Soviet collectivization and dekulakization

Soviet collectivization and dekulakization are portrayed as a state campaign to remake the countryside in service of rapid industrialization—and as a policy whose coercive simplifications helped deepen the crisis it was meant to solve. The drive depended on removing farmers labeled enemies, imposing new agricultural arrangements, and extracting more grain even as production faltered; its consequences reached from slaughtered livestock to mass starvation.

Purpose and Agricultural Plan

The campaign is linked to the First Five-Year Plan, launched in 1928. As workers in the cities built power stations, steel mills, and heavy-machinery plants, the grain-producing regions were expected to meet rising urban demand for bread through a sharp increase in agricultural production. In the book’s account, the countryside was assigned a central role in a national transformation whose industrial ambitions depended on a reliable food supply.

That expectation was not matched by the resources or cooperation available in the fields. The state sought to redirect farming through collectivization, but the peasants regarded the new approaches with resentment and suspicion. Tractors, intended to usher in modern agriculture, were in short supply. The plan’s demand for increased output therefore collided with a rural population distrustful of the changes and a lack of the machinery meant to make them work.

Dekulakization and Coercion

To prepare for the campaign, the authorities deemed it necessary to exile a million kulaks, described as profiteers and enemies of the common good. The book stresses the contradiction in that justification: those removed also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. Dekulakization thus deprived agricultural districts of experienced producers at the moment the state was demanding that they produce more.

The narrative places this removal within a broader meditation on exile. On the hotel roof, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov reflects that Russia had developed the practice of banishing people within their own country, rather than simply expelling them abroad. In the history of exile he recounts, domestic banishment prevents the exiled person from beginning anew elsewhere and can sharpen attention to the country and city kept just out of reach. This reflection gives the campaign’s mass expulsions a significance beyond administrative population movement: removal itself becomes an instrument of punishment and control.

Resistance and the Collapse in Output

Resistance took destructive forms. In a conversation with Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, Mishka recalls that when mandatory collectivization was announced in 1930, half the peasants slaughtered their own livestock rather than surrender it to the cooperatives. He gives the scale as fourteen million head of cattle, left to the buzzards and flies. As he speaks, he lifts an untouched piece of veal on his fork, then gently returns it to the plate as if paying respect to the animal. The small gesture makes the reported loss immediate: livestock has become both a statistic of resistance and the remains of a meal.

Other pressures compounded the opposition. Uncooperative weather contributed to a collapse in agricultural output, while shortages of tractors further weakened the state’s promise of a mechanized future. Yet the imperative to feed the cities did not recede when the harvest fell. Instead, quotas and requisitions increased and were enforced at gunpoint. The system demanded greater deliveries from a countryside already deprived of capable farmers, short of equipment, resistant to imposed methods, and suffering poor conditions.

Famine and Narrative Significance

The account traces the combined pressures toward severe consequences in 1932: widespread hardship in the agricultural provinces of old Russia and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine. The famine is not presented as an isolated accident of weather. It follows from the collision between ambitious production targets, the removal of skilled farmers, rural resistance, inadequate machinery, declining harvests, and coercive extraction that intensified as output fell.

The campaign also belongs to a recurring pattern in the book: institutions convert complicated human circumstances into categories, targets, and enforceable procedures, then treat the resulting figures as commands. Here, the state’s demand for grain remains fixed even when the conditions required to produce it deteriorate. Mishka’s account of the cattle, and his anguished question about a nation’s willingness to destroy its own inheritance, shifts attention from official necessity to the human and material cost of the policy. Collectivization and dekulakization emerge as both an agricultural reorganization and a stark instance of progress pursued through coercion and destruction.