Conclusions

Abstract

The decision in the autumn of 1929 to embark on forcible collectivisation was shaped by two major preceding sets of events. First, the victory of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and its consolidation during the Civil War excluded the possibility of more than a limited development of capitalist agriculture in Soviet Russia. The major industries were transferred to public ownership within a year of the revolution, and the restoration of private ownership of industry was thereafter never seriously contemplated. Individual peasant agriculture remained, but no group of Bolsheviks at any time displayed any propensity to contemplate the re-emergence of large-scale entrepreneurial private farming, or even of well-to-do peasant farms which employed more than a very small number of agricultural labourers; and all Bolsheviks believed that in the long term collective forms of agriculture must predominate. In 1919 and 1920, the Bolshevik victory seemed also to imply that collective agriculture would predominate within a few years, and that in the transition period the market would be replaced by non-monetary product-exchange between the state sector and private agriculture.