Forced Collectivization and the Holodomor Famine (1929-1933)

Mass agricultural collectivization was launched starting in 1929, bringing an end to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which had allowed a degree of market economy in agriculture. Its declared goal was to raise production and finance rapid industrialization. The reform created kolkhozes (collective farms) and sovkhozes (state farms), accompanied by a campaign of "dekulakization" (raskulachivanie) targeting wealthier peasants known as kulaks, a term applied in an ambiguous and arbitrary way that served as a pretext for repressing dissenting peasants generally. Entire peasant families were deported en masse to Siberia and Central Asia, and peasants resisted by destroying their harvests and slaughtering their livestock rather than hand them over to the collective, causing a drastic collapse in the Soviet livestock population. Urban brigades and party militants were deployed to force collectivization through in the countryside, and in his 1930 article "Dizzy with Success," Stalin attributed the resulting excesses to "local errors," prompting a brief pause in the pace of collectivization before it resumed at an accelerated rate shortly afterward. More than 1.8 million peasants were deported between 1930 and 1931.