§§ \IHMHHHHNHWNWWIHHIHHI‘HWHIHHIWIIHI

   

“THS

1 lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

74 1843
{I} I ’8/ \3
1’ /

 

LIBRARY

Michigan State
University

 

 

 

This is to certify that the

, thesis entitled
A? «25/3 ,. Mar/n55 MD [Mp/,4 g; M
7/7? W45 07/142,417ka a; 771;: Spy/57"
WWexs/bg ~ tom; zap/9W La 2795 ”(fl-77;
)‘

presented by
fix) TIM/,4 A. 5774/9095”

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Mil. flismti

 

degree in

 

Date ”("997

0-7 639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

PLACE IN REI‘URN Box to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINE-S return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

MAYTZZ 4” £0823

 

'AUG‘B i) 2W?

\Jt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/00 c/CIRCJDmDmpGS—p.“

POWER, IDENTITIES AND LANGUAGE IN COLLECTIVIZATION OF THE
SOVIET COUNTRYSIDE — LOCAL OFFICIALS IN THE 19208-19308.

By

Natalia A Starostina

A MASTER’ S THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of History
1999

Professor Lewis Siegelbaum

ABSTRACT

POWER, IDENTITIES AND LANGUAGE IN COLLECTIVIZATION OF THE
SOVIET COUNTRYSIDE - LOCAL OFFICIALS IN THE 19208-19308

By
Natalia A Starostina

Local officials and peasants in the Soviet countryside in the late 1920-19308
adapted the dominant discourse of collectivization, which the Soviet authority attempted
to realize. However, even though they used the same language, the communication in the
Soviet countryside broke down because peasants and local officials used the language
against each other, thus undermining the possibilities of negotiation of collectivization
processes. The underlying paradigms which created the frameworks for using the language
were rooted not in the context which this language appeared fi'om (collectivization), but
rather on the traditional paradigms of running the peasant life. The state gradually
acknowledged an impossibility to use the language inspired by the state-sponsored rhetoric
of collectivization and class-struggle in the countryside as a criterion for assessing its own
success in transformation of the countryside. This resulted in the prohibition of the
language of negotiation for local officials in their everyday transactions with the higher

authorities.

Copyright by
NATALIA A. STAROSTINA

l 999

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to express my deepest gratefirlness to my husband, Dmitn' Starostine, who
was of enormous support and help in writing this work. He provided me the most
intellectually stimulating atmosphere and the deepest understanding of my scholarly work.

My family, father, mother and sister, provided me love and support.

Finally, I want to express the appreciation to all members of my committee - David
LoRomer, Leslie Page Moch and Lewis Siegelbaum - who gave me interesting

suggestions about my work.

iv

mm

Although both in the West and in contemporary Russia a vast, amount of literature
on collectivization has appeared during the last two decades, a critical problem remains:
the studies of the Soviet countryside has touched very little upon the important group
which was in great part responsible for its transformation. The problems of local officials
who bore the primary impact of collectivization from both peasant society and the state
remained outside of a range of problems that historians were pursuing. Even though Sheila
Fitzpatrick dealt with the problem of local leaders in the countryside, the all-
encompassing character of her works did not allow for underlining the importance of
lower rural officials for the balance of power in the countryside. The books of Fitzpatrick,
which saw chairmen as just another variety of the soviet bureaucratic machinery, simplified
the problems of authority which the Soviet village faced, and actually imposed the post-
war and later Soviet phenomena on the Stalin’s collectivization. Yet the study of lower
rural officials - chairmen of collective farms, - is crucial for understanding the inner
mechanisms of the Soviet village during and immediately after collectivization. A very
limited number of historians have given partial attention to this problem, but in general
there exists no consistent work that would try to make a broad generalization about a role
of local oflicials in the countryside.

The historians of the so-called “totalitarian school” in the historiography of the

Soviet Union treated the history of collectivization as an undesirable and violent

intervention of the Bolsheviks into the life of the Russian countryside.‘ Partisans of such
an approach seemed oblivious to the problem of modernization of the countryside in
Soviet Russia that was of extreme need and importance in the 193 0’s. Implicitly, they
lamented the end of an old way of life in Russian village, based on a system of the village
commune with its accompanying practice of discrimination of women, the dominance of
elderly people and a very tiny possibility for social mobility.2 Such authors as Richard
Pipes, Martin Malia, Andrea Graziosi and Robert Conquest used the dichotomy between
fanatical and cruel Bolsheviks, on the one hand, and suffering and passive people, on the
other hand, as a ubiquitous explanation for the whole period of Soviet society. For
historians of the totalitarian school the Soviet Union represented a dictatorship and there
was no place for common people to participate in the projects launched by the Bolsheviks.
They saw collectivization as a forceful imposition of Bolshevik will on the peasantry. Such
historians failed to see that the state would not be able to launch and eventually to
implement large-scale reforms of the society without the participation of hundreds of
thousands of people in this process. This paradigm proved to be extremely insuflicient for
the explanation of the complex social fabric of Soviet society and was severely criticized
by the next generation of historians, the partisans of the so-called “revisionist school.”

The scholars of the so-called “revisionist” school became pioneers in revealing to

Western historiography the vast amount of documents produced by common people in the

 

‘ Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik reginle (New York, 1984); Martin Malia, The Soviet
Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York, 1994); Robert Conquest, The Harvest
of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror (London, 1986), Andrea Graziosi, “The Great Soviet
Peasant War. Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-1933, Harvard Lagrs in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge,
1996) and other.

2 For peasant commune in imperial Russia: Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: ngly and Community
in the Post-Emancigtion Period, (Princeton, 1991).

 

Soviet period.3 It allowed them to highlight the complexity of social processes that took
place in the 1930’s and the variety of social responses to collectivization from whole-
hearted support and active participation to total denial and resistance. Such scholars as
Moshe Lewin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lynn Viola and others sought to understand how the life
of the Russian village changed during and after collectivization. Inasmuch as their studies
touched the problem of the role of local officials in the collectivization drive, they were
turning their attention to local officials, even though this problem never occupied a central
place in their work.

Moshe Lewin argued that collectivization came as a response from above to the
intensification of a class tension in the countryside that occurred in the end of 1920’s and
that collectivization would be impossible without an active participation of local officials
in dekulakization.4 Lewin argued that local oflicials were ignorant and leaned on violence
and disorder when the state launched the dekulakization. They played a central place only
in a destruction of the old way of life in Russian village. It was not local oflicials,
however, but urban dwellers, according to Lewin, that came to build collective farms in

the countryside. Lewin blamed the brutality with which dekulakization was implemented

 

3 Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Boston, 1989); Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet
Sygtgm. Em in the Social History of Interwar Russia, (New York, 1994); idem, Russian Peasants gag
Soviet Power. A Study of Collectivization (New York, 1968); Roberta Manning, “Government in the
Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties. The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937,” The Carl Beck Pam in
Russian and EaiEurgrean Stud_i§s__ (University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European
Studies, October 1984); William Rosenberg and Lewis Siegelbaunr, eds. Social Dimensions of Soviet
Industrialization (Bloomington, 1993); Siegalbaum, Stakhanovism a_nd the Politics of Productivity @th
USSR, 1935- 1941 (Cambridge, 1988); James Hughes, Stalinism in a Russian _fProvince. A study of
Collectivization and Delculakization in Siberia (New York, 1996), Elena Osokina, Za fasado_____m
”stalinsko o izobiliia”: ' ” industrializatsii (Moscow,
1998) and other.

‘ Dekulakization was a process that took place along with collectivization and implied clearing peasant
society of the excessively rich peasants (kulalcs) and the appropriation of their property. Moshe Lewin,
Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. A Study of Collectivization (New York, 1968), 489-90.

 

 

   

not local oflicials, but Moscow politicians. The term “kulak” that Moscow politicians
actively used during the dekulakization to manipulate local officials was more than
confusing. Therefore, Lewin argued that local officials played rather a negative role in
collectivization because they succeeded only to alienate peasants from an idea of collective
farm.

Lynn Viola’s works on collectivization demonstrated an even more skeptical
approach towards the ability of local officials to rule the countryside.’ She argues that the
role of local officials in the collectivization drive was insignificant and that it was
newcomers into the villages, urban dwellers, who actually transformed villages into the
collective farms. One of Viola’s studies was focused on the 25,000ers, workers from
Leningrad and other cities, who came in the countryside as new appointed chairmen of
collective farms. According to Viola, it was they who first brought a bold vision of social
transformation into the countryside. The 25,000ers, however, failed to transform this
vision into reality because they were challenged by a lack of understanding from rank-and-
file peasants and by the hostility of local oflicials.

Sheila Fitzpatrick developed another definition for local officials as “middlemen”
between the state and the countryside. Fitzpatrick argued that a collective farm’s chairman
could negotiate with the state in his everyday transactions as far as, for example, the

delivery of planned quotas on agricultural production was concerned.6 Fitzpatrick

 

5 Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vangufl of Soviet Coll_ectivizati_o_n (New
York, 1987), idem, Peasant Rebels ugrtder Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance
(New York, 1996).

6 Fitzpatnck argued that “the kolkhoz chairman was the chief broker in the kolkhoz-village's relationship
withthestate. Hemediatedbetweerrthevillageandthedistrictauthorities; itwashisjobtotell thedistrict
thattheprocurementstargetonsuch-and—suchacropwastoohighandtrytogetitlowered;toconveyto
the peasants that the mica (district administration) was serious about clamping down on pilfering or

compared the role of a collective farm’s chairman with that of a middleman between serfs
and their landlord, for she argued that collectivization of the countryside resulted in the
revival of old ways of life.7 The creation of collective farms, according to her, became a
second edition of the commune (mir). Fitzpatrick argued that by and large Soviet peasants
as well as local ofiicials remained passive, if not hostile to collectivization. 8 She
distinguished three types of peasant mentality in the countryside: first, “traditionalist,” a
rejection of any changes and a desire to be lefi alone by the state; second,
“entrepreneurial,” a desire to be engaged in trade and entering into the market; and, third,
there were peasants who appreciated collectivization as providing for welfare practices in
the countryside. By arguing this, Fitzpatrick put Russian peasants into the category of a
passive social stratum that might respond differently to the challenges from above, but had
nothing to propose itself. F itzpatrick’s views on the political aspirations of peasants
expressed the understanding of political and social dynamics in the Soviet society of the
1930’s that characterized contemporary Soviet historiography.

This understanding of peasants as a passive agent in the collectivization of the

 

individualuseofkolkhorz horseswithoutpaymenutotrytoprovideexcusesforanyfailurestomeet
procurements targets, and so on.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peaflts: Resistance and Survival in the
Rr_r__ss_ian Villgge afler Collectivization (New York, 1994), ll.

7 According to Fitzpatrick’s views, “one of the kolkhoz chairman's main functions was to act as broker
between the village and the mica authorities. To play this role successfully, he needed acceptance on both
sides: Ifthe village “elected” him, he needed raion approval; if the raion “appointed” him, he need the
approval of the village. This was not fundamentally different from the situation on Prince Gagarin's
Manilovo estate a century earlier, where the serf manager (bumristr) was “elected by and from the loeal
peasants and approved by Gagarin.” Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 194.

