The Crisis in the Party, March–July 1930

Abstract

In declaring a halt to the collectivisation drive, Stalin firmly placed the blame for previous excesses on local officials. In his initial article of March 2 he condemned ‘tendencies in the ranks of our party’ manifested by ‘certain of our comrades’, and confined his criticisms of party organisations to ‘certain districts’ in the remote Northern region and in Turkestan (see p. 269 above). The central committee resolution of March 14 condemned the behaviour of ‘a number of districts’, making no mention of regional or even okrug officials (see p. 273 above). At this time, the authorities believed that only small numbers of peasants would leave the kolkhozy, exclusively in the grain-deficit regions. With the departure of millions of peasants from the kolkhozy in the second half of March, this limited attribution of error became utterly unconvincing. In his ‘Answers to Collective Farmer Comrades’ of April 3 Stalin widened his criticisms to the Moscow and Central Black-Earth regions and to the Transcaucasus, though significantly still omitted the main grain-surplus zone.