The storms of revolutionary bosoms have calmed down.
The Soviet mishmash was covered with mud.
And got out
from behind the RSFSR
murlo
tradesman.
From all the immense Russian fields, from the first day of Soviet birth
they flocked, hastily changed feathers, and sat down in all institutions.
(V. Mayakovsky. About rubbish)
The beginning and end of the peasant civilization. Today is the fifth article on the topic of the end of the peasant civilization. I really hope that after reading the previous article, those of you, dear readers of VO, who would like to comment on this material today, found the strength and time to read the report of I. V. Stalin (I. V. Stalin's speech at the conference of agrarian Marxists " On the issues of agrarian policy in the USSR”, December 27, 1929), because it explains the role of the Soviet kulaks of the 1920s and the reason why it was impossible to touch them at that time. But since 1929, the situation both in the country and in the world has changed dramatically. In the United States, a crisis began, many farmers went bankrupt, and grain production fell sharply. There was a real possibility of exchanging "grain for factories", which undoubtedly put an end to the "kulaks" as a social stratum in the Soviet countryside. And this despite the fact that the kulaks of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet kulaks of the 1920s were very different. The pre-revolutionary ones are usurers. The Soviets are hard workers, but they make use of the hired labor of the poor. But they were also closer to capitalism, so it was impossible to put up with it further in a socialist country.
A situation arose that was somewhat very similar to that which took place in England during the era of fencing. It needed cloth, and traditional peasant tenants stood in his way. And they were destroyed! Our traditional peasant small-scale commodity system stood in the way of the industrialization of the country. And also had to be destroyed. The new machine civilization did not require a peasant to own the land. She didn't even need a user (as in the USSR)! What was needed was a hired worker on the land, who did not reason about what to sow - grain or potatoes, but would do what was ordered for a salary.
And it all began, as in England, only adjusted for the era. Although the methods were not very different. Then they were beaten, branded and hanged. In our country, famine came to the aid of the state, with which no one particularly fought in the early 30s, then the repressions of 1934-1941. If someone thinks that they suffered mainly from the military, the Chekists themselves, "old party members", "sabotage engineers", "poisoning doctors", "fascist spies" and others with them, he is cruelly mistaken. The RGVA calculated: 60% of the repressed are peasants who were exiled to the GULAG as a cheap slave force. So, my scientific advisor, Professor Medvedev, who worked in Moldova, back in Soviet times, proved with documents in his hands that after its annexation to the USSR, 10,000 householders were repressed there after its annexation to the USSR. more, but just no documents were found. That is, in relation to these people, a frank act of arbitrariness was committed. It is difficult to explain from the point of view of the slogans proclaimed in the USSR, but quite understandable from the economic point of view. The peasantry, which had become a brake on the country's economy, was annihilated with any "trump cards", if only to liquidate it.
And now let's turn to a very interesting book by N. Voznesensky, Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR. And let's start not with the text, but with a photocopy of its corner. "Withdrawn" - it says there, and only then my mother somehow managed to get it …
And in it there are numbers, many numbers showing why we defeated Germany, and the numbers are compared with percentages, sometimes with numbers, so it is impossible to find out anything exactly from it. But … you can still use some data from it. And here we read:
And now the modern data available to everyone today: the first five-year plan (1928-1932) was associated with the incredible pace of urbanization. The urban workforce increased by 12.5 million, of which 8.5 million were rural migrants. Nevertheless, the USSR reached a share of 50% of the urban population only in the early 1960s. And … again, let us recall Lenin and his words from the previous material: "A giant petty-bourgeois wave has risen …" Well, after all, it did not dissipate anywhere after the revolution and the Civil War, and the mass of peasants in the cities remained! When Mayakovsky wrote his poems "On Trash"? In 1920-1921. Here is that and it … And now we will continue our epigraph:
“The threads of the philistine revolution have entangled them.
The philistine life is more terrible than Wrangel.
Quicker
roll the heads of the canaries -
so that communism
was not beaten by canaries!"