8 Fitzpatrick concluded her books by a suggestion that “three separate strains of peasant aspiration can be
identified in the 1930s. “Traditionalist” peasants wanted to be left alone with their horse and cow to be
subsistence cultivators, within a communal framework that tended to inhibit economic differentiation.
“Entrepreneurs” wanted not just to subsist brrt also to sell for a profit on the marker, have the opportunity
to buy and lease land, and become prosperous, on the Stolypin model. “Welfare-state kolkhorzm'ks” wanted
thestatemacthkeagoodmaster,provichngpensionsandmherkindsofsocialwelfarethatwould
elinrinate the risk of being wiped out in a bad year.” Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants 313.

 

1930’s is challenged by recently published collections of primary sources -- for example,
letters that Soviet citizens sent to newspapers, security reports on rumors and opinions in
cities and in the countryside produced by the NKVD -- that shed light on the inner
mechanisms of Soviet society as well the role of local officials in collectivization.9 In many
cases, short commentaries or no commentaries at all accompany documents in these
editions. The editors of such collections of documents, therefore, have left much room for
firrther interpretations of these documents.

A new trend in Soviet historiography, the so-called “subjectivist school” promises
new possibilities for historians to understand how complex social, political and cultural
processes of the 1930’s were reshaping identities of people. 1° An innovative study of a
diary of a Moscow worker Stepan Podlubnyi by Jochen Hellbeck suggests a new approach
to the history of Stalinism as a story of internalization or denial of identities that the state
implicitly and explicitly suggested. Hellbeck argued that the identity of Stepan Podlubnyi
was deeply transformed as a result of the internalization of identities that the state
suggested. The diary for Stepan Podlubnyi became a means to fashion his soul according
to ideals promoted by the state.

The tendency to limit collectivization to a re-allocation of property fi'om individual

households into a collective farm with a concomitant exile of better-off peasants and the

 

9 Andrei Sokolov, Golos naroda. Pis’ma i otkliki riadovih sovetskih grazhdan o sobitiigh 1918-1932
(Moscow, 1998); idem, ed, Obshchestvo i viast’ v 1930-e gody: povestvovanie v dikymenw (Moscow,
1998); Lynn Viola, T.McDonald, S.V.Zhuravlev, ANMel’nik, Riazanskaia derevniiav 1929-1930 gr;
khronika golovokruzheniia. Dokumenti i material; (Moscow, 1998); Sergei Maksudov, Neusly_sl_r_an_nye
golosa: Dokumenty Smolenskogo arkhiva. Kn.l (Ann Arbor, 1987); Vasilii Popov, Krest’ianstvo i
gosudarstvo: 1945-1953 (Paris, 1992) and other.

0 Stephen Kotkin, M__agrretic Mme: Stalinism as 3 Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); Johen Hellbeck,
“Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939),” Jahrbucher fr_r_er Geschiglfi
Osteurog 44 (1996) 344-373; Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds.
mum and Terror: SovieQLaries (Luge 1930's (New York, 1995) and other.

 

 

mechanization of the countryside limits historians in their understanding of
collectivization. Collectivization of the countryside was designed to resolve urgent
problems that the Soviet state was facing in the middle and end of the 1920’s. There was a
fourteen million population increase during the 1920’s, but agricultural production did not
reach its pre-war level. For example, grain production per capita was 584 kg in 1913, but
in 1928-9 it was only 484.4 kg. This gap was continuing to increase in the end of the
19205.11 In other words, there was not enough grain to feed the growing population of the
Soviet republic. A possibility of drought or other climatic failure could result in a famine
that the state would not be able to stop or to lessen its consequences for the state did not
have even grain reserves. ‘2 There was a limited number of available measures to overcome
this shortage of grain without applying pressure on peasant society. Ifbefore 1913 peasant
households produced only 50% of the total grain output, and consumed 60% of their
production, now peasants produced 80% of total grain output and consumed 85% of its
volume.” The fact that only 15% of the grain went to the market put state authorities in
an extremely difficult situation because of the importance of grain in the balance of the
economy. First, grain production occupied a central place in the still mostly agricultural
economics of the early Soviet state. Moreover, agricultural production had become central
to the industrial renovation which the Soviet state, for ideological and pragmatic reasons,
considered a cornerstone of its right to exist. Grain exports were the major source for the
regime to firnd the restoration and expansion of industry that suffered great losses during

the Civil War. Hence, the low productivity of agriculture was perceived as a major cause

 

” Lewin, Russian Peasants 174.
‘2 Ibid, 178.
'3 Ibid, 175-6.

 

of the obstacles to build the Soviet state.14 Therefore, collectivization was predicated on
reorganizing the countryside along the lines of increasing productivity.

In this context even collectivization itself needs further explanation in the context
of complex social processes that took place in the Soviet countryside in the end of 1920s -
19303. The term implied the creation of collective farms as an ultimate goal of the state’s
policy in the countryside. However, the use of this term necessarily questions peOple’s
initiative in transforming the countryside and implicitly advocates a trickle-down theory of
socialism in the countryside. Evidence suggests, however, that collectivization was a
process of social transformation that deeply changed the nature of power and authority in
the countryside. Language played a central role in this process because the subjectivity of
power during the time of social transformation resulted in a specific phenomenon:
interpretations of social realities became as important as realities themselves. Because of

this, language is one of the dominant elements of the social transformation, and example of

which the collectivization presented. The language which local officials used and which
peasants and the political elite applied towards local oflicials allows us to see the sets of
representations on which this language was based. It allows us to distinguish realities fiom
representations in the analysis of the role of local officials in the countryside.

This understanding of collectivization allows us to consider actions of local
officials from a new perspective. First, I will try to demonstrate how local leaders
constructed their identity through creating an elaborate construction of a social utopia, in

which they were the leaders of the people. I will examine this discourse which local

 

‘4 [bid

leaders invented through the lense of Michel Foucault’s theory of the dissemination of
power through social institutions and language.15 In my second chapter I will try to argue
that rank-and-file members of Soviet farms redefined the meaning of the narrative created
by local officials and created a specific discourse of local ofiicials as gentry landowners. In
contrasting the two different discourses present in the countryside I will attempt to show
that both of them came from the same roots of social utopianism. In many ways both of
the conflicting discourses resembled, and probably directly borrowed from, the Bolshevik
language of social transformation, which had reached the countryside from the cities. The
thesis will attempt to show that even though peasants and those of them who managed to
become collective farm chairmen employed the same language, they used it against each
other. They competed against each other using the same kind of Bolshevik discourse in
everyday life. Therefore, the Soviet countryside was a sponge that absorbed the dominant
discourse of social transformation, but reinterpreted it and used it for the purposes of
traditional peasant routines. The tensions within the collective farms, which the chairmen
were the first to bear, went not along ideological lines, but rather emanated fi'om the
pressure on peasant society which collectivization exemplified. This does not mean,
however, that these tensions, to which the conflicting discourses of the countryside gave a
voice, were any less poignant. The thesis will show that the rural oficials, and chairmen of
the collective farms in the first place, were not able to connect even on the level of
language, and that any negotiation was impossible. The last chapter will try to demonstrate

that the political elite did not invest local officials with the function of negotiating

 

‘5 See Michel Foueault, Power/Kriowledge: Selected Interview and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New
York, 1980).

collectivization in the countryside. The appropriation and reinterpretation of Bolshevik
discourse by rural society made the central elites come up with a new language of
collectivization, which was based on extending urban models to the countryside and

emphasized the role of machinery in the transformation of the countryside.

10

Chapter].
”Charismatic leaders” rural officials in collectivization’s ngriafiyes

A language and a set of images that local officials used describing themselves shed
light on the complex identities of local officials and their understanding of their role in the
social fabric of Soviet society. For local officials, the representation of themselves went far
beyond an image of state servicemen with precisely defined administrative duties. Not an
administrative position of a chairman in a collective farm, but rather a broadly understood
position of power responsible for transforming the countryside according to socialist ideals
inspired local ofi'lcials in their search for self-identities. A specific discourse, according to
which local omcials were leaders of the people, and which they themselves developed,
reflected their search for self-identification.

The exploration of the discourse of “people’s leaders” cannot be done without the
exploration of the dominant official discourse - the language of socialism. For historians, a
vision of socialism appears to be the privilege of the “Kremlin dreamers,” and the process
of the building of socialism a dissemination of a dominant discourse, as Michel Foucault
put it, of the socialism produced by the educated urban elite. Social historians still refuse
to see how deep the social utopianism was embedded in the everyday reality of the Soviet
countryside. The understanding of socialism articulated by the peasants is considered to be
only a curiosity, a ridiculous fantasy that stands halfway between interpretative rigidity,
illiteracy of peasants, and their futile efforts to understand the complexity of socialism. ‘6

According to an assumption that many scholars share, the revolutionary discourse in the

 

‘6 See, for example, Sokolov, Golos naroda 11.

11

countryside existed only as an alien language in contrast with the traditional culture and
mentality of the peasants. The trickle down discourse of the urban utopianism and
reorganization of society joined and was in many ways accompanied by the undercurrent
of rural utopianism, and their interaction was the reason for the dynamics and tension of
rural life.

The self-representation of local officials suggests, however, that a correlation
between an urban-dominated socialist discourse on soviet _ power and the peasants’
interpretation of betterment of their lives was a much more complex process. The self-
representations of local officials as “people’s leaders” will provide evidence of a complex
process of internalization of the language of socialism among Soviet peasants and,
particularly, local officials Narratives which emerged together with the dissemination of a
dominant discourse in the society were incorporated by local officials for the creation of a
specific self-representation of “people’s leaders.” Local leaders, however, redefined the
meaning of these narratives and while using its language, put a very difl‘erent meaning into
them. Chairmen’s visions of a new countryside embedded the social utopianism that re-
defined the discourse about socialism in the countryside and brought into it a new
meaning. I will try to demonstrate that the social utopianism became deeply embedded in
the everyday actions of rural authorities and that collectivization invoked and powerfully .
reinforced this utopian vision. I

The reinterpretation which peasants gave to the social blueprint for a better

society, suggested by the Bolsheviks in 1917, started immediately after the news from

12

\

Petrograd reached countryside.17 The period of the Civil War became a time when the
village faced a generation of militant dreamers - demilitarized soldiers that brought their
own representations of social utopia and change into the countryside. While the village
faced increasing banditry, demobilized soldiers or just volunteers came to serve in new

institutions and to defend the village from the Whites, Greens and so forth. They,

however, quickly came to disagree with the central authorities and came to make the

\.
\ Revolution in the countryside on their: cram. For example, the story of Avraam Makarov, a

demobilized soldier, illustrates to what extent his vision of social change was nurch more
radical than that of the higher authorities and how quickly be appropriated the making of
the revolution in the countryside. He wrote a twenty-page letter to W
in 1929 in which he described his life. The story of his revolutionary experience began
when he returned to his village and was elected chairman of the provincial executive
committee (volispolkom).18 His views on the building of socialism countered those of
higher authorities and from 1919 Makarov began his struggle with executives in the
provincial executive committee. Makarov labeled those who were his chiefs as past
officers of the old army: they, according to him, did not allow him to implement
collectivization and the cultural enlightenment of people in his village. In order to succeed
in this clash Makarov organized a clandestine party cell during the second meeting of
Soviets in his province. Makarov’s story of ardent struggle with his enemies - officers of
the czarist army that according to his account occupied positions in the revolutionary

committees - suggests the longing for social transformation that the generation of militant

 

‘7 Orlando Figec, Boris Kolonitskii, lnte_rg;c_n'ng the Russjin Revolution : the langtggg and mu of
1917 (New Haven, 1999)

‘8 rbid, 67-8.

