others wandered around dejectedly. Workers from different departments got to know each other. Men and women looked at each other appraisingly, weighing their chances. An old, shabby little car drove up; the elder called out to those gathered according to the list, and finally the bus set off in the direction of his native collective farm.
Every collective farm consisted of a whole conglomerate of all kinds of land, randomly spread over vast spaces. It included a dozen villages, many fields, farms, storage facilities, machine and tractor stations (MTS), auxiliary sawmills, mowing fields, a toy power plant on a dam, and God knows what else. In essence, it was its own small state, which was completely ruled by the chairman, who nested in the central estate. Usually the largest village on the collective farm, conveniently located near railways or highways, was chosen for it. In the middle of the square rose the brick building of the government; In front of him, among the carefully weeded flower beds, stood a monument to Lenin. The asphalt sidewalks quickly ended in mud, on which drunken tractor drivers in boots splashed and Moscow summer residents minced carefully.
Dusty lanes spread out in all directions from the village, becoming barely noticeable ruts in the grass as they moved away. The fields either ran down to swampy hollows, where mosquitoes rang and the intoxicating smell of meadowsweet, then were interrupted by wedges of surviving dark forest, creating such a striped landscape that only local residents could understand. A visiting Muscovite, driving along the country roads, could not understand whether he had already seen this group of barns, or whether they were just similar. In this enchanted area, all kinds of earthly fruits grew, which had to be harvested.
The bus, dragging a plume of brown dust behind it, rolled into a quiet street of an almost abandoned village, where the track was lost in the thicket of fine curly grass. Behind the rickety fences, untouched greenery flourished, through which the skeletons of huts with roof slopes sagging to holes and cross-boarded windows could be seen. Here and there, dirty old men with wasted, sun-brown, wrinkled faces were resting on benches; Their Moscow grandchildren ran screaming across the soft grass. An alley of hundred-year-old oak trees and wide mosquito ponds overgrown with duckweed on the other side of the village testified to its noble origin. Halfway along the street stood a white concrete cylinder of a well with a curved, rusty handle; Departing employees from the previous shift crowded around him, chattering animatedly.
Behind the gate, in the thicket of no one's raspberries, the glass of the veranda of the house allocated to Muscovites gleamed. Almost its entire length was occupied by a rough-hewn dining table, littered with stacks of freshly washed army-style iron utensils. The table was surrounded by narrow rickety benches. A white refrigerator donated by the institute sat in the corner, and a gas stove sat opposite.
In the center of the hut itself stood an inactive Russian stove; Partitions diverged from it in different directions, dividing the total external volume into several rooms. All the partitions did not reach the ceiling, which was enjoyed with pleasure by the countless mice, flies and mosquitoes that constantly circulated around the room. The rooms contained iron army beds covered with dusty blankets, broken chairs and bedside tables. Instead of doors, grimy curtains hung from the jambs. It smelled of smoke, dirty laundry and some kind of office stuff, as often happens in guardhouses.
Women and men settled down in different rooms, occupied the beds they liked and, having sorted out their belongings, went for a walk around the village. The cook, chosen before departure, began preparing a simple soldier’s lunch of fried potatoes and stewed meat. He didn’t go to work at all and spent all day managing the hut with a shift assistant. The most loving employees often signed up as cooks and chose assistants at their own discretion.
H aces at seven in the morning the metallic clink of dishes rose from the veranda. The assistant on duty, in soaking wet pants, swearing, dragged two splashing full buckets from the well. The most vigorous ones were already sitting on their beds, making as much noise as possible to wake up the others. Wincing painfully, the intellectual crawled out from under the blanket with his eye swollen from a night bite and itching. Others prudently wrapped their shirts around their heads and breathed into nowhere. A kettle boiled for shaving was puffing on the veranda. Half-naked figures with towels crawled out from the porch into the fresh morning breeze and splashed around the washstand. The cook rattled the ladle on the pan: it was time for breakfast. The prison, pleasant from hunger, steamed in the bowls; someone very kind was pouring the strongest black tea into mugs. People said hello, sat down, sorted out coarsely cut slices of bread and clanked their spoons in concentration. Yesterday's bus was already honking on the road. Everyone took their places and set off through fields and copses to where the foreman was waiting for them.
In the spacious mown meadow, the breeze stirred the scattered rows of golden drying hay. The slowly crawling car picked him up with long forks and pulled him inside, and large, rectangular, twenty-kilogram briquettes comically tumbled out of the back door, like manure. The men, breaking up in pairs, followed and, straining themselves, threw them over the side of a truck crawling nearby; some managed to do it with a pitchfork alone. A man covered in grass debris was on duty at the top and was pulling briquettes around the body. The prickly hay dust clogged my eyes, itched my nose, sore my throat, and corroded my sweaty skin. People prone to allergies completely broke down after a quarter of an hour and never showed up here again.
Grain harvesting started in mid-July. Now the main work shifted to the current, where dusty dump trucks constantly unloaded grain threshed by combines. Long ridges of this grain stretched across the surface of the concrete area between two lines of covered pens. A huge rattling chest crawled from one end of the ridge and, vibrating in all parts, slowly ate the grain. Golden stripes flowed up and down inside and finally spilled out far to the side along the conveyor, forming behind another, parallel ridge of purified grain, and black-green weed seeds were shot out in the opposite direction under pressure. To avoid raking them all over the site, a bucket was placed under the stream, which filled with alarming speed. Then it was necessary to change it to another and quickly drag it to the fence, where a mountain of waste was already rising.
Before being sent for storage to the city elevator, the grain was thoroughly dried so that it would not ripen or ignite there. For this purpose, bulky dryer bunkers loomed at a distance, into which a lot of grain was poured, and heated air was supplied from below. However, either their throughput was low, or fuel was a pity, but most of the crop had to be dried the old fashioned way. To do this, the grain, cleaned the day before, was shoveled into spacious covered pens until it was a meter thick, and they waited.
Two days later there was already a damp warmth coming from under the canopy. Then the designers, armed with shovels, bravely climbed inside and began shoveling, i.e. They threw the grain from one corner to the opposite so that the heated bottom layer cooled at the top. The main problem was that the grain had been treated with chemicals the day before, and now people had to work in a cloud of toxic dust. They were standardly armed with stuffy respirator masks that filtered toxic dust when breathing; however, in the daytime, when the sun heated the roof of the shed, and the heated wheat burned the boots, it was not so easy to use them. Many people threw them aside altogether and worked like that. Sometimes a long pipe was dragged into the pen, inside of which a screw rotated. Then the work accelerated greatly. On one side, grain was raked into the pipe, and it obediently spit it out from the other end.
From mid-August, the most labor-intensive potato harvest began and lasted without interruption until the frost. In the dirty fields, completely covered with weeds, withered potato stems, gnawed by beetles, turned yellow. Along the hilled ridges, deeply stuck in the sodden clay, a potato harvester dragged itself - a strange humpbacked structure, painted rusty brown with red lead. The designers sat on his back like flies, staring at the black rubber band crawling past their noses. The combine was digging its mustache into the ground, tearing off the top layer, and dragging it up with tangled links of conveyors. Along the way, everything unnecessary fell off, and the tubers, along with similar stones and lumps of clay, crawled to the people on duty above, and they barely had time to throw the garbage overboard. Dump trucks loaded with loose materials pulled from the combines.