You should think carefully about this paragraph … Look how much the sown area and gross grain production have increased in 22 years. For 37 million hectares and 3 billion poods. And now what is not in these lines, but what was in reality. Before collectivization, up to a THREE of the cultivated land lay … in the borderlands and was excluded from the crop rotation. And now this third has been plowed with tractors! But at the same time, grain production grew very insignificantly, not several times, and only on the basis of the extensive growth of collective farm plowing! Which clearly indicates that the collective farmers were not interested in working "for their uncle" and even worked on tractors carelessly. However, here I have already published a number of articles with materials from the Pravda newspaper about how badly the equipment on the collective farms was monitored and how badly it was repaired. And although there were shock tractor drivers, the bulk of the peasants did not work well!
And here is the data on the population of the USSR in 1940: 195,392,000 people. And how much grain was harvested is known. Well, who's good at math? Let's divide and find out how much grain was produced per capita. I got 37 pounds. And now let's compare: in 1913, 30, 3 poods of grain per capita were harvested in Russia. In the USA - 64, 3 pounds, in Argentina - 87, 4 pounds, in Canada - 121 pounds. Thus, in terms of grain harvest per capita, the United States was two times ahead of Tsarist Russia, Argentina - three times, and Canada - four times. Well, in the USSR, at the cost of colossal costs, tears and blood (and the fact that it was pouring, we can even learn from Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned, and his letters to Stalin are a very interesting source [1]), the yield became only slightly higher, than it was in tsarist times!
Was there a work front where they worked well? Yes, I was! And again, we look at the book of N. Voznesensky …
Only now, not all of these figures comrade. Voznesensky said. He did not give the figures that Comrade. Stalin named it at the XVII Congress of the CPSU (b). And in his reporting report he gave the following data: horses (1929 - 34, 0 million heads) - in 1933 - 16, 6 million; cattle (1929 - 68, 1 million heads) - in 1933 - 38, 6 million; sheep and goats (1929 - 147, 2 million heads) - in 1933 50, 6 million; pigs (1929 - 20, 9 million heads) - in 1933 - 12, 2 million. That is, people cut cattle into collectivization so much that the grave consequences of the mass slaughter were felt three years later. Yes, according to the book of Voznesensky, the number of livestock on collective farms was growing, but "my beast" was also bred in peasant farmsteads, where its massive growth was also observed. But for some reason he did not give these figures. Do you know why? So that it would not be seen that on collective farms, animal husbandry, like grain growing, developed "anyhow". But on the other hand, the peasants worked conscientiously on their personal subsidiary plots. They could not grow grain, but they raised cattle both for themselves and for sale for meat in the city! And there the rates were not much higher than those of the collective farms. That is, they cut it themselves, and then by 1940 they raised it!
That is, the goal of turning the peasants of Russia into hired agricultural workers in the 30s was generally achieved. In England, their number was reduced through "bloody laws", in our country through hunger, "freezing" (see Sholokhov's letters to Stalin) and the GULAG. The mass of peasants from the "immense Russian fields" migrated to the cities, where they brought their peasant morality, petty-bourgeois psychology and traditions of patriarchal culture. There was a petty-bourgeois village - the city became petty-bourgeois. The level of the urban subculture has dropped sharply. And for some reason, no one really thought about the consequences of these. They introduced universal primary education in 1930 and … everything is fine. As a result, before the war, there were only 77 people per 1000 people with a secondary and seven-year education. And six (only six!) People with the highest. In the Red Army, personnel hunger reverberated in 1941-1942. - on January 1, 1941, only 7% of the commanding staff of the army and navy had a higher military education, and only half had a secondary education. But education is not everything. It is important to understand that for the development of a certain consciousness and culture, the life of three generations is required, that is, from 60-75 to 90 years (it depends on which of the generations to count!) and did not think … Although the same Stalin in his reports at the congresses and said, while referring to Lenin, that it takes a lot of time to develop a proletarian consciousness. But I didn't really focus on this topic. Apparently, he believed that gradually it will develop in our country … Step by step!
Additional literature:
1. From the correspondence between M. A. Sholokhov and I. V. Stalin. April 4 - May 6, 1933
2. Stalin I. V. Report to the 17th Party Congress on the work of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) January 26, 1934 (Stalin I. V. Works. - T. 13. - M.: State Publishing House of Political Literature, 1951. S. 282-379)
3. "Jack the Eight American" - a story by Nikolai Smirnov, first published in 1930. See editions 1933, 1969, 2012, 2013.
