INTRODUCTION

Soviet-era policies created a revolution across sectors. In regard to agriculture, in 1917, after the collapse of the parliamentary regime that had governed the country since the February revolution, the Bolshevik successor government eliminated private property rights in land and supported communal farming. The Bolsheviks exchanged market prosperity and savings that might have resulted, had the Stolypin era reforms continued, for the principle of equity in an age of revolution.

From 1921 through the mid-1920s, some better-off peasants tried to hold on to their large farms. After the mid-1920s, this became more difficult. Macroeconomic conditions continued to generate risk, and tax policy, showing the Bolsheviks' preference for communal or collective agriculture, discouraged individual farm growth. By the end of the 1920s, that preference became a dictate in forced collectivization. Stalin's government sought to use savings from agriculture for industry; and to construct a factory-style labor force on huge mechanized agricultural complexes to improve production and overcome resistance of the peasants to state command.

The ideology of communism sought to raise the contribution of the peasantry from the small tax base it had constituted in tsarist Russia to the center of a new growth strategy, even if this required the highly coercive power of its army, which had succeeded in the civil war against the Whites. In this sense and in others, collectivization was a costly experiment. It was an act of hostility against the peasantry, with lasting negative impact on labor incentives.