Quotes About Collectivization

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

He runs something called the Celestial People's Republic, just north of here. What he tells his subjects is that we can turn Hell into Heaven by collectivizing it.

Within a year or two of Lenin's death he was clearly the party's boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

But the propaganda accompanying collectivization placed emphasis on the elimination of rural "exploiters," to divert attention from the fact that by far the most numerous victims of collectivization were ordinary peasants.

For example, new EU member Poland survived the communist era without collectivizing its small family farms. But now that they've joined the EU, collectivization is mandatory.

Breakneck industrialization, with priority for heavy industry, and forcible mass collectivization of the peasantry would be the twin hallmarks of the revolution from above that Stalin inaugurated in 1929.

The prescribed harsh emergency measures, reminiscent of War Communism's forcible grain requisitions, would predictably stimulate greater peasant recalcitrance the next time around, which in turn would stimulate and justify more radical measures culminating in the mass collectivization campaign on which Stalin's sights were set; and so it went in reality in 1928–29.

In effect, he amalgamated his earlier Russocentric, great-power gospel of socialism in one country with the programmatic content of high-speed industrialization and collectivization; yet he was flexible on certain points or adopted a moderate tone so as to allay fears concerning the possible implications of this program. A landmark in the arguing of the case was Stalin's principal address during the Central Committee plenum of July 4–12, 1928.

Famine, Robert Conquest estimates that eleven million people died of starvation in 1932–33 and that seven million of those deaths were in the Ukraine.18 Most other estimates vary between seven and fourteen million lives lost. This was a predictable consequence of Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.

The peasant rebellion against collectivization was the most serious episode in popular resistance experienced by the Soviet state after the Russian Civil War. In 1930, more than two million peasants took part in 13,754 mass disturbances. In 1929 and 1930, the OGPU recorded 22,887 terrorists acts aimed at local officials and peasant activists, more than 1,100 murders.

In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants.

Since they believed that this revolutionary transformation was in the long-term interests of the people, they were willing to force it through, even when, as with collectivization, a majority of the relevant population clearly opposed it. They explained popular resistance as a result of the backwardness, prejudices, and fears of the unenlightened masses.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes' forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.

When Marxism was put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed. Private property was eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized. The result? Tens of millions of people died. Hundreds of millions more were subject to oppression rivalling that still operative in North Korea,

I think that collectivization was an erroneous and unsuccessful measure and it was impossible to admit the error. To conceal the failure people had to be cured, by every means of terrorism, of the habit of thinking and judging for themselves, and forced to see what didn't exist, to assert the very opposite of what their eyes told them.

By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity.

In the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin, prosperous farmers were portrayed on propaganda posters as pigs—a dehumanization that in a rural setting clearly suggests slaughter. This was in the early 1930s, as the Soviet state tried to master the countryside and extract capital for crash industrialization. The peasants who had more land or livestock than others were the first to lose what they had.

Collectivization, when completed, brought starvation to much of the Soviet peasantry. Millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Kazakhstan, and Soviet Russia died horrible and humiliating deaths between 1930 and 1933. Before it was over, Soviet citizens were butchering corpses for human meat.

In the end, the number of people killed in the kulak operation was about the same as the number sent to the Gulag (378,326 and 389,070, respectively).

It is important to note that in spite of all the anarchist slogans the program of the Makhnovists in practice was not much different from that of later peasant revolutions (like the Chinese), namely: redistribution of the land, more or less voluntary collectivization, and expulsion of the imperialists (national independence).

Stalin gave Hitler his strength by driving the middle classes away from Communism with the nightmare of forced collectivization, famine, and terror against the technicians.

The very fact of our becoming aware of this profound ordering of things will enable human collectivization to pass beyond the enforced phase, where it now is, into the free phase: that in which (men having at last understood that they are inseparably joined elements of a converging Whole, and having learnt in consequence to love the preordained forces that unite them) a natural union of affinity and sympathy will supersede the forces of compulsion.

If then this tendency toward collectivization is a mutation there is no reason to suppose it is for the better. It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles—a tendency that can end only in extinction.

Since the start of collectivization, the necessities of life had almost completely disappeared from the shelves of the village store.