However, much more often a tractor with a plow simply drove across the field and sloppily turned the tubers to the surface. Following them wandered figures with empty bags and, having filled them three-quarters, left them standing while they themselves moved on. Others dragged the bags into groups, where the most skilled twisted their necks and tied them tightly with rope. A truck with ugly high sides approached; two men grabbed the bag from both sides, swung it and deftly threw it up. Those who did not know how to do this squirmed furiously right next to the wheels, lifting the bags over their heads and over the side. From above they received several more people, piling up the bags with their humps sticking out to the sky.
The trucks walked in a line towards the giant sorting machine, which rattled and shook as it sorted the tubers by size. Some remained on the collective farm for seed, the smallest ones were fed to livestock, others waited to be sent to the city’s vegetable bases. Nevertheless, they all fell from the conveyors into bags, which now had to be thrown into the bodies for hours without a break. At first it seemed impossible; my arms were falling off, my lower back was raw, and sticky sweat blurred my eyes. However, day by day the work went on more and more skillfully, so that over time no one counted the number of tons transferred.
Sometimes the townspeople were given rusty bayonet shovels, and they, dirty to their ears, picked out long orange carrots from the clay. Others stuffed it into bags and loaded it into the truck in the same order. Beets and radishes were primitively pulled by the tops.
In September, fodder turnips ripened - giant, juicy roots with a coarse taste that cattle adored. Others grew almost a meter long and twenty centimeters in diameter; they stuck out entirely to the surface, like stumps or cacti, with stupid clumps of leaves on top that could easily be torn off. A powerful tap root sank into the ground like an anchor. It was funny to watch how the city's intellectuals, their feet scattering in the clay, vainly tugged and pushed the stubborn cylinder until they flew with their noses into the mud. The more skilled ones deftly kicked it under, like a soccer ball. Women, armed with terrifying knives, cut off roots and leaves, and the root crop, which had lost its solidity, thumped loudly to the bottom of the dump truck.
But the most fun was harvesting the cabbage. All over the field there were rows of shaggy green-blue hummocks on long scaly stalks. Women cut them down with knives just below the head, men picked them up and threw them from a great distance into the back of a dump truck, like basketballs. Here the competition began: the women tried to chop as much as possible so that the men would not have time, and they rushed like machine guns and did not allow the women to straighten up. When the truck was almost full, another slippery head of cabbage, flying tangentially, plopped onto the heads of those working on the other side. They began to rush from there on purpose; someone would pull out a frail head of cabbage and, grabbing it by the stump, wave it like a grenade. It was called "cabbage with a handle"; launched at the enemy, it tumbled funny in the air, spreading its flabby leaves; someone would pick it up on the fly and send it back. Finally the truck drove away, and the red-faced crew sat down to rest on the side of the road.
In the middle of the day a bus appeared and took everyone to the hut, where a happy lady cook and a grinning assistant were already setting the table. After dinner, some lay flat on their beds, others rinsed themselves under the washstand. The bus was buzzing outside the window, and the second half of the day was beginning. When everyone finally returned back at half past five, dinner awaited them.
Then until the night there was free time, which everyone used according to their own taste. Some wandered around the neighborhood in groups, chatting about trifles; others explored the surrounding forest alone for mushrooms; still others listened to the radio at home; someone went to swim in a dirty pond. Volunteers with buckets trudged to the nearest farm for fresh milk. Trembling couples walked along the shore, contemplating the moonlit path on the surface of the water and driving away mosquitoes with a twig. A dim lamp shone on the veranda, and milk was poured out to those who wanted it. A shoe flew across the room and hit the partition just below the rat. Sometimes a drunken native would burst through the door with an accordion; the men hurried with their bottles, and the concert began. Under the window, today's assistant was laughingly explaining his duties to tomorrow's.
The NEP, which replaced “war communism,” created conditions for the rapid restoration of the productive forces of the Russian countryside, undermined by the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 and the civil war.
So, if in the 1921/22 business year agricultural production was only 46.8% of the level of 1913, then by 1926/27. the level of 1913 was practically reached. Nevertheless, the development of the Russian village during the NEP period was very contradictory.
The country's population grew faster than gross grain harvests grew. So in 1928/29 there were only 484.4 kg of bread per capita compared to 584 kg in pre-war times.
There was a decline in the marketability of agriculture. If before the war half of the grain was collected on landowner and kulak farms, and the grown grain went to the domestic and foreign markets, then the “middleization” of the countryside contributed to reduction in the share of grain produced for sale. The middle peasants collected 85% of all grain, most of which (70%) they consumed themselves. In 1927/28, the state was able to procure only 630 million poods. grains against the pre-war 1300.6 million. Bread exports decreased by 20 times. “By eating most of their grain harvest...” wrote the Western historian M. Levin in his book “Russian Peasants and Soviet Power,” “the peasants, without realizing it, tightened the noose around the neck of the regime and tightened it ever tighter, as the situation developed from bad to worse.” to even worse."
The country has constantly faced grain procurement crises, the reasons for which were the naturalization of peasant farming and low grain prices. The grain procurement crisis of 1927/28 turned out to be especially acute. The party leadership was taken by surprise: despite the good harvest, peasants, due to lower purchasing prices, supplied the state with only 300 million poods of grain (instead of 430 million as in the previous year). There was nothing to export. The country found itself without the currency necessary for industrialization.
To get out of this situation, the leadership of the USSR resorted to urgent measures reminiscent of food appropriation. Top party leaders went to regions producing high grain harvests: I.V. Stalin - to Siberia, A.A. Andreev, N.M. Shvernik, A.I. Mikoyan, P.P. Postyshev and S.V. Kosior - to the Volga, Ural and North Caucasus. The party sent “investigative officers” and “work detachments” to the villages, who were tasked with cleaning up village councils and party cells and, enlisting the support of the poor, finding hidden surpluses and punishing the perpetrators.
The authorities blamed the current situation on the kulaks who refused to hand over the bread the country needed for industrialization. However, emergency measures (primarily the forcible seizure of grain) affected not only the kulaks, but the middle peasantry.
Soviet poster
The following year, the situation with grain procurements repeated itself, forcing the top party leadership to draw a number of conclusions. In his speeches in May-June 1928 I.V. Stalin he said about the need to create “supports of socialism” in the countryside - collective farms and machine and tractor stations (MTS), capable, according to the leader, of giving the state 250 million poods of grain. The absence of mass protests by the peasantry during the period of emergency measures convinced I.V. Stalin and his entourage are that the village will not resolutely resist the destruction of the traditional foundations of its economic life and way of life.
In addition, the use of emergency measures to confiscate bread and other products from peasants made it possible to solve the problem of lack of money for industrialization.
Thus, The NEP was recognized by the country's leadership as having exhausted itself. The completion of industrialization, impossible without the transfer of funds from agriculture to industry, required breaking the previous relations between the authorities and the peasantry.
December 1927 took place XV Congress of the CPSU(b), where the need for a further offensive against the kulaks was proclaimed and the task of creation of collective production enterprises in the village - collective farms.
The “offensive against the kulaks” was expressed in increasing the tax burden on wealthy peasants and confiscating land surpluses from them and so on. In the summer of 1929, a decree was issued “On the inexpediency of admitting kulaks to collective farms and the need for systematic work to cleanse collective farms of kulak elements trying to corrupt the collective farms from within.” The very entry of kulaks into collective farms was considered a criminal act, and collective farms created with their participation were qualified as false collective farms.
