From the Soviet English language magazine Socialism: Principles, Practice, Prospects, 1983.
The late twenties was a turbulent time for the Soviet village. The former foundations of peasant life which were built on private ownership and on individual labour, were breaking down. Rural workers learned from their own experience that their small farms would not permit them to overcome want and privation, even under the favourable conditions which the Soviet government was creating for the toiling peasantry. At the same time they saw how efficiently the collective farms managed their affairs.
In pursuing its agrarian policy the Communist Party gradually fostered in the peasantry an understanding of the advantages of collective labour and was guided in this by Lenin’s cooperative plan. The 15th Party Congress held in 1927 recommended the collective farm as the main form of the transition to large scale socialist production. Suffice it to say that it provided a suitable form of harmonizing the social and personal interests of the peasants.
By joining collective farms the peasants embarked upon a new, socialist path of development which secured them against ruin and kulak exploitation. By 1929 70,000 collective farms had been set up, comprising 2 million individual peasant farms, i.e., roughly eight per cent of the total. That year went down in the country’s history as the “year of the great change”; the collective farm movement swept the country.
Opportunists in the Party claimed that the peasants were not ready to accept socialism and collective forms of labour. Directly or indirectly they reflected the interests of the kulaks. The class struggle grew more acute in the village. The kulaks hid their grain when the state purchase teams came to the villages: they tried to hamper the supply of food to the population. This helped the toiling peasantry realize the class essence of the kulaks who were trying to undermine the foundations of the state of the working people. Eventually, the kulaks found themselves in isolation.
The state counted on providing the collective farms with various types of farm machinery. Even then, 35 per cent of all collective farms were provided with up to-date sowing-machines, 38 per cent with reapers and 29 per cent with threshers. A quarter of them had tractors. The advantages of collective farming were seen more clearly when this machinery was used; their crop areas and harvests were increased and the material status of their members was improved.
The tractor became the best advertisement for the collective farm in the village. Machine and tractor stations (MTS) were set up and down the country, Thanks to the use of modern machinery and the latest farming techniques the collective and individual peasant farms serviced by the MTS obtained higher crop yields than elsewhere which increased their production volume and income. The construction of tractor plants helped realize Lenin’s dream of giving the peasantry 100 thousand tractors. 27,000 tractors were used on Soviet fields in 1928 and over 100,000 in 1932.
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