13

dreamers brought with them in the countryside. In verses that Makarov composed in
1927, he defined his adherence to the ideals of revolution and the tribulations he had
suffered because of it. The people who brought the influence of the city to the countryside .
- demobilized soldiers and other groups, - as well as local peasant society borrowed
revolutionary rhetoric, in the process redefining the meaning of Bolshevik ideology.

From the very beginning of the Soviet state local authorities were at odds with the
official view of their responsibilities and the extent of their power. Perhaps, Andrei
Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1927) gives the best view of a gap between the
understanding of socialism expressed by a generation of “rural dreamers” and the
dominant discourse of socialism.19 “Rural dreamers” produced a very peculiar
understanding of socialism, which sometimes might be an eccentric reinterpretation of
Marx’s ideas on the countryside. A main character of “Chevengur,” Kopenkin, was deeply
influenced by Marx’s ideas about the necessity to eliminate exploitation in society in order
to build socialism. Kopenkin, however, redefined the logic in Marx’s argument and
announced labor itself (rather than social relations based on one’s relation to property) a
source of exploitation and inequality in the society. Kopenkin argued that only by
eliminating labor and, thus, according to his logic, exploitation, it was possible to reach
socialism. Kopenkin created a commune of people in the countryside who refused to work
and by that, i.e. doing literally nothing, they believed they were building a new, socialist
society.

A confrontation between the official view of rural officials and rural otficials’

 

‘9 Andrei Platonov, “Chevengur,” Yuvenil’noe more (Moscow, 1988).

14

vision of their role produced striking effects when collectivization was launched. The way
in which these leaders envisioned themselves is represented in great detail by the memoirs
of a collective farm’s chairman, which demonstrated that rural officials adopted a language
which portrayed them as “people’s leaders.” The memoirs of Vasilii Sitnikov,20 a
fascinating account of the life of collective farm’s chairman, gave a number of very
important insights into his representation of this office. Published in a newspaper with an
introduction by his grandson, writer Vasilii Sitnikov, these memoirs portrayed the
formation of a rural official. Even though Sitnikov might have written or dictated these
memoirs later in his life, most likely between the 19503 and the 19805, the Soviet state still
existed and socialism remained the powerful, if not dominant, ideology in the societyLThe
language which Sitnikov used in his story is not a result of his later interpretation because
the - development of the Soviet state at this time represented a continuity of political
institutions the political and social firnction of which were defined during the social
transformation of the 193 Os. The continuity of the oflicial rhetoric emphasized the Soviet
state’s devotion to Marxist ideology and building socialism. Therefore, there were no
other ideologies that might challenge Sitnikov’s understanding of his role as a collective
farm’s chairman. Moreover, as Stephen Kotkin suggested, even after the fall of the Soviet
system the language that was based on socialist ideas was present in conversations that
Kotkin had with his friends and a landlord in Magnitogorsk in the late 1980’s.21 Sitnikov’s

memoirs presented him as a utopian dreamer who did not give up his vision of

transformation of the life in his village according to his utopian beliefs. His memoirs

 

2° Vladimir Sitnikov, “Khronika vremeni moego deda”, Sovetskaia Rossiia, August 26, 1988.
2‘ Stephen Kotkin, Stecltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gotham Eur (Berkeley, 1991), passim.

15

reflected his thoughts about forces that hindered his success as a chairman of a collective
farm but even after many years Sitnikov believed that the idea of transforming the
countryside was certainly to the benefit of the peasant population.

The memoirs Showed from the start that Sitnikov was a dreamer. According to
them, Vasilii Sitnikov developed an interest in books from his childhood and as a result he
became more educated than his fellow villagers and was sent abroad to learn agriculture.
Then, Sitnikov served in the army during the First World War, was captured and spent
time as a prisoner. Afier 1917 he returned to the village, was drafted into the Red Army,
became a member of a small administrative district’s executive committee (volispolkom)
where he was responsible during the years of War Communism “for culture and medicine”
and during N.E.P. - for cooperation. In 1929 Sitnikov was purged fiom the party for his
origins (his father was a petty merchant). Sitnikov went to the commune in a difl'erent
area, acquired there some popularity and even was nominated as a possible chairman.
Sitnikov, however, decided not to run because he was still deprived of political rights
(Iishenets). Soon Sitnikov returned to his village, became an activist and participated in
the creation of a commune in Gul’kevichi in 1929-30.

Sitnikov was deeply disappointed when Stalin put a blame and responsibility on
local officials for excesses and rush with which collectivization was implemented in his
article “Dizzy with Success” that appeared in the newspapers in March 1930.22 Stalin
argued that the course of action, taken by the local officials, was the main reason for the

failure of collectivization. He lashed out against what many chairmen believed their

 

22 Joseph Stalin, “Golovokruzhem'e 0t uspekhov” (Dizzy flom Success), Pravd_a, March 2, 1930.

16

collective farm had to be -— a commune. He argued that this form of peasant organization
that undertook a requisition of almost all property of peasants including their personal
belongings was an extreme. Stalin claimed that local otficials should take responsibilities
for their eagerness to make every peasant a member of a commune or a collective farm
even when peasants did not want to become its members. Stalin deliberately failed to
mention in his article that the Moscow political elite required Party and state officials
elsewhere in the Soviet Union to achieve planned quotas of collectivization and to create a
certain number of collective farms. The failure to implement state quotas of
collectivization was most likely to result in purges against those officials who failed to
achieve these quotas. Stalin’s article, therefore, was an efl‘ort to distance the state, and
particularly, the Party elite, from failures that the introduction of communes against
peasants’ wishes brought in many cases. The mass breakdown of collective farms after this
article was an important consequence. However, collectivization headed in the same
direction even after the appearance of Stalin’s article. The political elite began to use a
variety of means in driving peasants into collective farms. The increase of the state tax on
individual households of those who were hesitant to join to a collective farm beyond any
possibility to pay it was, for example, one of the means at state’s disposal to ensure
growth in the a number of collective farms.

Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success” ruined the commune that Sitnikov organized
in Gul’kevichi too. His commune fell apart in a moment after the publication of Stalin’s
article. He wrote: “We, activists, got stranded (ostalis’ na meIi). How could it happen?

Stalin proved his innocence, but he blackened us and attacked us. All passionate words

17

and incredible efforts went down the drain (vse zhw'ki'e slova 1' neimovemye usiliia poshli
nasmarku). This struck me. It was like a betrayal.” Sitnikov abandoned the village because
he was ashamed to live there, and chose another one. In another commune, “Working
Peasantry,” Sitnikov launched a propaganda campaign and as a result he was elected as a
chairman of the collective farm again. However, Sitnikov realized that the grain delivery
quotas that the state set for the peasantry were impossible to achieve and impossible to
negotiate. Moreover, Sitnikov claimed that he could be easily labeled as an enemy of
people for a delay with various assignments such as carting out the grain that his collective
farm had to implement. Sitnikov quit his position and was sent to a lumber mill and then
went to his son in the city in 1937. He remained there and visited his village only after the
Second World War.

There are several narratives which this collective farm chairman’s account
illustrates. First, in the beginning of his activity Sitnikov constantly wanted to distance
himself from the pressure exercised by the state on peasants. He minimized his role in the
building of a commune in his village. Only his comments about the nrinous impact of
Stalin’s article on its creation revealed that this commune was created through his
vigorous, if not forcefirl, partaking - his “passionate words and unbelievable efl‘orts”. He
did not mention forceful means for the creation of this commune, although he most likely
used them, for this commune seemed to exist only through coercion.

It is very revealing how Sitnikov described his position between a hammer and an
anvil. He wrote:

“I, a chairmen of a collective farm, ended up being between the rock and the hard

18

place (mezhdu dvuh ognei). They pressed me from above: I have got to fulfill urgent tasks
come hell or high water (krov’ iz nosu). Despite a bad harvest of flax, the regional
authority issued an enormous quota for flax delivery. Implementing this order, I myself
unwillingly became a stubborn and obtuse agent for procurement of delivery quotas
(upriamii 1' tupoi vykolachivatel ’ plana).” 23

According to Sitnikov, he was pushed to force his subordinates. His account in
fact gives almost a physical perception of force that won over his will to be a
compassionate leader. At the same time, he was aware of the transformation that
happened in him when he was a chairman - his will came to serve the merciless force that
turned the lives of the Soviet peasantry upside down. Sitnikov’s account gives a different
perspective of the process of the making of the New Soviet Man that characterized the
1930’s.“ Instead of describing himself as an outside observer of the social transformation,
Sitnikov saw himself captured by this process and transformed almost against his will.
There was no exit for Sitnikov but to quit his job and even abandon his identity as a
peasant. He confessed that after the experience of this pressure, peasant work lost its
attractiveness for him and he decided to quit. The impossibility to transform the life in his
collective farm according to his dreams was perceived by Sitnikov, therefore, as a failure
to preserve his integrity as a peasants’ leader and as a peasant.

Sitnikov described his experience in the 1930’s as an interchanging set of failures

caused by the state and successes caused by peasantry. The state purged him from party in

 

23 .

Ibld.
2‘ Hellbeck, “Subjectivities and Policies of Subjectivization in the Stalin Period” (manuscript, presented at
the conference “The Stalin Period: New Ideas, New Conversations”, the University of California,
Riverside, 12-15 March 1998), 16.

19

1929, Stalin’s article ruined a commune that Sitnikov created and, finally, the pressure
from the state made him abandon his post of a chairman of the collective farm. The state
appears to be a force that stood behind the party purges, Stalin’s articles and the ill-done
process of ruling the countryside. Sitnikov did not make a distinction between the state
and the party and did not identify actors in his account as Communists or non-
Communists. It even remained unclear whether Sitnikov was reinstated in the party afier
1929. It suggests that for Sitnikov membership in the Communist party meant very little if
it was not reinforced by a position in the authorities which could be either linked with the
state or the party but had to be necessarily inscribed into the state mechanism. The
division between the state and the party hierarchies that one scholar described as being
important for social identities,” appeared to be significant only for those who were
occupying a position of power in these structures. In Sitnikov’s account, there is no
difference between the actions exercised by the state or the party - both of them mingled
together to overcome Sitnikov’s will as well as the will of his people.

