Hammer, Sickle, and Soil: The Soviet Drive to Collectivize Agriculture

During the reign of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), russia became the world’s first developing country—its elites better educated, its military more powerful. Within a century and a half, russia’s greatest composers, writers, and scientists would rival those of any country in the world. but by the time of nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), intellectual discontent had festered and swelled. marxism gained particular favor among russia’s intelligentsia because it seemed to promise a path to the highest stage of human flourishing in the face of an apparently unshakable autocratic government and without the gradual and spontaneous emergence of political, social, and economic institutions that gave such autonomy and power to society in Europe. In february 1917 crowds took to the streets in Petrograd, troops mutinied, and the tsar abdicated. In October the bolsheviks seized power in the name of worker and soldier councils (soviets). The world’s biggest experiment in social engineering had begun—and in the process the seeds for its ultimate destruction were being planted.

Hammer, Sickle, and Soil details the revolution in Soviet agriculture under Stalin. Collectivization was intended to bring to russia marx’s promised bright future of socialism, but the reality diverged radically from the optimistic and even joyful propaganda posters, which were for the most part created in the style and according to the philosophical tenets of socialist realism. This official artistic movement aimed to represent the achievements of Soviet socialism in the light of their future fulfillment—not life as it was then experienced but as it should be, were everything to go according to plan, or as it would be in the bright socialist future. Such propaganda posters were a ubiquitous feature of Soviet popular culture, both adornments of public spaces and didactic tools for raising consciousness and imparting knowledge about the world to Soviet citizens. This book contains a wealth of these posters—all from the hoover Archives—illustrating the spectacle of Stalin’s agricultural revolution.

Collectivization removed from the Soviet countryside a large proportion of competent and hardworking farmers. ultimately it was a disaster for the uSSr, which from the late 1950s systematically imported grain from the West. This volume tells that story in heartbreaking detail.

COVER POSTER

Hoover Institution Library & Archive

COVER DESIGNER

Jennifer Navarrette

Detail of Let us expand socialist competition and shock work, see page 77.

Detail of Vigilantly protect the socialist harvest, see page 74.

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 680

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First printing 2017

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Designed by Jennifer Navarrette, with additional design and production assistance by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services, Oakland, California.

Printed and bound by Friesens Corporation in Canada.

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ISBN 978-0-8179-2064-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8179-2066-1 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-0-8179-2067-8 (Mobipocket)

ISBN 978-0-8179-2068-5 (PDF)

To Christine, Anna, Zoe, and Jeremiah, hoping for a better world

Detail of Collective farm women, see page 98.

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1Inching toward Armageddon, 1928–1929

MAP 1

Major grain-producing areas in the USSR

Chapter 2Apocalypse Now, 1930–1931

MAP 2

Areas of universal collectivization and state farms

Chapter 3Demographic Catastrophe, 1932–1933

MAP 3

Areas most sharply affected by famine, 1932–1933

Chapter 4A Broken People, 1934–

Conclusion

Chronology of Events

Notes

Glossary

Further Reading

Index

Detail of Join the collective farm, see page 43.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.Dubinushka. The song, 1919

2.The land is the common and equal property of all people, 1917–24?

3.Petr and Vasilii, 1919

4.The revenge of the kulak, 1931

5.Give bread to the revolution!, 1920

6.The benefits of cooperation, 1919

7.In the collective farm, build a collective lifestyle, 1931

8.Long live May 1, 1929

9.Build a new life in the collective farm, 1930

10."Strengthen the smychka of town and country!," 1929

11.Sow high-yield seeds and obtain a big harvest, 1930

12.We will ensure the delivery of grain to the state, 1920–28?

13.Let us create indivisible funds for the acquisition of tractors, 1930

14.Encounter with a combine, 1931

15.Peasant women! Let’s increase the harvest!, 1930

16.Let’s organize a spirited sowing campaign, 1930

17.Come, comrade, join us in the collective farm!, 1930

18.A new power is rising!, 1930

19.Join the collective farm, 1930

20.Soviets, support the collective farm movement, 1930

21.100% of rural Komsomol members into the collective farm, 1932

22.Peasant women, join the collective farm!, 1930

23.Who is the first in the collective labor?, 1928–32?

24.A parable of fairness, 1920

25.Comrade, prepare in the Bolshevik manner for strenuous sowing! 1930

26.Conscientious peasants contrasted with a conniving, lazy kulak, 1931

27.We will fulfill the grain harvesting fully and on time, 1929

28.Summer daycare helps raise crop yields!, 1929

29.Every collective farmer, every brigade, every MTS must know the plan, 1931

30.MTS—organizers of collective farm production, 1930

31.Join the ranks of the shock worker brigades, 1931

32.Free working hands of the collective farms—to industry, 1931

33.At the grain delivery station, 1930

34.Let us fulfill the decree of the government on the agricultural tax, 1932

35.We will fulfill the plan for 43 million hectares of winter sowing, 1931

36.Vigilantly protect the socialist harvest, 1936

37.We pledge in 1935 to produce a great harvest, 1936

38.We are entering into the ‘Red List’ Comrade ___, 1931

39.The collective farm at work, 1930

40.Grain is our strength, 1931

41.Comrade, vigilance at all times, 1933

42.Strike the kulak, who agitates for reduced sowing, 1930

43.For good work, prizes; for inferior, punishment, 1930

44.Muslim peasants joining the collective farm, 1939–40?

