What Was The Impact Of Collectivization On Russia

Collectivisation caused a lot of suffering in the countryside and had devastating effects for people who worked on collective farms, with the amount of resources that the state was demanding during the famine it becomes clear that they did not care for agronomists living conditions. A.Nove, Source 4, clearly shows that the peak amount of cattle was 70.5 million in 1968 and that sharply fell to 38.4 by 1933 before recovering, giving weight to the argument because clearly people where struggling to keep up with Stalin’s grain demand and had to supplement their needs through over means. Moreover, weight is given because A. Nove is a modern historian gathering information on the total output of Soviet Russia for his book because he would want this
Therefore, collectivisation had a negative impact on Russian rural life as the total output by the agronomists dropped until well after they had been sent to the collective farms. This can be seen by the statistics given by Nove as all types of livestock decreased because of how people where eating them to defy Collectivisation and get enough food to live on during the famine. Grain procurement continued to stay at around 60 million tons to help the growing industrialisation of places like Magnitogorsk. Taking this into account, collectivisation had a massive negative short term impact on rural life as Stalin only saw it as bringing the countryside to heel and making sure that ‘it was the countryside, not the towns, which went hungry if the harvest was bad’ as shown by source 7.It was more about collecting what they needed from the farmers rather than improving their standard of
This can be seen as in the letters to Our Village the peasant newspaper, source 6, because Pyotr Gorky compares it to ‘Eternal slavery’ showing the amount of control that the government had over people when they went to these collectives. However, the issue with this source is that the letters were not actually published meaning that they could just be extreme letters from people who were not happy with the amount of grain required. This removes the weight from the event but the fact that this was a peasant’s newspaper makes it so that it could be that they were facing pressure from the communists to not release these letters because of the amount of control they had. This adds a significant amount of weight to argument because they were written by people who had little reason to lie because they knew what would happen if the communists found out about what they had written meaning that it could have been stopped from being printed for their own protection by Our Village. Support for this is found by Graeme in source 5, ‘the establishment of party control over the peasants and the countryside, collectivisation was successful.’ This adds weight to the argument for total control due to how they essentially made peasants