Actions of Sitnikov’s foes acquired success only because the state supported
them, for without this support people would find a right leader and a right path. It was his
fellows’ support that brought him recognition in his village and election to the district
executive committee (volispolkom) in 1917. Sitnikov was nominated three times by his
fellows as the best candidate for chairmanship in two communes and his native village, and
the Timiriazev collective farm in 1929, 1930, and 1933. Sitnikov presented his election as

something that had nothing to do with his efforts - in his account it appears that he was

 

25 Kotkin, Mamie Mountain, 590-96.

20

nominated as a possible candidate even during his actual absence in Gul’kevichi. Sitnikov
constructed himself as a leader nominated by the people and serving them. Although
Sitnikov might have been just removed from the position of chairman for his inability to
fulfill the quota requirements, he represented his quitting as a gesture of desperate protest
against the virtual impossibility of being a people’s leader.

Sitnikov’s representations about the role of leader in the countryside invoke a
whole set of associations. Sitnikov created a peculiar triad that could be seen in the
production of revolutionary rhetoric in the 1920’s: the state as a counterfeit power (=
Imperial government and Czar), Sitnikov as a genuine people’s leader (= Bolsheviks) and
the people as a group that knows who is its real, not forged leader. Sitnikov presented
himselfas a servant of the people, not the state. The state in his narrative is as a constantly
intervening and hindering force in the process of his serving the people of his village. The
state is ultimately responsible for his failures, but the people - the peasants of Gul’kevichi -
are willing to support him and to nominate him as a genuine peasant leader. Despite ‘
constant pressure from the state, purges and ordeals, Sitnikov did not give up. He referred
to the higher authorities as ultimately counterfeit leaders in the view of the peasantry - '
they maintained power only through the use of force, while Sitnikov acquired his authority
through the genuine people’s support and his “passionate words.” Sitnikov is not afraid of
his fellows although the widespread practice of assault on collective farm chairmen might
suggest that he had many reasons to be afraid. For instance, he explained his reluctance to
return to his village as a fear of shame, not a fear of being killed or injured. Sitnikov feels

that he has to account for his actions in the face of his village, not that of the state.

21

Sitnikov, however, is not writing about himself as an ordinary peasant like the
rank-and-file members of his commune. He did not squeeze himself into a dichotomy of
‘irs” (“peasants”) against “them” (the state authorities) in which he would be a part of
his,” the peasant community. He invokes his identity of peasant only to Show how
meaningful peasant work was for him and how symbolic was his decision to quit his work
and peasant labor. In fact, a peasant identity is too solemn for him to refer to it in his
everyday life decisions. It is significant that in a period when he was not chairman he relied
on his skills to repair accordions or to procure lumber. Peasant and chairman’s identities ‘
became closely interwoven for him and he was unwilling to remain a peasant without
being a chairman.

Rationalizing his achievements and failures in a position of authority, Sitnikov
actually created a discourse of power which was distinctly different from what his
immediate surroundings or ideology of service to the socialist state could predicate.
Sitnikov did not see himself as a servant of the state. He understood his mission in much
broader terms of service to the people and transforming of their lives according to his
belief. His identity of chairman of a collective farm has nothing to do with his professional
responsibilities per se, but is understood as an essential mission of implementing his dream
- commune in his village. The position of chairman was a time of Sitnikov’s personal and
professional triumph - only then could he carry out his essential task of people’s leader.

The question of belief plays an important role in Sitnikov’s narrative. Sitnikov
almost did not mention the deve10pment of events in the commune until Stalin’s article

made it disappear. The process of building a commune for him is a process of the

22

implementation of a dream. A narrative about actual events is subdued by a narrative
about a correspondence between life and dream and an oscillation between a belief and a
frustration. He wrote: “We lived in an unusual way, we believed and did not believe, but
we wished that everything we dreamed about come true (zlrr‘lr' neprivychno, verili 1‘ ne
verili, no khotelos, chtoby udalos' vse tak, kak mechtalos)” When the commune fell apart,
Sitnikov became deeply disappointed in the role of leader. He promised himself that he
would not be involved again in any projects (“dal ia zarok bol'she ne vsrrevat' ne vo
chto”).

The chairmanship was meaningful for Sitnikov only when he had the possibility to
implement his dream in his native village. His narrative hinges on the moments when he
became a chairman in his native Gul’kevichi. Moreover, other events in his life did not
interest him that much -— the story becomes almost incoherent when he talked about
repairing accordions or was just a rank-and file member of a collective farm in the south
where he went with his fiiend, a like-minded peasant. Although there was a group of
sincere believers in the commune, Sitnikov was not satisfied there - he wanted to
transform his native village. The south was an alien terrain for him which might lure for a
brief moment by the mildness of the climate and fertility of the land, but did not firlfll his
dreams.

In Sitnikov’s narrative, his failure to exercise his essential role of a “people’s
leader” was closely interwoven with a failure to implement his dreams in Gul’kevichi.
Vlfrthout Sitnikov’s leadership, life in his village could not but go awry - after WWII there

was a famine in his area and people in his village became torn by tension, which he

23

interpreted as class hatred. Sitnikov was greatly distressed by the fact that people in his
village did not create an atmosphere of trust and belief in each other that would be the
most important evidence of transformation of life in his village according to his dreams.

Therefore, Sitnikov’s account of his chairmanship is constructed according to the
conventions of narrative available through revolutionary and utopian rhetoric. Sitnikov
borrowed the discourse of the Russian revolution to create the self-image. His vision of
the future of Gul’kevichi was inspired by an utopian discourse, and the implementation of
his dream was the ultimate goal as a people’s leader in Gul’kevichi. He created a triad in
which he played the role of a genuine people’s leader. He did not refer to himself,
however, as to a state officer whose firnction was to serve the interests of the state. While
borrowing the language of a dominant socialist and revolutionary discourse, Sitnikov
greatly redefined its meaning. In his narrative the state played a negative role of a force
that hampered the transforming of life in Gul’kevichi. Sitnikov acknowledged that the
state was ultimately responsible for his life’s failure - to implement his virtual
responsibilities of people’s leader in Gul’kevichi and to transform life there according to
his beliefs.

Sitnikov’s example illustrates the process of transformation and redefinition of the
oficial discourse that local officials were engaged in.26 Sitnikov’s understanding of his role
in a kolldroz was typical as letters of local officials demonstrated. A peasant of Voronezh
province, Andrei Poluektov, described a number of positions in the kolldroz that he took,

from most recently, a member of auditing commission to a bookkeeper and a member of

 

2‘5 The rhetorics that Sitnikov used is very similar to that of many loeal officials in the countryside. See
letters of local officials in Sokolov, Golos naroda passim.

 

24

all possible voluntary societies such as that for promotion of radio and elimination of
illiteracy. 27 He argued that his collective farm was falling apart because there was no
accurate bookkeeping verification. He believed that his efforts as a newly appointed
member of the auditing comnrission to check funds of his collective farm would save this
collective farm from a complete breakdown. Again, for Poluektov his own vision of the
problems which beset collective farms was the only guiding principle which had to be
applied in solving them.

For some local officials the establishment of collective farms provided an
opportunity to create new social bonds in the countryside and to essentially redesign
gender relations in the countryside according to this utopian vision. Reports about
people’s political attitudes in the countryside collected by OGPU, the Department of state
security, portrayed how local officials tried to implement their utopian ideas about the
collective farm in reality. For example, a party member, M. P. Shesterov, advocated
membership in a commune for three widows in a village in Riazan province in 1930. He
told them: “Become members of a commune, you widows! You will have intimate
relations three times a night.”28

A desire to create immense entrepreneurial projects in the countryside
demonstrates another dimension of the utopianism that embedded actions of local officials.

An unpublished article in Krestianskaia Gazeta told a story of two consecutive chairmen of

a collective farm who tried to create fantastic enterprises.29 Markov, a chairman of a

 

2’ Sokolov, Obshchestvo i vlast’ 282-3.

28 Viola, Riazanskaia derevm'gv 1929-1930 gg, 241. This infornration was taken from special report #6/6
conrposed by Riazan’ ’s provincial department OGPU and dated by February 20th, 1930.

29 Sokolov, Obshchestvo i vlast’ 254.

 

 

25

collective farm named in honor of Voroshilov in Moscow province, tried to implement a
number of different economic projects - the production of maps for high school students,
rugs for home and building a gigantic repository for produce and stockyard. The extent of
Markov’s commercial initiative is hard to underestimate: in order to produce maps, he
wanted to raise firnds for the enterprise which to date existed only in his imagination. In
order to do so, he sent out representatives all throughout the Soviet Union, including the
remote republics, and raised a significant sum of one million four hundred and eighty
thousand rubles for the purpose of producing these maps. The map business,
unfortunately, went wrong and was a complete failure. Markov did not get discouraged by
this failure and launched a production of rugs. This undertaking again brought only losses
to the collective farm. Members of this collected farm reelected Markov, but his
successor, chairman Gavrilenko, kept to the beaten path: he started producing color chalks
and even printing templates for identification cards for members of professional unions and
stuck to the production of maps. All these enterprises resulted in the waste of the
collective farm’s funds because of the considerable quality problems or theft of funds by
those who were supposed to raise them. Finally, Markov and Gavrilenko were charged
with abuses of power and put on trial.

When the state tried to impose its own vision of socialism by launching
collectivization and when rural officials strongly disagreed with it, this clash of different
visions could produce a disastrous denouement. In November 1929 the lives of two
brothers Arrikeev tragically ended - both of them committed a suicide in protest against

forceful collectivization. Both were vested with power as rural Soviet’s chairman and a

26

collective farm’s chairman in the village Gorki Kiovskie, Moscow province. They refused
to make their subordinates members of the collective farm in the short period of one
month and were charged with the deliberate failure of the collectivization project.30
Charged with wrecking, the brothers Anikeev were sentenced to a long-term
imprisonment, but they decided to commit suicide in a vain hope to attract the attention of
the higher authorities. The understanding of collectivization which Anikeev had was in
tragic dissonance with that issued from the center. To create a collective farm in one
month was for them to betray the idea of socialism and their own people. Although
Solov’ev, as a Party plenipotentiary, was sent from Moscow to Gorki Kiovskie to examine
this incident, he just filled out the formal report which seemed not to result in any
persecution.

The development of the language of “people’s leaders” represents efl‘orts of local
officials to find means of channeling their power during collectivization. The local officials
were supposed to implement a broad range of social reforms in the countryside while at
the same time there was an appalling scarcity of sources of power at the disposal of local
officials. The language of people’s leaders and originating from there an imaginative and
utopian discourse about the extent of their power was the only means for local oflicials to
channel their power in the countryside. This image of “people’s leader” provided an
opportunity for local officials to exercise their power in the countryside and to justify the
means by which the power was exercised.

Collectivization enhanced this utopian understanding of the role of rural officials as

 

30AGSolov’ev, “T etradi krasnogo professora,” 159-161, Neizvestnaia Rossia. XX ve_k, vol. 4 (Moscow,
I994), 140-231.

27

people’s leaders that redefined the nature of collective farms according to their
understanding of socialism. In doing this, they reinforced a discourse of rural officials as
people’s leaders who were independent from the state and served not the state, but
people’s interests broadly understood. The making of a utopia was for them an ultimate
task that surpassed narrow definitions of professional responsibilities of a collective farm
or Soviet’s chairman. The trickledown theory of social ut0pianism, implicitly present in
many works which emphasize the dichotomy between the ideal plan of collectivization and
its barbarous implementation in the countryside, is therefore apparently flawed, because

the countryside matched the utopian project of the Soviet state with its own utopia.