However, the main direction of the party course was the creation of large production farms in the village. In the spring of 1928, the People's Commissariat of Agriculture and the Kolkhoz Center of the RSFSR drew up a draft five-year plan for the collectivization of peasant farms, according to which by the end of the five-year period, i.e. by 1933, it was planned to involve 1.1 million farms in collective farms (4% of the total number in the republic). In the summer of the same year, the Union of Agricultural Cooperation Unions increased this figure to 3 million farms (12%). And in the five-year plan approved in the spring of 1929, it was planned to collectivize 4-4.5 million farms, i.e. 16-18% of their total number.
In real pace of collectivization turned out to be different: by June 1929, there were already more than a million peasant farms on collective farms (i.e., as many as were originally planned only by 1933); by October of the same year - 1.9 million. The number of collective farms in the grain regions - the North Caucasus, Lower and Middle Volga regions - grew especially rapidly.
At the end of July 1929, the Chkalovsky district of the Middle Volga region took the initiative to declare it a district complete collectivization. By September 1929, 500 collective farms had been created in the region, which included 6,441 farms (about 64% of the total number) and socialized 131 thousand hectares of land (out of 220 thousand hectares). A similar movement that arose in some other regions of the republic received approval from the department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for work in the countryside. The idea of complete collectivization of grain regions began to be actively promoted in the press and put into practice.
Areas of complete collectivization began to appear in many territories and regions of the country. However, such “successes” in organizing collective farms in the countryside were explained not so much by the enthusiasm of the peasants, but the use of administrative methods and violence by the authorities.
Collective farm construction acquired an accelerated character at the end of 1929 - beginning of 1930, thanks to a publication published in Pravda. November 7, 1929 article by I.V. Stalin's "Year of the Great Turning Point". It stated that the party managed to turn the bulk of the peasantry to a new, socialist path of development, “we managed to organize a radical change in the depths of the peasantry itself and lead the broad masses of the poor and middle peasants.”
The leader was wishful thinking. By October 1929 in the USSR, only 7.6% of the total number of peasant households was united into collective farms. However, the article by I.V. Stalin had a direct impact on the decisions of the November (1929) Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. From the rostrum of the Plenum of the Central Committee it was stated that the transition “to the collective path of the rest of the peasants” would be a matter of several months, not several years. Thus, in essence, the party leadership proclaimed complete collectivization - 100% inclusion of poor and middle peasant farms into collective farms.
The impulse for collectivization, according to the unanimous decision of the Plenum of the Central Committee, was to be the sending to the villages of 25 thousand industrial workers with organizational and political work experience. The latter, according to A.A., who spoke at the November Plenum of the Central Committee. Andreev, is required, since “organizing a large collective farm is almost as difficult a task as organizing a large industrial enterprise.” The “twenty-five thousanders” (mostly communists and Komsomol members) were supposed to create and lead collective farms in the grain regions.
In the decisions of the Plenum, there was also a place for kulaks, whom party members qualified as the main class force interested in disrupting collective farm construction. Local party organizations were recommended to more decisively attack the kulak and stop all his attempts to get into the collective farms.
Soviet poster
Thus, the transition to a policy of complete collectivization also meant an expansion of the scale dispossession -forcible deprivation of wealthy peasants of means of production, buildings, property, etc.. I.V. unequivocally stated about the changes that had occurred in the general course of the party and government. Stalin in December 1929. Speaking at a conference of Marxist agrarians, he noted that “from the policy of limiting the exploitative tendencies of the kulaks” power is transferred "towards the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class".
After the November Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which decided on complete collectivization, the country’s leadership took some measures to carry out organizational and technical preparations for the implementation of this decision. Firstly, the collective farm-cooperative system was reoriented to primarily serve collective farms rather than individual farms. Secondly, during 1929, for the needs of collective farms, management personnel and rural specialists were trained: collective farm chairmen, accountants, tractor drivers, etc. Thirdly, to mechanize the labor of collective farmers in the regions, it was decided organize machine and tractor stations (MTS) and columns.
To more effectively carry out complete collectivization, two special commissions were created: one - under the leadership of the People's Commissar of Agriculture A. Yakovlev - was supposed to develop a collectivization schedule; the other - chaired by V. Molotov - decide the fate of the fist.
The result of the work of A. Yakovlev’s commission was the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of January 5, 1930 “On the pace of collectivization and measures of state assistance to collective farm construction,” which determined the deadline for completing collectivization: for the North Caucasus, Lower and Middle Volga - autumn 1930. or the spring of 1931, for the remaining grain regions - the autumn of 1931 or the spring of 1932. The decree called the agricultural artel the main form of collective farm construction, which was defined as a “transitional form of farming to the commune.”
The resolution of the Party Central Committee spurred the activity of local authorities in carrying out collectivization. Directives from the center, as well as the constant threat of being accused of “right deviation” due to indecisive actions, pushed local workers to use violence against peasants who did not want to join collective farms.
The expansion of the pace of collectivization required the authorities to clearly define their position regarding the future fate of the kulaks. In January 1930, at the insistence of I.V. Stalin issued a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, which indicated signs of kulak farms: annual income per consumer is more than 300 rubles. (more than 1,500 rubles per family), engaging in trade, renting out cars, premises, using hired labor; the presence of a mill, oil mill, grain crusher, fruit or vegetable dryer, etc. The presence of any of the above signs gave local authorities the opportunity to classify the peasant as a kulak.
On January 30, 1930, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a secret resolution prepared by V. Molotov’s commission “On measures to eliminate kulak farms in areas of complete collectivization.” According to this document, in areas of complete collectivization it was prescribed to confiscate the means of production, livestock, farm and residential buildings, food, feed and seed stocks from the kulaks.
All kulaks were divided into three categories: the first (“counter-revolutionary activist”) were subject to imprisonment in concentration camps and, in some cases, execution; the second (“individual elements of the kulak activists”) were sentenced to deportation to remote areas of the country or to remote areas of a given region; the third group (“loyal to the Soviet regime”) was to be resettled in new areas allocated outside the collective farms.
The resolution also indicated the approximate number of kulak farms being liquidated - 3-5%. The figure was clearly overestimated: in the fall of 1929, the share of kulak farms in the USSR was 2.3%. In 9 regions of the country it was planned to send 60 thousand kulaks to concentration camps and evict 150 thousand kulaks. The resolution also stated that family members of those imprisoned in concentration camps and those deported could, with the consent of the district executive committees, remain in the same area. However, in reality, family members of repressed kulaks were deported along with the accused. The property confiscated from the kulaks was to be transferred to collective farm funds as entrance fees for the poor and farm laborers.
Soviet poster
Specially created “troikas” were called upon to eliminate the kulaks locally, consisting of the first secretary of the party committee, the chairman of the executive committee and the head of the local department of the GPU. Lists of fists of the first category were compiled only by the GPU bodies, lists of rich people of the second and third categories - by representatives of local authorities and rural “activists”.
