“Problems of Agrarian Policy in the U.S.S.R.,” Speech by Josef Stalin to a conference of Marxist students, December 27, 1929.
The solution lies in enlarging the agricultural units . . . and in changing the agricultural base of our national economy. . . the Socialist way, which is to set up collective farms and state farms which leads to the joining together of the small peasant farms into large collective farms, technically and scientifically equipped, and to the squeezing out of the capitalist elements from agriculture. . . . Now we are able to carry on a determined offensive against the kulaks [private land owners], to break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class and substitute for their output the output of the collective farms and state farms.
Collective farm propaganda. Soviet reporters setting up the district newspaper 'Collective Farmer' in the fields of the Lenin collective farm in Zhazhkovo District, in the Ukraine, USSR, on 18 August 1933.
The Land of Soviets, a school textbook published in the U.S.S.R in the early 1940s.
The radical step forward by the majority of the peasantry towards a collective way of life was taking place against the backdrop of a bitter struggle between Soviet power and the kulaks. The [kulaks] stooped to all possible means to wreck the collectivization campaign. They murdered collective farm activists and Party and government officials sent to the villages to help the peasants; they set fire to collective farm buildings; they poisoned the cattle and destroyed farm machinery. . . . The Soviets had the right to banish them from their villages. . . . The exploiter class—the rural bourgeoisie—was finally abolished. . .
Miron Dolot, Ukrainian (Kulak) farmer, from his memoir Execution by Hunger, 1987.
To safeguard the 1932 crop against the starving farmers, the Party and government passed several strict laws. One of the cruelest laws was enacted on August 7, 1932. This law declared that all collective farm and cooperative property such as the crops in the fields, livestock, and so forth were to be considered as state-owned. The penalties for theft were execution by firing squad, and confiscation of all property of the guilty one. There could be no amnesty for these so-called felons.
Letter from Soviet economist Igor Feigin to to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, industry commissioner and close friend of Stalin's; this document is among the first detailed descriptions of the collectivization and its results in Siberia, April 9, 1932.
I'm writing you from Novosibirsk. I have driven around several collective farms [kolkhozes] and consider it necessary to inform you about a few items. I was in various kolkhozes--not productive and relatively unproductive ones, but everywhere there was only one sight--that of a huge shortage of seed, famine, and extreme emaciation of livestock. In the kolkhozes which I observed I attempted to learn how much the livestock had diminished in comparison with the years 1927-28. It turns out that kolkhoz Ziuzia has 507 milk cows at present while there were 2,000 in '28; kolkhoz Ust'-Tandovskii collectively and individually has 203 head, earlier they had more than 600; kolkhoz Kruglo-Ozernyi at present has 418 head of beef cattle and 50 held by kolkhozniks, in 1928 there were 1,800 head; kolkhoz Goldoba collectively and individually has 275 head, in 1929 there were 1,000 plus head, this kolkhoz now has 350 sheep, in 1929 there were 1500. Approximately the same correlations were found also in the kolkhozes Ol'gino and Novo-Spasski. ...
Upon arriving in Moscow, I will try to see Stalin and inform him, or if he cannot spare the time, I will write him a letter. ... But in order for him to see beyond everyone, one must, with absolute objectivity, relate to him those facts which are based on reality.
"A Collective Farm Holiday," by Sergei Gerasimov, 1937.