28

Chapter 2.
Chairmen gs viewed by Sovietfipeas_gr_lt_s

The language of being leaders of the rural population that chairmen of collective
farm invented had its repercussion among rank-and-file members of collective farms. The
peasant who now bore the title of members of collective farms (kolkhozniks) closely
watched the everyday life of local officials, which received immediate reflection in the
security reports about opinions in the countryside. The peasants interpreted what was
going on collective farms in the terms of their own utopianism, which, paradoxically, went
against the utopian visions of local chairmen or their efforts to transform the countryside.
The discourse about local officials as landowners or even a new opriclmina31 that rank-
and-file members of collective farms created demonstrates that the peasants had their own
utopia which they attempted to put forward in their critique of the chairmen’s actions.

The deviant behavior of local omcials, according to these reports, occupied a
dominant if not central place in peasant discourse. Peasants relentlessly criticized local
officials for their failure to conform to basic administrative discipline, idleness,
drunkenness and so on. By doing this, peasants, therefore, revealed their deep concern
with a gap between sometimes gloomy realities of life in the kolkhoz and social and
economic goals that the creation of collective farms was supposed to firlfill. Close

examination of the way peasants criticized local officials suggests that peasants often built

 

3‘ Ivan the Terrible, 8 czar ofMoscovite Russia (1530-84, crowned in 1547), established a special unit of
militant people (opn'chnina) that stood above other structures of the state and even aristocratic networks
and was subordinated only to the czar. Ivan the Terrible used this political force to fight against his real
or, most of the time, imagined, enemies. Members of oprichnr’na were carrying out purges of Russian
nobles and implemented the barbarous massacre of the inhabitants of Novgorod, a prosperous city in the
North-West of Russia. The term opn‘chm‘na became associated with cruelty and violence later. See, for
example, Ruslan Skrynnikov, Ivan Grozgfl‘ (Moscow, 1975).

29

their accusations on the shaky ground of imagination. It was sometimes the idleness of a
chairman of a collective farm or his material wellabeing that were described in politically
combustive terms. Therefore, the language that rankr-andr-file members of collective farms
used to criticize local officials suggests that often peasants imposed an imaginary picture
of what a collective farm should be on their chairmen.

Even before collectivization there were many references to the local officials in the
countryside as brutal, unjust and selfish. Peasant letters to Krest’ianskaia Gazeta, for
example, demonstrate a high degree of anxiety and dissatisfaction with the authoritarian
style of leadership in the countryside that became common in these years. According to
the author of a letter to Krest’ianskaia Gazeta, I. G. Shokhin, the rural authorities came to
resemble the oprz'chnina and counterrevolution. Shokhin blamed rural omcials “for
destroying what Soviet power was building” (“eta re zhe konttrevolutsionery - rmshiteli
logo, ch10 I: sit wblvaias ’, stroll tsemral ’naia v1ast”)3‘2 Another peasant, A. Grigor’ev,
passionately condemned “a lack of Soviet power in the countryside.” He wrote: “Actually,
there is no Soviet power in the countryside, especially among peasants; everything goes
the wrong way, not like the rulers write. [They write:] ‘Rve are building socialism, but in
reality it is complete bureaucratisrn.”33 The peasant therefore did not acknowledge rural
officials as representatives of central power. Moreover, he blamed them for failing to bring
the social transformation to the countryside. An anonymous author of a letter to
Krest’iansakaia Gazeta described a shortage of food that was in his (her) collective farm

and put the blame for this on local olficials: “the newspaper, do not take away our belief

 

32 Sokolov, Golos naggg, 209.
33 A letter is written by AGrigor’ev on July 4th, 1928. Publ. in Sokolov, Golos naroda, 213.

30

that collective farms lead us to a better life, not to death and if we do not have enough
bread, it is a responsibility of local authorities, but not Soviet power.”34 According to
these letters, there was a considerable gap between what Soviet power brought into the
countryside and what rural officials brought into the everyday reality of the Soviet village.
Moreover, these letters show that the peasants had their own ideas about building the new
life, and that they honestly believed in the social reorganization of the countryside.
Interestingly enough, both authors used the language of social reorganization against local
officials, who were allegedly to implement these ideas.

The extreme degree of alienation of local authorities from the peasantry reached its
peak during the grain delivery crisis of 1929. In a letter written by a peasant to
Krest’ianskaia Gazeta the methods which local authorities used to extract the extra grain
from their neighbors are described. This peasant refused to fulfill the quotas issued by the
local Soviet when they were increased by five times. Calling this peasant into the rural
Soviet, local officials cursed and humiliated him after which this peasant began to ponder
“who these people are: state criminals, or activists of grain delivery, or some gang of

”35

bandits. Again, the peasants applied their understanding of what life should be to the

actual people in charge and their actions, and the comparison was not in favor of the rural
officials.
When in 1928 the local authorities were given freedom to impose an unlimited

agricultural tax on the better-off households, volost and district tax commissions’ actions

 

3“ Sokolov, Obshchestvo i vlist; 39.

3‘ The author, Il’sov, a peasant from Cheliabinsk’s district, sent this letter to Pravda, before April 11th,
1929. Published in 'r. M. Vakhitova and v. A Prokoreva, eds, “Prokliatiia krest’ian padut na vashu
golovu... Sekretnie obzori krest’ianskih pisem v gazetu “Pravda” v 1928-30 godakh,” 176, Noyyj Mir,
1993, 4:166-83.

31

spurred more pessimism among peasants. Antonov, the author of letter to Prayda,
pessirnistically viewed the greed of local authorities. “These abuses always will be
unavoidable only because most of these agricultural taxes go to the local budget and,
therefore, local officials at the local level are interested in extraction of funds.” 3‘ The
actions of local officials, therefore, were judged more harshly than those of central
authorities.

Collectivization gave a powerful impetus to the formation of a language of social
utopianism focused on local officials. Property that local officials possessed or gained
access to was described in politically combustive terms. It was the material inequality
between members of the collective farm and their chairman that undermined the idea of
new relations in the Soviet countryside. One peasant bitterly claimed, for example, that in
his collective farm “there is no order, everybody seeks only his own profit and the others
cannot do anything whether they like it or not . if one can get away [with stealing], one
can steal (e311 Iovko, to l tashchi sebe)”37 In these words the bitter criticism of the
practice of the rural officials appears as fundamentally different from the utopian ideal of
mutual sharing. The fact that the lower rural authorities lived better than simple rural

inhabitants provided the possibility for peasants closely to examine the relations of local

 

36Newlawsontheimpositionoftaxesintheeountrysidewereintroducedin1928.Theydidnotspecify
an amount of tax that local authority could impose on households of peasants. Therefore, local ofi'rcials
(volost and district tax commissions) were granted an authority to define an exact amount oftax in each
case that, according to the author of the letter, would result in numerous abuses of power. Vakhitova, ed
“Prokliatiia krest’ian padm na vashu golovu...” 176.

37 All cited sources are from the Records of the Smolensk Oblast of the All-Union Communist Par_ty of the
Soviet Union, 1917-1941. Microfilm (Washington, DC, 5. a.) Wkp 166, 16. The structure of the archive is
described in the Guide to the recorgdsfi of the Smolensk oblast of th_e All-Union Commum'st Party of the
Soviet Union, 1917-41 (Washington, 1980). For the history of the archive and the documents it contains
see Patricia Grimsted, The Odyssey of the Smolen_s_k Archive: Plundered Communist Recog for the
Service of Anticommunisrn (Pittsburgh, 1995), E. V. Kodin, “Smolenskii arkhiv” i amerikanskaia
sovetologg'a (Smolensk, 1998).

32

officials with the property of the collective farm and, in general, the suitability of their
leaders for the building of socialism in the countryside. For a chairman of a collective farm
was the only person in a village who enjoyed a relatively good standard of living. He had
almost unlimited access to the collective farm’s property and the better knowledge of the
allocation of supplies, even though the information was only about the goods in the village
shop. Probably, the specific nature of agricultural industry gave even more grounds to
suspect that local officials were involved in the embezzlement of a collective farm’s
property. For example, as a security report on rumors and opinions in the countryside
claimed, one collective farm’s chairman embezzled twenty poods of wheat by sowing the
field with trash instead of seeds"8 The chairman of a collective farm in the Smolensk
region was claimed to have sold the grain from the collective farm’s reserve in a
marketplace in the town of Krasnii.39

Rank-and-file members of collective farms gave a difl‘erent meaning to the idleness
of local ofiicials and the inability of some of them to perform their basic administrative
duties. The fact that chairmen of collective farms were doing nothing suddenly acquired a
politically dangerous meaning in the context of security reports on rumors and opinions,
for such information came together with information about anti-sSoviet expressions among
peasants. A peasant claimed that during the critical time of procurement the chairman of a
collective farm and his counterpart from the village Soviet were fishing at a local lake after
enjoying a deep sleep until noon."0 Another report claimed that the chairman of the

collective farm Path of Il’ich Gurov enjoyed playing the balalaika and hanging out with

 

3‘ Ibid, 36
39 Ibid, 452.
4° Ibid, 276.

33

his wife in a house. 4‘ On the same day one of the poor peasants of this ill-fated collective
farm, Pavel Erofeev, had given up his ploughing on the collective farm’s field because “he
could no longer do it since he had not eaten because of the lack of food?”2 After being
fired, eXr-chailman Gurov drank himself into oblivion with his fellows *- chairman of the
rural soviet and the head of collective farm a and stirred up the village’s inhabitants by
riding a stallion at midnight.43 These reports indicate that peasants expected adherence to
basic norms of organization from the local officials.

The bad organization of labor in the kolkhoz was a focus of constant criticism for
peasants who very often blamed chairmen of collective farms for their inability to run
agricultural routines efficiently. For example, a peasant blamed the chairman of his
collective farm Il’ia Zaretskii for failures to manage the functioning of the farm that
threatened the welfare of all members.“ According to this report, Zaretskii was a rude
person, who was communicating with their subordinates only with Obscenities. He was not
able to explain anything and answer their questions. The author of a report compared
Zaretskii with a former chairman of the board in this kollcoz, Martusov, who could give
clear instructions to members of this collective farm (“ob ’r’asm‘t vse kak chelovek”) and
because of this, a peasant argued, before Zaretskii the kolkhoz ran well. The inability of
chairmen to give clear instructions to kolkhozm‘ks challenged the success of collective
farms in general in peasants’ view. In some collective farms, the peasants did not know the

plan for sowing until the middle of May because of the chairman, which was already very

 

4r Ibid, 484
42 Ibid.

‘3 lbid, 692.
“ Ibid. 31-2.

34

late considering the climate of the Smolensk region.45 Peasants had to begin an individual
sowing campaign despite the fact that it went against the bylaws. In a village Zavidovki
and another village of Samsonsk’s nlral soviet peasants did not know the amount of
delivery quotas on wheat as late as the end of August because local officials did not tell
them.46 Considering the fact that all of these accusations only appeared because the
peasants were voicing their concern, their discontent shows the very important
phenomenon. The peasants were apparently aware of the ideal organization which they
would like to see in the countryside, and attempted to inform the world of the
irregularities.