The release of the resolution became a signal to action for local authorities. At the same time, the criteria for kulak farms specified in the January 1930 decision of the Council of People's Commissars were often ignored. The main document exposing the kulak was denunciations. According to the OGPU data only for 1930-1931. 381,026 families with a total number of 1,803,392 people were evicted and sent to special settlements (in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the North). Some peasant families (200-250 thousand) “dispossessed themselves” - they sold or abandoned their property and fled to the city and industrial construction sites. The majority of those 400-450 thousand dispossessed families classified as the third category, who were initially supposed to be resettled in separate settlements within the areas of their residence, also ended up there. In 1932-1936. the number of dispossessed farms decreased and amounted to about 100 thousand people. Thus, during the entire period of collectivization, about 1,100 thousand households or 5-6 million people were subjected to repression. The share of dispossessed peasant farms was 4-5%, which turned out to be almost twice the number of kulak farms in 1929. There was nothing surprising in this - the majority of middle peasants who did not want to join the collective farm were classified as kulaks.
The dispossession campaign further accelerated the pace of collectivization. Only in February 1930, the number of farms that joined the collective farm increased from 32.5 to 56%, and in the Russian Federation from 34.7 to 57.6%. The highest numbers were observed in Siberia, the Nizhny Novgorod region and the Moscow region. There, the percentage of collectivized farms has doubled.
The violence that accompanied the process of collectivization could not but cause resistance (including armed resistance). According to the OGPU of the USSR, in January-April 1930, 6,117 performances took place in the village, in which 1,755 thousand participants took part. The peasants opposed both forced collectivization and dispossession, as well as other lawlessness - the closure and desecration of churches and mosques, the arrest and persecution of clergy, the closure of bazaars, etc. However, more often the peasants practiced passive resistance: they refused to carry out grain procurements, slaughtered livestock, not wanting to hand them over to the collective farm, did not go to collective farm work or worked “carelessly,” etc.
Admission of new members to a collective farm near Moscow. Photo from 1930
In an effort to reduce the growing tension in the countryside, the party leadership resorted to tactical maneuver. March 2, 1930 was published in the newspaper Pravda article by I.V. Stalin "Dizziness from success", wherein Some representatives of local authorities were blamed for the “excesses” in collectivization, who “often try to replace the preparatory work on organizing collective farms with bureaucratic decree of the collective farm movement.”
The reaction of the peasantry to I.V.’s article was also unexpected for the local authorities. Stalin. Referring to Pravda, many of the peasants began to leave the collective farms, into which they had recently been driven by force. As a result of these “outputs,” the level of collectivization at the end of the summer of 1930 throughout the country as a whole decreased to the level of January 1930.
After the mass exodus of peasants from collective farms, a short-term “calm” ensued in the countryside: peasants who left the collective farms did not return there voluntarily, and the confused local authorities were afraid to force them to do so. The senior Soviet leadership was not happy with this course of events. In September 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks sent a letter to local party organizations, in which it demanded energetic work “to achieve a powerful rise in the collective farm movement”.
Soviet poster
The stake in the matter of re-collectivization was made on propaganda of the advantages of collective farms among individual farmers. Recruitment teams and initiative groups created from rural activists, poor and middle peasants had to play a special role in persuading opponents of collective farms. In December 1930, there were 5,625 recruiting brigades operating in the RSFSR, and in the spring of 1931, over 21 thousand in the main grain regions alone.
The party and state leadership of the USSR also took measures to encourage peasants to join collective farms. So on December 29, 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks approved the annual program for the construction of 1,400 machine and tractor stations (MTS) and canceled the decision on the purchase of equipment by collective farms as untimely. By spring sowing, the number of MTS reached 1228, and the number of tractors in them increased from 7102 in 1930 to 50114. By the end of 1931, the MTS construction program was completed.
Another incentive for individual farmers to join the collective farm was providing collective organizations with loans and tax benefits. The state also promised to streamline the organization and payment of labor on collective farms and guarantee the collective farmer the management of personal subsidiary farming.
However, in addition to the “carrot”, the “stick” also continued to be used. In the autumn of 1930 it began mass eviction of dispossessed peasants, carried out by the OGPU. Former kulaks were exiled to Siberia, the Urals, the Northern Territory and Kazakhstan. Life was no better for that part of the kulaks who were classified in the third category and allowed to settle non-collective farm (usually bad) lands. These peasants found themselves crushed by taxes. The tax pressure on ordinary individual peasants has also increased. So, if 1 collective farm yard in 1931 accounted for about 3 rubles. agricultural tax, then for one individual owner - more than 30 rubles, and for a kulak - almost 314 rubles. With this tax policy, the state clearly pushed peasants to join the collective farm. By June 1931, the level of collectivization in the country reached 52.7% of the total number of peasant farms.
However, the emerging rise soon ended. This circumstance caused further concessions to the peasantry from the authorities. On March 26, 1932, a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was issued “On the forced socialization of livestock,” which explained that “the practice of forced selection of cows and small livestock from collective farmers has nothing to do with the policy of the party” and that “the task of the party is to so that each collective farmer has his own cow, small livestock, and poultry.”
In May of the same year, joint resolutions were adopted by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, according to which After fulfilling the state plan for the procurement of bread and meat, collective farms were allowed to sell the remaining products at market prices.
However, the reality was completely different. During the grain procurement period of 1931, significant grain reserves were confiscated from thousands of collective farms (in some farms - up to 80%). There could be no question of the existence of any kind of surplus. The confiscation of grain led to sad consequences: There is a real threat of famine in Ukraine.
Under these conditions, the authorities decided to reduce the procurement plan compared to last year. All republican and local taxes and fees on the trade of collective farms and collective farmers were abolished, and no more than 30% of their income from trade was collected from individual farmers. But lowering the grain procurement plan could not correct the situation. Grain procurement tasks were not completed. The peasants went to all sorts of tricks to save part of the harvest. In reply the party leadership again used the “whip”. On August 7, 1932, the law “On the protection of the property of state enterprises, collective farms and cooperation and the strengthening of public (socialist) property” was adopted, popularly nicknamed the law of five ears of corn. Behind theft of collective farm and cooperative property, the document provided for capital punishment - execution. In mitigating circumstances, the exceptional punishment could be replaced by imprisonment for 10 years. By February 1933, 103 thousand people were convicted under the “five ears of corn” law, of which 6.2% were shot.
Another act of intimidation was the dispatch in October-November 1932 to the North Caucasus, Ukraine and the Volga region emergency commissions on grain procurements. With the help of mass repressions, the resistance of the peasants was broken and grain (including seed supplies) was confiscated. The result of these actions was terrible hunger, which killed, mainly in Ukraine, about 5 million people. The authorities carefully hid information about the crop failure not only from the world community, but also from the citizens of their country. All attempts by starving people to leave their villages were decisively suppressed by troops.
The disaster forced the government to somewhat change its policy towards the peasants. By May 1933, in connection with the “new favorable situation” that had arisen in the village, it was decided stop the use of mass evictions and “acute forms of repression”. On January 19, 1933, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution “On the mandatory supply of grain to the state by collective farms and individual farms.” Collective farms and individual farms received firm obligations that had the force of a tax to deliver grain within certain periods and at prices established by the state. All grain remaining after the mandatory delivery was completed was considered to be at the full disposal of the producers.. Local authorities and procurement institutions were prohibited from imposing obligations for the delivery of grain that exceeded the norms established by law. Theoretically, this measure was supposed to protect collective farms from repeated taxes by local authorities, but in practice this resolution did not improve the lot of the peasants at all. In addition, in addition to the established tax, collective farmers had to pay in kind for services provided by MTS.
