Success & Failures of Collectivisation
- Created by: Niamh McMullan
- Created on: 15-04-13 19:15
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- The Success/ Failures of Collectivisation
- Ways in which it was economically successful for the government
- State procurement of grain always happened even at the toughest of times as the controlled farms
- Used collected grain to export & use this money to import machinery to industrialise
- Gains more workers for industry in towns by making life so uncomfortable for peasants they move
- Mechanisation of farms meant they could become more efficient so produce more
- It enabled Stalin's industrialisation programme to continue even throughout the 1930s
- Tractor production increased
- Supplied food for towns in urban areas so peasants became more skilled workers & would therefore work better & harder
- Ways in which it was an economic failure
- The USSR did not get as much foreign money for its grain as it had hoped because the Great Depression had forced up world grain prices
- Peasants withheld grain
- Grain & animal production never returned to 1928 levels until the 30's
- Agriculture still remained, on the whole, poor in relation to the Soviet economy - farming was still inefficient, unproductive & had low levels of mechanisation
- Peasants still lacked the incentive to work hard - they worked much harder on smaller private plots of land
- Collectivisation left some of the worst farmers
- Eventually private plots of land produced about 1/3 of all markets food in the USSR, even though they only made up about 4% of cultivated land
- The Human cost
- Lives lost through deportation, dekulakisation etc.
- The famine of 1932 partly caused by the government's actions (continuing to requisition grain despite the famine) & no aid sent to peasants as they could not admit it was their fault
- Destroying society: towns, villages, ways of life
- People destroyed their own homes, crops, animals etc rather than hand it over to the collective
- Many of the most skilled & successful farmers were killed by famine/ dekulakisation
- Although internal passports were introduced 1932 restricting movement, millions of youth left the countryside for towns = serious population imbalance in rural areas
- Many peasants were hostile twoards the regime now - resulting in the welcoming of the German invasion 1941
- Ways in which it was successful for the government
- Increases party control in rural areas - controlled MTS
- Gets rid of Bukharin & right wing opposition
- Gains control over peasants
- Political advantage - propaganda
- Ensured that party members always had food
- It moved the USSR further along the road towards Stalin's view of Socialism - class differences in countryside were abolished by dekulakisation - Apart from the existence of small private plots, any remains of capitalism, based on private enterprise, had been destroyed - The threat to Marxist ideology is gone
- Communist image benefitted as peasants saw that they brought education & child care etc - propaganda
- Ways in which it was economically successful for the government
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