Peasants were concerned with the past of their leaders and believed it could have a
significant impact on the filture of a kolkhoz. When Grigorii Osipenkov, a former criminal,
was sent by regional authorities to head a collective farm “Joint Labor,” peasants were
appalled by the outlaw character of their new leader. According to the report, peasants
believed Osipenkov was a bandit who pillaged the Smolensk province in the early 19205."7
“Why did they send a bandit (“opredelennogo bandita”) to our kolkhoz who was going
completely to ruin it?” Therefore, peasants of “Joint Labor” believed that the leadership
had to adhere to the basic norms of social behavior to be critical for the kolkhoz success.

A lack of concern for the property of collective farms that some chairmen had also
greatly bothered peasants. Political reports are fill] of information about local leaders who
appeared to be involved in the destruction of the [:0le ’s property, even though this was

often just due to the lack of knowledge of agriculture and peasant routines. For example,

 

‘5 lbid, 330,216
‘6 lbid, 565.
‘7 lbid, 596.

35

a chairman of a collective farm named after the Second Bolshevik Spring was reported to
have no interest and no skills for running this collective farm. As a result, there was a lack
of management in this kolkhoz (“v kolkoze tsan't polnaia beskhoziaistvennost ’ '). To
substantiate this charge, the peasants showed an example of a rush decision that this
chairman made: he ordered the dismantling of a recently bought woodshed for firewood."8
Peasants of Tolstikovo rural Soviet believed that the actions of their leaders caused
damage to the property of the kolkhoz. The chairman of Tolstikovo rural Soviet relocated
the beehives from one village to another (both of them were in the same collective farm)
and because of this relocation, peasants believed, bees died.49 Mismanagement of the
collective farm’s property that some local officials rendered often wrecked peasants’ best
intentions to support the most distinguished projects, such as, for example, the creation of
the advanced aircraft industry in the Soviet Union. For example, peasants of a village in
Smolensk province sew a strip of land in order to sell the harvest from this strip in autumn
and to raise funds for 0soviakhim, the Association for Support of the Soviet Aircraft
Industry. However, the chairman of a collective farm sold off the harvest fi'om the strip of
land to a peasant and, thus, peasants missed an opportunity to raise funds for their
project.50 The peasants, therefore, believed that management skills were critical for the
reorganization of the countryside, and they bitterly contested those in charge who were
unable to perform as they saw necessary.

Chairmen of collective farms, as peasants told in the reports, failed to organize

peasant work better and efficiently and, thus, undermined the meaning of a collective farm

 

‘8 lbid, 33.
‘9 lbid, 545.
5° Ibid, 690.

36

as a path to a better future. There was a considerable gap between an emphasis on the
scientific organization of labor that collectivization was supposed to bring about and the
actual situation in the countryside. A bookkeeper of Voloedovsk rural soviet,
Kavliuchenko, appeared to be very disappointed with a lack of agricultural knowledge in
his village.51 “They do not carry out crop rotation, they do not consult the rules of
agronomy. Where has the time gone when the magazine “Self-guide to agronomy” (Sam
sebe ggronom) actually taught people how to run agriculture?” Kavlyuchenko, therefore,
while supporting innovations that science was bringing to the countryside, was deeply
concerned that in his collective farm the peasant did not acquire, but, on the contrary, lost
the ability to incorporate the achievements of agronomy in everyday practice. Another
peasant was bothered by the fact that in his kolkhoz sowing was performed without plough
blades (nozhr‘), which diminished a chance for a reasonable harvest.’2 A similar criticism of
the inability to incorporate peasants’ experience in managing the land appeared in words
of Miron Sergeenkov, a peasant of the “Red Banner” collective farm.’3 He argued that the
extensive sowing campaign, which the authorities of his district undertook, could only
bring disastrous results. “If our leaders would not issue us such plans, but were sensitive
to the peasant experience, the life would be better. For we sow so much, but there was not
and would not be any grain.” Therefore, the appalling realities of bad planning and
inability to bring the best of agronomy or management into collective farms contrasted
with the rhetoric of reorganizing the countryside, which the peasants eagerly accepted.

Therefore, the peasants used a specific language describing the actions of local

 

5‘ Ibid, 459.
52 lbid, 457.
53 Ibid, 659.

37

leaders. Peasants believed that the bad management of their chairmen and their ignorance
of agronomy and basic skills of dealing with the land significantly undermined the ideas
that brought collective farms into existence. They did not see the realization of pronrises
that collectivization brought to the countryside and they apparently believed that
sometimes it was local oflicials who negatively afl’ected life in the kollchoz by their inability
to be up to demands that life in the collective farm posed. Collective farm members thus
judged the activity of local leaders according to explicit and implicit standards and
expectations to which local leaders were not always able to live up. The existence of a
hidden context in which the actions of local officials were described suggests, therefore, an
existence of a system of representations about how life in a collective farm should run and
how social relations after collectivization should be re-fashioned. The examination of the
language that peasants used to describe local omcials reveals this context. The fact that
peasants were often constructing identities of rural ofiicials as landowners or even class
enemies suggests that, according to peasants, local leaders played an ambiguous role in the
transformation of the countryside.

Although peasants branded local officials “landowners” or “class enemies” with a
great deal of persistence, these terms were deliberately misrepresenting the actions of local
omcials. In reality, rural officials had only a very slim chance to have connections with '
class enemies or act as real gentry landlords. For example, Minchenkov, a peasant in
Smolensk region, claimed that while the farm’s chaimran Gurov favored his class allies

(kulaks), he deliberately ignored the needs of poor and middle peasants. 5‘ Minchenkov,

 

’4 lbid, 120-22.

38

however, mentioned that Gurov used his power to support his relatives —- the chairman
distributed the meat of slaughtered animals only among his relatives. Two conflicting
interpretations contradicted each other in Minchenkov’s report: first, Minchenkov claimed
Gurov supported his relatives and then, he argued Gurov favored his class allies.55
Therefore, Minchenkov gave political connotations to Gurov’s nepotism, and used class
terms to describe this episode, which had nothing to do with class struggle in the
countryside. The story continued when Gurov, who evidently knew who was the author of
the report, threatened to expel Minchenkov from the collective farm. During one of brawls
Minchenkov attempted to blackmail Gurov with politically charged language when he
said, according to an informer: “Should I take back my cow and horse [from collective
farm’s common shed] and return to being independent?” Gurov arrogantly missed the
political connotations of this perspective: “Take back your cow and horse and go to hell,
because for us your horse and cow are nothing.”56 Apparently, Minchenkov was better at
mastering the dominant discourse of the Soviet state, because he skillfully shaped their
argument in terms of building or destroying the collective farm.

In order to denounce their local ofiicials, peasants used the terminology of serfdom
and compared a chairman with a landowner (pomeshchik). For example, women from
collective farm “Force” said about their authorities: “We were united with Tolstikovo
collective farm and they now feed off us, before we had only one landowner, and now
there are three. Chairman of the rural Soviet, chairman of the collective farm and steward

all boss around, sell our bread on the market, while we have to make do without bread.”57

 

5’ lbid, 438.
5‘ lbid
’7 lbid, 545.

39

Peasants of the “Red Banner” farm were talking among each other that they would better
leave a collective farm in the near future because, they said, ”a collective farm is a second
edition of the serfdom: we are working day and night, but we are starving because of such
leaders?”8 Although peasants of the “Red Banner,” whose opinion the report gave, might
refer to the highest political elite, they most likely referred to their local officials in the first
place. The beginning of this report described a chairman who refused to make feeding
troughs for pigs in this kolkhoz, which threatened the stock and hence the welfare of the
peasants. A chairman of a collective farm “Kommunaf’ Ivanov was so rude with the
members of the collective farm that the latter decided to give him a lesson.’9 Peasants
drew a picture in which they represented him as a general of czar’s army in the kolkhoz ’s
wall newspaper. Such an image invoked associations with the insolence, the arbitrariness
and dull wit that was attributed to highest officials of the recently gone regime. Therefore,
peasants clearly saw political connotations of the reorganization of the countryside, which
was taking place in Soviet Russia, and masterfully exploited the language of revolution
and social transformation towards the ends of Mg usual peasant business.

The term “landlord” (pomeshchik), which had pejorative connotations associated
with the czarist regime, and which peasants applied to local ofiicials as an expression of
the heaviest criticism, suggests that rural inhabitants developed a system of explicit and
implicit representations about collectivization and a fair way to organize life in a kolkhoz.
The emergence of a discourse of “landlords,” “oprichm‘na,” or “czarist generals” suggests

that the past represented an absolutely unacceptable social order in the countryside that

 

58 0

Ibid, 657.
59 Sokolov, Obsllghestvo i vlast’, 33. This information was taken from the security report on political
attitudes written on September 26, 1930.

40

actions of some local officials seemed to revive in collective farms. The appalling
discrepancy between peasants’ vision of collectivization and abuses of power in which
many local oflicials were involved, resulted in the creation of the language of social
discontent focused on local ofiicials. The peasants’ discourse that branded local officials as
gentry landlords, therefore, ofien indicated the dissatisfaction with the results of
collectivization of the countryside.

Such a language, prevalent in the countryside at the time of collectivization,
emphasized the disconnect between two important discourses, created by the peasants and
some of their kind that managed to get into positions of local authority. Promotion to the
duty of a chairman seemed to have undermined even the deepest connection between the
former peasant and now a local ofiicial and his fellow villagers. Moreover, even though
both of these two strata seems to have been speaking the same language, the greater part
of which was based on the vocabulary of collectivization and reorganization of social
structures, and counterposing the new soviet village to its czarist past, the chairmen and

the peasants were effectively using it against each other.

41

Chapter 3.
Negotiating the countryside? Local officials in the discourse of the central elites

The different discourses about the power of local officials which they elaborated
and which peasants reinterpreted were a response to the re-organization and re-
distribution of power through the transformation of institutions and values that
collectivization of the Soviet countryside in the 1930s represented. Both discourses
focused on the problem of transforming the countryside, betterment of peasant life and
increasing of peasant life, but approached this task from different angles. The conflict,
however, was not the only one in the countryside, for the Soviet political elites were ready
to forge a new language describing the social change. The two discourses of the
countryside, which reinterpreted Russia’s recent revolutionary experience, were at
considerable odds with the new rhetoric, developed by the party elite, bureaucrats, and
Soviet writers. This new rhetoric developed a negatively charged representation of local
leaders as people virtually incapable to bring changes in the countryside.

The role of local officials in the relations between the state and the society was
discussed in a recent work on collectivization by Sheila Fitzpatrick. One of the important
concepts in this study was of rural ofiicials as negotiators and middlemen between the
state and the society in the countryside. According to Fitzpatrick’s views,

“one of the kolkhoz chairman's main functions was to act as broker between the
village and the raion authorities. To play this role successfillly, he needed acceptance on
both sides: If the village “elected” him, he needed raion approval; if the raion “appointed”
him, he need the approval of the village. This was not fundamentally different from the

situation on Prince Gagarin's Manilovo estate a century earlier, where the serf manager
(burmistr) was “elected by and from the local peasants and approved by Gagarin.” 5°

 

6° Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasant_s, 194.