A year later, a new decree was issued, according to which the state’s above-plan purchases of grain from collective farms, state farms and individual farmers should be carried out on the basis of complete voluntariness at prices 20-25% higher than procurement prices. Farms that sold bread at purchase prices could purchase scarce manufactured goods for an amount three times the cost of the bread sold. However "merchandising" system, which was supposed to be the main incentive for purchasing, did not justify itself, since the state did not have the goods the village needed, and purchase prices were too low. Having existed for a little more than six months, the “reproduction” was cancelled. On August 31, 1931, by directive of I.V. Stalin and V.M. Molotov, a new procurement procedure was introduced: collective farms that had fulfilled plans for grain supplies and payment in kind were required to create a reserve to fulfill the procurement plan before paying the collective farmers. Thus, procurement turned into a mandatory system for the delivery of additional products to the state.
Alternating between “carrot” and “stick”, the government managed in 1933-1935. achieve the delivery of bread throughout the country. The growth of procurement allowed the state, starting in January 1935, to abolish the rationing system for flour, bread and cereals, and at the end of the year - for meat, fish, sugar, fats and potatoes.
There has also been some relief for the peasantry. In February 1935, at the Second Congress of Shock Collective Farmers, a model charter of the agricultural artel was adopted, which provided the possibility of a collective farmer running a personal subsidiary plot. Depending on the region, the peasant was allowed to have from 0.25 to 0.5 (in some areas - up to 1) hectares of land, from one to 2-3 cows and an unlimited number of poultry.
These “concessions” to the peasantry played a significant role in meeting the agricultural needs of the rural population itself and the country as a whole. Personal subsidiary plots accounted for 20.6% of the country's gross livestock production. By the end of the second five-year plan, this farm produced 52.1% of potatoes and vegetables, 56.6% of fruit crops, 71.4% of milk, 70.9% of meat, etc. Most of the production was for personal consumption, but about 1/4 of livestock products and up to 1/2 of potatoes and vegetables were sold on the market. The turnover of market collective farm trade during the second five-year plan increased 2.4 times.
Collectivization was completed by the end of the second Five-Year Plan. Her as a result was the creation by 1937 of 243.7 thousand collective farms, which involved 93.9% of the remaining farms in the village by that time. A completely different type of economy took hold in the village. Formally he was listed as a special type of cooperative economy, with collective ownership of the main means of production(except for the land, which was considered public property, handed over for free and indefinite use to collective farms). However in fact, the new type of economy was semi-state. He was distinguished by strict centralization, directiveness and planning.
Demonstration. Photograph from the 1930s.
The transformation of small peasant farms into large collective ones allowed the state confiscate the required amount of grain from the peasantry at a symbolic purchase price and uncontrollably dispose of the harvest. Such a simple payment system allowed the authorities to easily redistribute financial flows and, by withdrawing money from agriculture, invest in the industrialization of the country.
The relationship between collective farms and the state meant the predominantly non-economic nature of forcing the rural worker to work, as a result of which he lost interest in raising the economy of his artel. This coercion was also legally supported with the help of the law implemented at the end of 1932 - beginning of 1933. certification of the country's population. In rural areas, passports were issued only on state farms and in territories declared “secure” (border zones, capital cities with adjacent areas, large industrial centers and defense facilities). It was not easy for collective farmers to obtain a passport. A joke appeared among the peasants: What is the name of the party VKP(b)? Second serfdom of the Bolsheviks.
Like many events, collectivization was carried out through direct administration and violence. Millions of wealthy peasants and middle peasants were declared kulaks and formed a huge army of the Gulag, working for free on the great construction projects of the country.
The establishment of the collective farm system meant a qualitatively new milestone not only in the life of the domestic village, but also in the country as a whole. Two forms of ownership that are homogeneous in nature - state and collective farm-cooperative - have become all-encompassing in society.
Collectivization fulfilled its main goal - it ensured the accelerated transfer of funds from agriculture to industry and freed up the labor force necessary for the industrialization of the country (15-20 million people). However, contrary to official propaganda, production indicators in agriculture have not improved much compared to the NEP period. The only difference was that if by the end of the NEP these products were produced by 50-55 million individual peasants, then in the pre-war years - 30-35 million collective farmers and state farm workers, i.e. there are a third fewer workers.
At the same time, the negative aspects of collectivization also became completely obvious. With some expansion of sown areas, grain yield per hectare decreased; the peasants' nutrition deteriorated; The number of livestock decreased due to mass slaughter on the eve of the peasants joining the collective farm and the inability to manage livestock on the farm itself. Due to the massive selection of grain, famine became a frequent occurrence in the Soviet countryside.
For all its cruelty, the agricultural policy of forced collectivization included elements of sober socio-economic calculation. The creation of collective farms ensured the transfer of funds from agriculture to industry and freed up the labor needed for the industrialization of the country. The Stalin regime solved the problem by uniting 61.8% of peasant farms and about 80% of sown areas into collective farms.
4.4.3. Cultural life of the country in the 1920s - 1930s.
The inconsistency of Bolshevik policy and its results was nowhere manifested with such force as in the field of cultural construction. Its origins are rooted in the doctrinal principles of Bolshevism, which sharply distinguished the new culture from the culture of the old, “bourgeois” society.
Although V.I. Lenin rejected the purely class approach to culture, characteristic of the initial stage of the Russian revolution and preached by proletkult supporters, he believed that it was impossible to build a new society on the basis of the entire existing culture. This approach inevitably raised the question of cultural selection for the architects of the new system: what to adopt and what to discard as unnecessary rubbish. The methodological basis for such selection was initially Marxism as a value system, a kind of ideological matrix on the basis of which the authorities tried to create a new culture, play and broadcast it. Therefore, the political technologies of Bolshevism in this area inevitably created instrumental approach to culture as one of the means to achieve one’s political goals.
Soviet poster
It is noteworthy that this approach was the complete opposite of the position of European social democracy on this issue. Its main provisions were clearly formulated by K. Kautsky, who believed that under socialism there can be no guiding influence on the processes of scientific and artistic creativity. “Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual production - this is the type of socialist mode of production,” he declared, strongly protesting against any dogmatic and doctrinal interference in this most complex process.
Cultural Revolution, according to the Bolsheviks, was supposed to make a revolution in the cultural sphere. It involved the solution of two blocks of tasks subordinated to the main strategic task - building socialism.
First block represented program to prepare the population for its participation in the industrialization of the country. That is, what every country needs in the industrial phase of its development. According to Lenin, it was necessary for workers to master the basics of knowledge and professional skills. In Russia, where the bulk of the population could neither read nor write, the first task was literacy. Therefore it is no coincidence the most important direction in this area was the creation, restoration and expansion of the public education system. Actually, there was nothing revolutionary about this, except for the total ideological intervention in this area of culture.
Back in October 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a regulation “On a unified labor school.” Instead of the various types of schools that previously existed in Russia, a single labor school was created, which was divided into two levels: the first for children from 8 to 13 years old and the second for children from 13 to 17 years old. The new school was declared secular, that is, free from the influence of religion. It was a free and compulsory co-educational labor school. However, practice has shown that such a school did not meet the requirements of life, and in the late 20s. there has been a return to traditional forms of education.