45.We will organize socialized nourishment in the fields, 1932

46.An energetic gathering of the Bolshevik harvest, 1934

47.You will double and triple your productivity, 1930

48.We were a country of the wooden plow, 1934

49.Only collective farm life has transformed labor into a point of honor, 1936

50.Collective farm women, organize daycare, 1931

51.The socialization of agriculture, 1930

52.Daycare in the collective farm, 1917–30

53.In the morning, one glances into the field, 1929

54.Widen the front of collective farm trade, 1932

55.We will kick the kulaks out of the collective farms, 1930

56.Collective farm woman, join the ranks of the shock work brigades, 1931

57.Forward to universal collectivization of the USSR, 1929–32?

58.Collective farmer! You must complete your work tasks with military precision, 1944

59.Collective farm, build up a fund of high-yield seeds, 1930

60.Down with moonshine!, 1930–40?

61.Are you ready for the spring planting campaign?, 1932

62."Raise the banner of the productive smychka of workers and peasants!," 1930

63.The sacred wooden plow contrasted with mechanization, 1930

64.The timely repair of harvesting machines and implements, 1932

65.To advanced collective farms—thank you from the front, 1944

Detail of Let us create indivisible funds, see page 31.

Detail of Down with moonshine!, see page 116.

FOREWORD

It is a tremendous pleasure for the Hoover Institution to support the publication of Professor Jonathan Daly’s illustrated history of the collectivization of agriculture in Soviet Russia. Not only does Hammer, Sickle, and Soil narrate what arguably was one of the most significant—and devastating—policies put forward during Stalin’s rule in Russia, but it is thoughtfully designed to incorporate more than sixty images from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives’ world-renowned collection of Soviet posters—posters that are critical to illuminating the ideology of one of the world’s cruelest authoritarian regimes as it enforced large-scale agricultural reform upon its citizens. The wide gap between the poster images of young worker-heroes behind tractor wheels or bringing in idyllic harvests and the reality of the brutal experience of Russian peasants under Stalin’s collectivization tells a crucial story in Soviet Russia’s history. Professor Daly’s work represents a substantial step toward our scholarly understanding of Soviet collectivization and the role it played in the demise of the Soviet socialist experiment.

Professor Daly’s work is the product not only of research in Hoover’s vast Russian holdings—generally considered to be the most significant outside of Russia itself—but also of his participation in Hoover’s annual Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes. For more than a decade, this workshop has gathered students and faculty from across the globe to study, discuss, and present findings on the history, structure, and legacies of authoritarian states past and present. Although in its beginning the workshop focused on Soviet Russia, it has recently been expanded to include projects on China under Mao, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and other authoritarian states. The study of Soviet Russia, however, remains crucial to research in the Hoover reading room and to the workshop; the Russian collections at Hoover have proved critical to the works of such well-regarded historians as Robert Conquest, Stephen Kotkin, Norman Naimark, and Robert Service. Hoover is pleased to support the work of both established luminaries in the field and young scholars as they conduct vigorous, meaningful research that furthers our understanding of the history of human action.

In terms of the historical record, it seems most appropriate for the Hoover Library & Archives to support a project on the history of famine in Russia. Our founder and namesake, Herbert Hoover, building on the masterful relief organizing he executed for Belgium in World War I, led the American Relief Administration (ARA) in a massive effort to feed the Russian peasants during the horrific famine of 1921–23. As Professor Daly notes in his introduction to Hammer, Sickle, and Soil, without the assistance of the ARA, millions more than the five million Russians who are estimated to have died would have perished from starvation and disease during the famine. In all, the ARA distributed more than $60 million worth of food and medical supplies from Europe and the United States to the devastated Russian countryside. The atrocities and starvation suffered by civilians in the World War I and postwar era inspired Hoover in 1919 to build a repository of records, photographs, documents, maps, and ephemera where scholars from around the world could gather to study war, revolution, and peace, yielding research that would lead to a more peaceful world. The Hoover Library & Archives continue to honor the founder’s mission by collecting, preserving, describing, and making available to the public the world’s most important materials on social, political, and economic change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Hoover’s collection of more than three thousand Soviet posters, featured in Hammer, Sickle, and Soil, is one of the best-known of such poster collections in the world and is frequently consulted as a source for the study of art, political propaganda, graphic design, typography, and the history of Russian socialist ideology. As art, the posters represent the Soviet Central Committee’s desire to do away with traditional caricaturist Russian images and create a new, bold, proletarian art—one that would often be rendered by well-known avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Demyan Bedny, Alexander Rodchenko, and El Lissitsky. Embracing bold experiments in text, font, color, and geometry, the Central Committee printed millions of posters that were displayed in all public areas: on trains, in streets, on fences, in factories, offices, cafeterias, and schools. The messages conveyed by the posters addressed literacy and hygiene campaigns, economic development, political indoctrination, social change, and political education. The posters designed to promote agricultural collectivization, however, are among the rarest and most interesting subsets of the canon of Soviet posters.

As ephemera—but particularly as ephemera posted in impoverished, starving regions—the posters often disappeared into dustbins, fireplaces, or rubble, making them rare artifacts. The collectivization posters also represent one of Stalinist Russia’s most desperate attempts to gain control of public discourse in regions largely hostile to urban bureaucrats who arrived in the countryside to carry out national policy and law.