42

This view became popular among scholars and in fact oversimplified, if not
vulgarized, the complexity of social identities of rural officials and the nature of relations
between state and its representatives in the countryside. Representing rural officials in a
position of middlemen opened a number of enticing yet doubtful opportunities for scholars
to present the process of running the Soviet village afier collectivization as a process
lubricated by the presence of a negotiating agent - the lower rural authorities. According
to this interpretation, the Soviet peasantry acquired an ally in a form of the rural
authorities. At the same time, this interpretation suggested that the state was willing to
give much of its agency to local officials.

A closer look at the documents reveals that the nature of interactions between the
central party elites and local omcials was much more complex than the concept of
negotiation suggests. As chapters one and two have just shown, even though rural oficials
and peasants accepted the language of social transformation, which collectivization
brought, they effectively used it against each other, thus undermining the possibility of
negotiating, let alone agreement.

Moreover, if the local officials and the peasants were to find a common language,
the immediate problem waited for the chairmen and other local ofiicials on the other side
of the hierarchical ladder. For the local party elites and other agents of the state, such as
police, security service, and local representatives of the government departments, did not
allow the local authorities, who actually interacted with the peasants, to accept the
terminology of negotiation. Efforts to stand up for peasants and to correct norms were

considered as a politically dangerous action, which could be immediately dubbed “an

43

opportunistic disregard of government food procurements,” “an anti-Party and non-
Bolshevik action,”61 or a “counterrevolutionary activity.” Fulfilling procurement norms
was considered not an economic activity, but a political action, namely, the realization of
the directive of the Party. For example, Lazar Kaganovich, a highly placed Party secretary,
clearly articulated the state’s approach towards the implementation of planned quotas by
collective farmers.

"1‘ he most important questions around which the re-education of the collective
farmers must be centered, are, firstly, the struggle for a carefill attitude towards public
socialist property; secondly, punctual and unquestioning fulfillment by the collective farms,
collective farmers and Soviet farms of all their obligations to the Soviet state; and, thirdly,
the correct organization of labour, labour discipline...”62

Obviously, even the highly placed Soviet officials had no authority to adjust the
directive of CC VKPCb). For example, the chairman of the nominal Soviet government of
the RSFSR,63 S. I. Syrtsov (1893-1937), argued against the exaggerated quotas and
arbitrary planning and questioned the necessity to speed up collectivization and
dekulakization.“ He delivered a speech on this issue during the plenary meeting of
Moscow Party cell in September 7, 1930. Stalin and other members of the political elite
labeled his speech as an anti-Party action. Several months later, on November 4‘“, Syrtsov
was fired from the Politburo and the People Comnrissars’ Soviet. His died in the Great

Purges in 1937.

Local oflicials were in a much worse situation. What any efi’orts to adjust or

 

6‘ Wkp. 220, 137.

‘2 L.Kaganovich, “Political Departments in M.T.S.and Soviet Farms. Report delivered at the Joint Plenum
of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the C.P.S.U., January 10, 1933,” 261, From
the First to the Second Five-Year Plan (5.1., sd) 209-77.

53 Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov RSFSR

6‘ See a detailed description of this incident in Solov’ev, “Tetradi krasnogo professora,” 164-7.

 

44

negotiate state procurement quotas on a local level brought might be illustrated by the fate
of Tolchanova, a candidate for membership in the Tumanovo regional Party committee. In
the committee meeting Tolchanova said: “Collective farms are overburdened by the
sowing of flax, members of collective farms are unable to gather the harvest...”65 Her
report was considered an anti-Party action and in three months she was fired fiom her
position in the Tumanovo regional party cell. Later, she was transferred to the lower job
of being responsible for cultural activities in a remote turf production settlement. Such a
demotion meant that Tolchanova lost any possibility to play a significant role in party
affairs in this area.66 The attempt at open negotiation led Tolchanova to dismissal.
Sometimes the plans which the central party elites attempted to impose on the
countryside were adjusted. However, it is interesting to look at the language which the
rural officials were ready to use in such situations. The chairman of the farm “Unification,”
Grigorii Borisenkov, refilsed to fulfill the sowing plan issued by the rural Soviet. He
argued that he did not have enough seeds to sow the land.67 A chairman of the
Voloedovskii rural Soviet F edor Evseev claimed that the planned quotas for a collective
farm named after Kalinin were chosen out of thin air because there was no eflicient
amount of land to sow a planned amount of spring wheat.68 Loginov, a chairman of a
collective farm “Budennyi,” argued that there were not enough human resources on his
farm to implement planned quotas of gathering the harvest. Probably in fear of possible

punishment for the failure to gather the harvest, Loginov argued that because only four

 

65 erp. 86, 147.
‘6 Ibid, 226.

6’ Ibid 166, 156.
6" Ibid, 66.

45

men and twelve women were members of the collective farm, it would impossible to
harvest fifty-three hectares of winter wheat, forty hectares of rye and to mow thirty
hectares of land that was the planned quota for this collective farm.69 He demanded the
unification of the collective farm with another farm several times, but the local union of
collective farms did not satisfy his request. Therefore, when the adjustment of plans which
the central party elites attempted to impose on the countryside took place, it was put in
the language of immediate unavailability of resources. In other words, the peasant idea of
running agriculture, the disregard for which was equal to destruction in peasant eyes, took
hold as the major reason for such occasions.

Rural authorities were aware that failure to deliver planned amounts most likely led
to removal from both the ofiice and the party as well as further purges.7o For example, a
collective farm chairman, Moriakov, ordered to sow an area of twenty-eight hectares,
even though the plan required forty hectares. At the same time he knew that his refusal to
fulfill the spring sowing plan could result in his arrest. “It is better if they bring us to the
court now because it makes no difference when we will be brought to the court [ill the
autumn or spring].”71 Therefore, his action was more an act of desperation than a
deliberate attempt at negotiation.

A much more common attitude towards the delivery quotas on the local level
appeared in one letter from the chairman of Toropetsk’s regional executive committee,

Smorodin. He reported that the fulfillment of norms was achieved only for three reasons:

 

‘9 lbid, 476.

"° See on the link between purges from the Party and political repressions Vladimir Izmozilc Glaza i ushi
rahima. Gosudarstvennii politiches_kii kongol’ za naseleniem Sovetgcoi Rossii v 1918-1928 godakh
(Saint-Petersburg, 1995) 115.

7‘ Wkp. 166, 245.

46

the sewing of out-of-plan spring rye, plowing of virgin soil and influx of individual
farmers. Moreover, the norms issued by the Regional Administration of Tractors included
overall plowing area of collective farms and even areas where the houses of peasants were
located instead of the plowing area for a particular crop. However, he did not mention any
possibility to change norms (even obviously mistaken ones) and instead proposed to resort
to the further expansion of the activity of the MTS (Machine-Tractor Stations) and further
collectivization.

Therefore, rural officials did not have the possibility to change delivery quotas by
means of negotiating with the state and did not use the terminology of negotiation. When
they did, as in the case of Tolchanova, punishment came immediately. It was impossible to
negotiate quotas for they started to serve as a measure of success in the transformation of
the countryside. Even though these quotas were impossible to fulfil in many cases, the
inability of local officials to implement them resulted in their denunciation and accusations
that they were unable to build socialism in the countryside.

The refusal to negotiate with local officials was an immediate result of the
changing language that the party elites were ready to introduce into their relationship with
the countryside. They no longer relied on local officials as a force in the countryside that
would be able to respond to the challenges of social reorganization. The party elites,
although still emphasizing social tensions in the countryside, which in party rhetoric was
one of the major inspirations for launching collectivization, gradually imposed the strict
language of administrative hierarchy even on its willing allies in the countryside. The

resolutions of the plenary meeting of the party bureaucracy in January 1933 suggested a

47

change in the nature of relations between the countryside and the Soviet power. The
rhetoric of class war in the countryside, which changed its meaning and was eventually
appropriated by different social groups of rural society, began to coexist with the
discourse about the countryside as an appendix of the central administrative apparatus.
The conflict was now between the city and the countryside rather than between various
political and social forces within the countryside. While the city was imagined as a
“modern” place, the village became homogenized in the imagination of political elite as
backward. For example, Lazar Kaganovich, a highly-placed Party official, argued:

“..it would be ridiculous to expect all these numerous new large-scale entreprises
[newly established collective farms] in the field of agriculture, created in a culturally and
technically backward countryside, to become at once, in one year, exemplary and highly
profitable undertakings. This obviously requires time. It requires the untiring, patient,
tedious work of consolidating the collective and Soviet farms organizational/y, of
expelling the pernicious elements from these farms, of carefully selecting and rearing new,
tested Bolshevik cadres before the collective and Soviet farms can really become
exemplary. And undoubtedly they will become exemplary, just as many of our factories
and mills that in 1920-21 were uncoordinated and poorly organized have since become
prototypes.”72

The rhetoric of joining of villages to cities (smychka) in terms of mechanization of
labor processes, material well-being and intellectual development, thus implied a changing
nature of social transformation in the rhetoric of the political elite.

One of the major indications of a changing vision of social transformation was the
beginning of several campaigns to bring urban dwellers into the countryside which the

state launched in 1932. These campaigns revealed a set of prejudices that the state had

towards local officials, for these crusades challenged local ofiicials. The first one was a

 

72 L.Kaganovich, “Aims and Tasks of the Political Departments of the Machine and Tractor Stations and
of the Soviet farms,” 460-1, From the First to thejecond Five-Year Plan (5.1., s.d) 450-472.

48

campaign to bring urban dwellers, also dubbed the 25,000-ers because of their number, to
the countryside. While describing local officials as backward or selfish, the state
contrasted them with an image of educated and energetic urban workers who were
devoted to the idea of social transformation of the Soviet countryside. However, urban
newcomers also proved to have a different set of ideas about the best way to run collective
farms and came to question the possibility to implement planned quotas. Some Leningrad
residents were shocked by the coercion that became a common means to squeeze more
agricultural products from peasants and instead came to defend the peasantry.73 Yet again,
the 25,000-ers’ failure to achieve the planned norms was considered their failure to
transform the countryside and as a result, the state ceased working-class mobilization
during the drive of 25,000-ers after less than one year of its existence.

The establishment of Machine-Tractor Stations (MT 8), a state enterprise to ensure
the mechanization of the countryside, became the second campaign that also considerably
changed the nature of leadership in the countryside. These stations had to provide
sufficient equipment - tractors, mostly - for collective farms in exchange for agricultural
products that the staff from the MT S obtained from a collective farm. The director of
political department of MTS was granted power that greatly exceeded that of local
officials - for example, he did not have to submit to local authorities on the level of raion,
but only to the head to the Party cell in a province. However, chiefs of MTS’s political
departments came to argue against state procurement norms because they were impossible

to implement.74

 

73 Viola, Best Sons, 109-12.
74Alec Nove, An Economic History of thflSSR (Harmondsworth, 1982) 182.

49

This campaign indicated another development in the understanding of the social
transformation of the countryside that the state developed. Bringing machinery to the
countryside became one of the most significant criteria for measuring the success of
building highly-profitable collective farms. These MTS were described as the vanguard of
the countryside. For example, Yakovlev, the Commissar of Agriculture, argued that MTS
became a lever for the reorganization of agriculture along socialist lines.75 This
understanding of MTS as a leading force of social transformation created a tension
between the staff of the stations and local administration. For example, according to the
chairman of the collective farm “ll'ic ” Khalistov, a member of Gorsk’s MTS emphasized
that they, the staff of the machinery and tractor station, were the real captains of
modernization. Khalistov wrote: “When members of collective farms blamed the staff of
Gorsk’s MT S for the lack of tractors, the latter responded that tractors were being
repaired. In the meantime, [MT S's authority said] members of collective farm should plow
with horses and sow by hand and pull out an old wooden plow from a museum and start

to rely on it.“76

Apparently, the representatives and staff of the MTS did not consider the
peasant concerns important, and considered themselves to represent the momentum of
social transformation in the countryside.