The issue of eliminating illiteracy and creating an education system that met the needs of ongoing industrialization arose especially acutely in the late 20s and early 30s. In the summer of 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution “On universal compulsory primary education.” Having soon received the force of law, it provided for the introduction, starting from the 1930-1931 school year in the USSR, of universal compulsory education for children aged 8-10 years for at least four years of primary school. In this regard, work on training teaching staff was launched. Universal primary education was introduced in the country within three years. Already on September 5, 1931, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in its resolution “On Primary and Secondary Schools,” indicated the need for the immediate organization of work on the Marxist revision of programs with a precisely defined range of necessary information. With this resolution, preparations began for the transition to universal seven-year education, which was introduced in cities by the end of the 30s.
Educational classes. Photo from 1928
Despite all the difficulties and costs, the broad masses of the people in the period of the 20s and 30s managed to become familiar with the book and the printed word. In fairness, it should be noted that the state has done a lot of work to creation of national schools on the former outskirts of the Russian Empire. Many peoples did not even have their own written language. In many republics, an alphabet was created based on the Cyrillic alphabet, in particular, it was acquired by the peoples of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the Far North. It is also important to note that teaching in national areas was conducted in the native language.
Specialists were required to build plants and factories and manage production. However, the Bolsheviks did not have their own personnel, so in the first decade after the revolution the Bolsheviks used the so-called “bourgeois specialists” or “specialists”.
Meanwhile, already in the second half of the 20s. is being created in the country higher education system.For the first time, universities were created in Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and all the republics of Central Asia. The Institute of the Peoples of the North, unique for that time, was opened in Leningrad, which gave a start to science and literature to many representatives of the northern peoples of the USSR. Those from the working classes, Red Army soldiers who had served in active military service, had a preferential right to enter new universities. It was then that the first generation of the Soviet intelligentsia was born.
During the first five-year plans, scientific schools and personnel were formed in the country, and a wide network of research institutes was created, predominantly of an applied nature.
In those areas of cultural construction where there was a need to train specialists with technical knowledge and certain production skills, undoubted progress was achieved. The higher school performed the important function of a personnel forge. The scientific and technical intelligentsia was necessary for the regime to solve the problems of industrialization and defense of the country.
The Bolsheviks managed to win over to their side the founder of aircraft manufacturing N.E. Zhukovsky, the creator of geochemistry and biochemistry V.I. Vernadsky, chemist N.D. Zelinsky, biologist A.N. Bach, the father of astronautics K.E. Tsiolkovsky, physiologist I.P. Pavlov, test agronomist I.V. Michurin, plant growing specialist K.A. Timiryazev.
The October Revolution revived the cultural life of the country. Until the mid-1920s. in various branches of art there was a search for new forms. Triumphant in literature and art revolutionary avant-garde. Colorful festive processions, large-scale performances, exhibitions of avant-garde artists, constructivist architects, and futurist poetry evenings were a frequent occurrence at that time.
Cobblestone is the weapon of the proletariat. Sculptor I.D. Shadr
The proclamation of the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat gave rise to a new form of culture - proletkult. The country encouraged art studios, clubs, and theaters for working youth, designed to promote the development of amateur creativity of the proletariat.
Worker and collective farmer. Sculptor V.I. Mukhina
The favorite topic of Soviet cultural figures has become depiction of the revolution and the Civil War, usually in apologetic or romantic forms. This was clearly manifested in the literary works of I.E. Babel (“Cavalry”), A.S. Serafimovich (“Iron Stream”), M.A. Sholokhov (“Don Stories”, “Quiet Don”), D.A. Furmanov (“Chapaev”).
The worker and the Red Army soldier became the main characters of paintings, posters, and sculptures. 1920-1930s became the time of the birth of Soviet cinema. The films of S.M. have received worldwide recognition. Eisenstein "Battleship Potemkin" and "October". In 1931, the first sound film by N.V. was released on the screens of the country. Ekka "Path to Life". The films of G.N. enjoyed enormous success among viewers. and S.D. Vasiliev “Chapaev”, G. Alexandrov “Volga-Volga”, “Jolly Fellows”, etc.
Still from the film “Chapaev”
Still from the film “Jolly Guys”
Stills from the film "Volga-Volga"
However, gradually in the field of humanitarian knowledge, literature and artistic creativity began to be felt more and more clearly ideological press and dictatorship, which distorted and nullified the goals that the regime itself proclaimed.
Has been installed total censorship. The initial criteria for evaluating certain works of literature and art were their compliance with the requirements of revolutionary Marxism and the goals of Bolshevism. The principle of “socialist realism” became the ideological template. He demanded that works of art unconditionally criticize the pre-revolutionary order in Russia and life in capitalist countries, while unconditionally praising the Soviet order and chanting the merits of the Bolshevik Party and its leaders, showing the advantages of the Soviet social and state system. The monopoly on truth became the principle of the ruling regime's attitude towards the creative process.
At the same time, the same principle of socialist realism led to the fact that often truly gifted cultural figures were forced to create works of art that were undoubtedly talented in form, but deceitful in their content. Among them were writers and artists, directors and composers, playwrights and sculptors.
Moreover, this principle opened the way for numerous cultural artisans who produced low-quality, throwaway crafts that had nothing in common with real works of art.
In order to make it more convenient for the Bolshevik leadership to “shepherd” the creative intelligentsia, in the early 30s. Unions were created that united cultural workers according to their type of activity: Writers' Union, Composers' Union, Architects' Union, Theater Workers' Union etc. Membership in these unions was voluntary and compulsory.
These Unions strictly monitored the “ideological consistency” of their members. If their works did not fit the established templates, their authors were criticized or even expelled from the Union. This threatened the expelled person with the most serious consequences - he was deprived of the opportunity to publish his creations in the Soviet Union.
Such contradictory results were due to methods subordinated to the super task that formed the core of the cultural revolution - re-education of people on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, the creation of people with a new system of spiritual values, a new psychology and mentality, deeply integrated into the social system of the new system. Solving such a problem would make it possible to achieve the goals proclaimed by the regime, strengthen its position within the country, reveal the advantages of the new system and prove the need for social reconstruction on a global scale.
The monopoly of Marxist ideology, identified with scientific truth, was not only the leading principle of cultural construction: ideology was transformed in the hands of the Bolshevik leadership into a value in itself, into a kind of new religion militant atheism.This dangerous trend in the development of Soviet society was noticed by A. Toynbee, who wrote: “We see how Marxism is turning into an emotional and intellectual replacement of Orthodox Christianity with Marx instead of Moses, Lenin instead of the Messiah and collections of their works instead of the holy scriptures of this new atheistic church " To this it should be added that there was a certain transformation of the ideology itself, which was Marxist only in form. In fact, in the context of a struggle for power, she became the core of totalitarian ideology, with its characteristic cult of personality, leaderism, and absolute militant intolerance of any dissent. This ideology became not just an integral part of the culture of the new society - it permeated the entire culture, giving it a specific character. In the hands of the ruling regime, it turned into a powerful means of social engineering, which was far from humanitarian in nature.
Soviet poster
Results of the "cultural revolution" difficult to assess unambiguously. If we compare them with achievements in other areas of society, they look somewhat preferable, moreover, they can even be considered successful. Art, literature and education have become more accessible to the masses. This is an undeniable fact. However the Bolsheviks drove culture into a Procrustean bed of ideological demands, which sharply limited creative freedom. The most important achievements of world culture were cut off from the Soviet people.
The collapse of the market inevitably led to a strengthening of command and administrative principles in managing the national economy and an increase in bureaucracy. The dominance of the “bosses” has become the universal form of existence of the bureaucracy, and technocracy has become the core of its consciousness. Culture has become the handmaiden of politics.
