In the late 1920s, the overwhelming majority (84%) of Russians were peasants, living within an agricultural system that was centuries old. One historian observed that it was not unusual to see a peasant or even his wife dragging a wooden plough “dating back to the time of the flood” across the fields. Four of five Russians lived in villages; three of four employed people worked in agriculture. Urban life was concentrated in small industrialized islands around Moscow, Leningrad, the Urals, and parts of the Ukraine and Azerbaidjan. In the great majority of provinces, 85% to 95% of the people lived in the countryside. People lived in tiny, isolated hamlets with an average size of 200 people, thirty to forty households. And most of these settlements, in the words of the rural historian V. P. Danilov, “were truly God-forsaken places.”

The Revolution had done little to improve the productive basis of agriculture, and in many ways it had actually undermined it. In redistributing the gentry's estates, the peasants eliminated large holdings and revived many age-old features of peasant life, like the village commune. Peasants still relied mainly on manual labor with primitive tools. Few owned machines and most survived with minimal dependence on the market. Only a tiny fraction of the rural population was employed in factories (1.1%) or cottage industry (1.6%).