4.5. USSR ON THE EVE AND DURING THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
4.5.1 International relations and Soviet foreign policy
In 1932, the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, led by A. Hitler, won the elections to the Reichstag. Soon its leader formed a new government, and then concentrated all state power in his hands. One of the most brutal dictatorships in the history of human civilization was established in Germany.
A. Hitler. Photograph from the 1930s.
The victory of Nazism in Germany was one of the decisive factors in international life in the 30s. XX century.
The Nazis proclaimed the destruction of “world communism” as the first goal of their foreign policy. To do this, they were going to organize a “crusade” against the Soviet Union. Preparing for an anti-Soviet campaign, the fascist Germany V 1936 concluded with Japan so-called Anti-Comintern Pact, which she joined a year later Italy. This is how a bloc of three aggressive states emerged, which bear the main blame for the preparation and outbreak of the Second World War.
The Nazis did not hide the ultimate goal of its foreign policy: the establishment of German dominance over the rest of the world. To substantiate their claims to world domination, they developed a racist theory, according to which the Germans should rule all humanity as representatives of the superior, Aryan race.
Already in the summer of 1933, the fascist rulers demanded the return of Germany to its former colonies in Africa, which she lost under the Treaty of Versailles. And soon they began openly violate the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Contrary to this agreement, the country had universal conscription introduced, and the multi-million dollar created the army entered the Rhineland bordering France, where she was prohibited from maintaining any military forces.
The victorious countries in the First World War turned a blind eye to these daring steps of the Nazis. Among the large Western European countries, the threat of fascist aggression loomed most over France, which predetermined its certain rapprochement with the Soviet Union. In 1934, these two countries jointly proposed that all European states, including Germany, sign an agreement on collective resistance to possible aggression. However, this idea was not supported by England and Poland, which did not allow putting a barrier on the way to the Second World War.
Under the current conditions, the Soviet leadership in 1935 concluded triple treaty of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia. In accordance with this treaty, in the event of aggression, the USSR was obliged to provide armed assistance to the Czechoslovak Republic, but only on the condition that France would provide such assistance, and Czechoslovakia itself would organize armed resistance to the aggressor country.
Pre-storm rumbles of the approaching new world war thundered in different parts of the globe in the mid-30s.
A. Hitler and B. Mussolini. Photograph from the 1930s.
Autumn 1935 Italy, where the fascist dictator B. Mussolini ruled, occupied Ethiopia. In 1936 Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War, on the side of the pro-fascist General B. Franco. England, France and the USA proclaimed a policy of non-interference in the affairs of Spain, which deprived the legitimate republican government of this country of the opportunity to receive the necessary economic and military support from them. The Soviet Union acted differently. He provided all possible assistance to the Republicans with food, military equipment, weapons and military personnel. But, despite the heroic resistance of the Republican army, the Francoists won, after which a fascist dictatorship was also established in Spain.
Summer 1937 Japan continued started in 1931 takeover of China. Already at the end of 1938, the Japanese managed to occupy the eastern part of the country, where the main industrial centers and the most important railway lines of China were located.
Spring 1938 German troops occupied Austria, turning the country into the German Reich. The USSR invited other countries of the world to immediately convene an international conference to take effective measures against fascist aggression. However, the disappearance of the Austrian state from the map of Europe went unnoticed by the League of Nations.
Entry of Nazi troops into Austria. Photo from 1938
The Nazis chose as their second victim Czechoslovakia. As a pretext for their claims to the territory of this country, the fascists used the fact that in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia the majority of the population were Germans. Under pressure from A. Hitler, England and France presented an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia to return the Sudetenland to the Germans. In their note, they promised the Czechoslovak leadership international guarantees of independence if German territorial claims were satisfied. In September 1938, to discuss this problem an international conference took place in Munich. Delegations from four countries took part in it: Germany, Italy, England and France. Czechoslovakia, whose fate was being decided, was not even invited to the meeting.
Deciding to “pacify the aggressor” and avert the threat from their own countries, the leaders of England and France agreed to annex the Sudetenland to Germany. At the same time, Czechoslovakia lost not only a large part of its territory, it lost its main industrial potential and the main fortified areas along the German border. US leaders who did not participate in the Munich Agreement approved this decision.
However, receiving the Sudetenland only whetted A. Hitler's appetite. Returning to Berlin after the conference, the Fuhrer and German Foreign Minister J. Ribbentrop exchanged views on its participants and results. Describing the Prime Minister of England N. Chamberlain, I. Ribbentrop cynically said: “Today this old man signed the death warrant of the British Empire, giving us the right to put under it the date of its execution.” The Prime Minister of England in the 1940s gave an exceptionally apt assessment of the Munich Conference in his memoirs. W. Churchill. “In Munich,” he wrote, “We had to choose between shame and war. We chose shame and got war.”
At the end of 1938, Nazi Germany sent its troops into the Sudetenland, and in March of the following year occupied all of Czechoslovakia.
In order to calm public opinion alarmed by these events, the ruling circles of England and France decided to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union. They started in the spring 1939 in Moscow. But since Western countries offered options for an agreement under which they did not undertake any specific obligations in the event of war with Germany, the Moscow negotiations reached a dead end. In addition, the British and French delegations did not have the authority to sign any official documents.
V.M. Molotov. Photography of the first half of the 20th century
Under such conditions, the Soviet leadership accepted A. Hitler’s proposal to sign a non-aggression pact. German Foreign Minister J. Ribbentrop urgently flew to Moscow. August 23, 1939 he and the head of the Soviet government and People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V.M. Molotov signed non-aggression agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany for a period of 10 years, which went down in history under the name "Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact".
V.M. Molotov and I. Ribbentrop. Photo from 1939
Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Footage from the chronicle.
The conclusion of the Soviet-German pact led to the cessation of all diplomatic contacts between England, France and the USSR, the recall of the British and French delegations from Moscow, although the leadership of our country proposed to continue negotiations.
Some regard it as forced but necessary step Soviet leadership. Others define the pact as gross foreign policy mistake I.V. Stalin and his inner circle. Still others claim that this document was betrayal of the interests of our country. Many foreign and domestic authors argue that the Soviet-German Pact allowed A. Hitler to soon attack Poland and, thereby, start the Second World War.
In our opinion, in the specific conditions of the late 30s. the signing of a non-aggression pact with Germany was a legitimate step on the part of the Soviet leadership. The agreement itself, from a legal point of view, did not go beyond the agreements adopted at that time and did not violate domestic legislation and international obligations of the Soviet Union.
Regarding the claim that the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact paved the way for the Nazis to attack Poland and start World War II, some important circumstances should not be overlooked. Namely, similar non-aggression pacts were signed by Germany even earlier with a number of European countries, including England, France and Poland. A reasonable question arises as to why it was the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, and not other similar documents, that gave Hitler a free hand. And one more important circumstance: from the archives it became known that the German leadership made its decision to attack Poland on April 3, 1939, that is, several months before the signing of the Soviet-German Pact.
In this case, the fault of the Soviet rulers was different. Attached to the non-aggression pact were secret protocols. And if the pact itself was legal and, therefore, justified, then the protocols were illegal and immoral. In accordance with these documents Germany and the Soviet Union divided Europe into zones of influence. Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia and Finland fell into the sphere of the USSR. Into the sphere of influence Nazi Germany included the rest of Europe.
These documents really made it easier for A. Hitler to further aggressively seize neighboring countries, and therefore drag humanity into a new world war. Having taken the path of dividing the “booty” with the fascist predator, I.V. Stalin began to communicate in the language of ultimatums and threats with neighboring states, especially with small countries.
Soviet border guards at the parade. Photograph from the 1930s.
In the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union, based on the division of spheres of influence with Germany, achieved establishment of Soviet power in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the subsequent “voluntary” entry of these countries into the USSR. In all respects it was an unwise move. If previously the population of the Baltic states condemned the pro-German policies of their rulers, then after the deployment of Soviet troops they began to look at Germany as their potential liberator and savior.
Almost simultaneously with these events, in the summer of 1940, as a result of diplomatic pressure on Romania Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were included in the USSR. This act also had deeply negative consequences for our country. Royal Romania, which previously pursued a pro-British and pro-French policy during the Great Patriotic War, also found itself among the allies of Nazi Germany.
I.V. Stalin did not consider it shameful to use weapons in a dispute over the border with Finland. The Soviet leadership invited Finland to cede part of its territory to our country in exchange for a much larger piece of land in South Karelia. The motives for this proposal were the fact that on the Karelian Isthmus the Soviet-Finnish border passed only three dozen kilometers from Leningrad, and in the north it came too close to the Kirov Railway, which connects the center of our country with Murmansk - its only ice-free port in the Arctic. These motives had an undoubted reason. Moreover, the USSR offered twice the territory in exchange. However, the Finns refused such a “barter”, and both sides began to prepare for military action. Finland - defensive, the Soviet Union - offensive.
The active troops of the Red Army outnumbered the Finnish forces in number of personnel by 3 times, in the number of guns and mortars by 5 times, aircraft by 6 times and tanks by 35 times. With such overwhelming superiority of Soviet forces, it was impossible for Finland to avoid defeat. However Soviet-Finnish war turned out to be more difficult than expected in Moscow. Due to the inept actions of the Soviet commanders, during the 105 days of the war, Soviet troops lost only 127 thousand people killed and missing, while the Finns lost 48 thousand, that is, almost three times less. The halo of the Red Army has completely faded.
The Soviet-Finnish war came back to haunt our country in 1941: Finland, which had previously pursued a policy of neutrality, entered the war against the USSR on the side of Nazi Germany.
Thus, the imperial policy of I.V. Stalin and his entourage in the pre-war years multiplied the number of enemies of our country and undermined the already small prestige of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the international community.
The division of spheres of influence in Europe with the USSR gave Germany a free hand in implementing its aggressive plans and served as a prologue to the beginning Second World War.
At various times, Italy, Romania, Finland, Slovakia and Japan entered the war on the side of Germany, which were opposed by England, France, the USSR, the USA and other countries. In total, 72 countries participated in World War II to one degree or another, with a combined population of about 80 % all inhabitants of the globe. A total of 110 million people were put under arms during this war.
In addition to Europe, World War II engulfed vast areas of Asia, Africa and Oceania. The naval forces conducted combat operations in the waters of all four oceans of our planet: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic.
The starting date of World War II is September 1, 1939. On this day fascist Germany, in accordance with the pre-developed Weiss plan, attacked Poland. During the first week of the war, the Wehrmacht inflicted a number of crushing blows on the Polish army. Poland turned to England and France for help. Two days later, they declared war on Germany, but did not take any real steps to help out Poland, which was in trouble, hoping that Germany, after the completion of the Polish campaign, would deliver its new blow not to Western Europe, but to the Soviet Union.
After the invasion of Poland by fascist troops, Germany began to put pressure on the Soviet government, insisting that the USSR enter the war against Poland. Under this pressure, but rather based on their imperial plans, the Stalinist leadership gave the order to the troops to cross the Soviet-Polish border, which was done by the Red Army September 17. The invasion of foreign territory was hidden behind a plausible goal - liberation of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, included in Poland after the Soviet-Polish War of 1920. But if the goal was plausible, then the method of achieving it was very unseemly. The “liberation” campaign of the Red Army was actually a stab in the back for Poland. And it was carried out in violation of the Soviet-Polish non-aggression treaty, signed in 1932 and extended in 1937. Thus, the Soviet Union practically became an ally of the Nazi aggressors.
On September 28, the command of the Warsaw garrison, having exhausted all the forces and means to defend the city, was forced to sign an act of surrender. Under attack from the west and east Poland as a state ceased to exist. The fascist and Soviet troops celebrated this “success” with a joint parade in Brest-Litovsk.
At the same time, the Soviet leadership took another shameful step. On the day of the surrender of Warsaw, September 28, 1939, V.M. Molotov and I. Ribbentrop signed Soviet-German Treaty “On Friendship and Border”. The leaders of the USSR, who had once organized many years of violent anti-fascist propaganda, now publicly declared their friendship with the aggressor country that had unleashed a new world war. In the secret annexes to the new treaty the spheres of influence of the Soviet Union and Germany were clarified. Territory of Lithuania Now was included in the zone of influence of the USSR in exchange for the Lublin and part of the Warsaw voivodeship, which, in a change to the previous division, went to the sphere of influence of Nazi Germany.
V.M. Molotov and A. Hitler. Photo 1940
From the moment Germany attacked Poland until the spring of 1940, England and France, on the one hand, and Germany, on the other, essentially did not conduct combat operations on the Western Front. French and English soldiers and officers mainly played football and volleyball and visited entertainment venues. That is why this period of World War II went down in history as "strange war".
In September and October 1939, Hitler publicly stated more than once that he did not intend to fight with Western countries, that the border with France was inviolable, and that the Germans only expected from England the return of former German colonies.
In reality, with these assurances the Fuhrer only lulled the vigilance of his opponents. Already at the end of September 1939, he gave a directive to immediately begin preparing a major strategic offensive in the west. In the secret documents prepared, the Wehrmacht was given the task of achieving victory over these countries during one lightning campaign.
In April 1940, fascist German troops occupied Denmark and Norway, and then, in May of the same year, bypassing the famous French defensive Maginot Line, through the territory of Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, they unleashed a powerful blow on the Anglo-French army. It took Germany less than four weeks to defeat the main forces of France and England.
On June 14, 1940, the Germans occupied Paris, and on June 22 France signed an armistice agreement, which effectively meant its surrender. This procedure was presented in a humiliating manner for the French. It took place in the Compiègne forest, in the same place and in the same saloon car delivered by the Germans from the museum, in which in 1918 the French Marshal F. Foch accepted the surrender of Germany.
Hitler with his comrades in Paris. Photo from 1940
Under the terms of the armistice, France was divided into two zones. The most developed and rich northern regions of the country were subject to German occupation. The French armed forces were demobilized and disbanded.
These days, the British expeditionary forces, having suffered defeat and abandoned their military equipment, evacuated through the port of Dunkirk to their home islands. Only its island position saved ancient Albion from complete destruction. The defeat of France and England in 1940 was the result of their policy of connivance with Nazi Germany.
In the fall of 1940, the flames of World War II spread to the Balkan Peninsula. On September 29, the troops of fascist Italy from the territory of Albania, captured by the Italians back in 1939, invaded Greece. Its army and people - the descendants of the legendary and proud Hellenes - offered heroic resistance to the invaders. A few months later, on April 6, 1941, Nazi and Hungarian troops attacked Yugoslavia. A week later they occupied its capital - the city of Be