Therefore, the experiments with the fashioning of rural officials in the countryside
that the party elites launched reflected a changing representation about the nature of

collective farms. The political elite wrote off local officials as people who could not

implement the critical changes in the countryside — the changes for which the party

 

7’ Y.Yakovlev, “Consolidating Collective Farms.” 343, From the First to the Second Five-Year Plg, 277-
346.

7“ Sokolov, Obshchestvo i vlast’, 250-51.

50

appealed to the 25,000-ers and resorted to a campaign of purges against local officials.
Also, the party promoted the mechanization of the countryside as a universal means to
transform the village, and intensified the campaign of establishing MTS in villages. These
two narratives —— one of backward local oficials who were an obstacle to build efiicient
collective farms and embodied the peasants’ inability to accept change, and another of the
mechanization of villages as a corollary to its urbanization, - were closely interwoven.
They complemented each other and revealed the dilemmas that the political elite faced in
ruling the countryside.

A novel by Nikolai Brykin Iron Mamai written in 1934, demonstrates the close

 

links between these two narratives." Its author was a part of the political establishment
who successfully matched the career of a party member and that of a writer - an “engineer
of human souls” in contemporary parlance. From 1917 Brykin served the new political
order: he set up partisan detachments in Pskov and Tver’ provinces in February 1918, and
also was the military commissar of the Velikie Luki region. Finally, in 1929 he became a
chief of the Union of Peasant Writers in Leningrad. In his works, Brykin created a glorious
picture of bringing tractors and building MT S in the countryside that literally turned life in
villages upside down. It was the staff of MTS that finally transformed life in his village and
made it socialist. At the same time, Nikolai Brykin showed rural officials who served in
the collective farms as lazy people that were only pretending to work. As portrayed in the
novel, the chairman of a rural Soviet was spending his time in drinking parties and used to

come to the workplace only when he wanted to do so. When urban dwellers organized

 

77 Nikolai Brykin, Zemlia v plenu. Stal’noi Mamai (Leningrad, 1969)

51

MTS in this village, they even did not bother to meet with this chairman and acted on their
own.

Many novels of 1930s while exploring the impact of modernization in the villages
portrayed local officials as people not suitable for modernization. In the novel y_i_rgin_So_il
Upturned by Mikhail Sholokhov, who was extremely influential on the formation of ideals
and practices of the Soviet literature of the 1930’s, the author created an image of Makar
Nagul’nyi. He was a peasant-activist who was a whole-hearted supporter of
collectivization, but whose extremism and lack of understanding of the complexity of the
social fabric only alienated peasants from the idea of becoming kolkhozm'lrs."8 Sholokhov
contrasted the image of Nagul’nyi with that of Davydov. Davydov, a 25,000-er and
former Petrograd worker, had to correct numerous errors committed by Nagul’nyi.

Not every writer, however, while denouncing local officials as narrow-minded and
extremist people, still shared sympathy for them, as Sholokhov did. Some works created a
grotesque image of local authorities in the countryside. Zaretskii, a writer, created an
image of extremist builders of a collective farm in his novel M in 1932.79 The
creators of a collective farm masked their egoistic aims behind their eagerness to subscribe
everybody to a collective farm. Two works, Orders of Taltanbai and Mg by a Kazakh
writer, Beimbet Mailin, portrayed chairmen of collective farms as pseudo-activists who,
while driving people into a collective farm, were seeking egoistic and selfish goals and
damaged the reorganization of the countryside. According to Mailin’s novel Mag,

chairmen initiated the imposition of immense taxation on peasants and spread the rumors

 

’8 Mikhail Sholokhov, Virgin Soil tram (Moscow, 1984).
’9 Georgii Lomidze, Leonid Timofeev, eds. Istoriia sovetskoi mnogonatsional’noi literatury, vol. 2
(Moscow 1970-1974).

 

52

that all women will become the collective property of collective farm in the future. In the
play “The Wedding” by a Georgian writer Sabit Rakhman, the chairman of a collective
farm Kerimov could not stand criticism. The writer portrayed chairman Kerimov as a
leader with total lack of concern for the affairs of his collective farm. Kerimov surrounded
himself with people who, while currying favor with him, were involved in the
embezzlement of funds from this collective farm. Kerimov was covering up his sycophants
until rank-and-file members of this collective farm exposed embezzlers and Kerimov.

The Russian writer, Andrei Platonov, harshly criticized this party-sponsored vision
of mechanization as the only force that was able to transform the agriculture into an
advanced modern industry. He demonstrated what could happen in the countryside if the
utopian projects brought from the city were implemented there. In his novel Iuvenil’noe
grog, Platonov demonstrated the chaos that the fascination with technical aspects of
collectivization and total disregard for its human dimension might create in the
countryside. Platonov’s character, a recently graduated engineer and a former driver,
locksmith and watchmaker Nikolai Vermo, came from Leningrad to a fictitious farm
“Parents’ Courtyards” that was located in steppe regions of the Soviet Union. He wanted
to resolve the problem of feeding livestock, which suffered fi'om a lack of water in this
farm together with Nadezhda Bostalaeva, the Soviet farm’s chairwoman.80 Vermo wanted
to resolve this problem once and for all and began to work on an immense utopian project
of extracting water from the core of the earth. The engineer put forward a project of

reaching underground seas that might rest deep inside the earth. While Nadezhda went to

 

8° Platonov, Yuvenil’noe more. See this work translated in French Mer De Jouvence (Paris, 1990).

 

53

the city to get supplies for this project, Vermo came up with a new idea to build a
tremendous tower that would serve as a gigantic slaughterhouse for livestock and would
save hundreds of tons of meat because it would eliminate stocks’ weight loss during
transportation to the city. In order to obtain building materials and to construct this tower,
Vermo completely dismantled this farm. When Nadezhda Bostalaeva came back fiom the
city, there was no farm as such - but only a surrealistic tower stripped of peasants’
property -

Therefore, the discourse about local officials that the state elaborated was a
reflection of changes in the understanding of objectives in the transformation of the
countryside. The portraying of local officials as backward peeple who hindered the
transformation of the countryside became a necessary part of the narrative of
transformation of the Soviet countryside into socialist and technically advanced. This
narrative was accompanied by glorification of the mechanization of the countryside. The
emphasis on bringing machines to transform the countryside was a hidden challenge to
local officials, whom the party elites now presented as not being able to live up to the
demands articulated by the state towards the countryside. The image of local officials
which this narrative emphasized, therefore, demonstrates the disconnect that existed
between the village and the cities in their approaches to the transformation of the Soviet

countryside.

54

Conclusion

In understanding the challenges presented by the social transformation and
reorganization of the countryside local officials occupy a central place. The emergence of
a discourse of people’s leaders, therefore, illustrates the complexity of the transformation
of power relations in Soviet Russia during collectivization. Power did not exist as a
privilege of a particular social group for, as the case of local officials demonstrates, the
power of local officials was contested, questioned, and challenged from above and fiom
below. Moreover, the challenges to local authorities were put in the same language as that
of the representatives who were trying to use it in the reorganization of the village.

A discourse of charismatic leaders that chairmen of collective farms created about
themselves reveals that the language of people’s leaders served as the dominant means for
channeling their authority in the countryside. This discourse suggests that local officials,
while internalizing the dominant revolutionary rhetoric, significantly re-defined it and
matched the state’s representation with its own utopia. Peasants, in their turn, re-defined
the meaning of the narrative of charismatic leaders. The rural population matched the
utopia of the rural ofiicials with the set of values it expected them to have. In many ways
the peasants had a utopian vision too, and they did not hesitate to let everybody know of
it. It was reorganization of the countryside that local officials, according to peasants,
hindered by their abuses of power. The emergence of a discourse of “landlords” about
local officials, therefore, served as an indication of peasants’ dissatisfaction with the
results of the reorganization of the countryside.

The vision of local officials served as a barometer of changes that the political elite

55

was undergoing in elaborating its policy of modernization of the countryside. Taking the
implementation of planned quotas as a criterion of the success of building socialism in the
countryside, the political elite refused to be engaged in negotiation with local officials and,
therefore, did not invest local officials with the function of a link between the state and
society. This failure to use local ofiicials as a channel between the center and periphery
demonstrated serious disconnect between the state and society. Local officials, peasants,
and the state each developed their own representation and discourse about the
reorganization of the countryside. The creation of a discourse about rural officials as
backward and unsuitable for implementation of changes in the countryside indicated an
important turn in the understanding of collectivization elaborated by the state: now it
emphasized the mechanization of the countryside brought from the city.

Therefore, although both local officials and Soviet peasants spoke in the same
language, born in the tribulations of the Russian Revolution, they applied it against each
other. Such a situation, I believe, was among the main reasons for the political elite in
Moscow to reconsider the politics of reorganization of the countryside. This in turn
resulted in the development of a new language of collectivization, which was based on

strict hierarchical controls and the mechanization of the countryside.

56

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Unpublished

Records of the Smolensk ObLast of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
1917-1941, Microfilm (Washington, DC, 3. a.) Wkp. 86, 166, 220.

Published

Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization ad the Terror
(London, 1986)

Fainsod Merle. Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Boston, 1989)

Figes, Orlando, Kolonitskii, Boris. Interpreting the Russian Revolution : The language and
symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999).

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin's Peasants: Resistantgand Survival in the Russian Village after
Collectivization (New York, 1994).

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interview and Other Writings, 1972-1977
(New York, 1980).

Garros, Veronique, Natalia Korenevskaya, Thomas Lahusen, eds. Intimagy and Terror:
Soviet Diaries of the 1930's (New York, 1995).

Graziosi, Andrea. The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks aLnd Peasants, 1917-1933,
Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge, 1996).

Hellbeck, Johen. “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (193 l-
1939),” Jahrbucher filer Geschichte Osteuropg 44 (1996) 344-3 73.

Hughes, James. §t_alinism in a Russian Province. A Study of Collectivizyation and
Dekulakization in Siberia (New York, 1996).

Izrnozik, Vladimir. Glaza i ushi:rezhima. Gosudarstvennii politicheskii kontrol’ 2a
n_aseleniem Sovets_koi Rossii v 1918-1928 godakh (Saint-Petersburg, 1995).

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).

Kotkin, Stephen. Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorlfichev era (Berkeley,
1991)

Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System. Essays in the Soeial History of Interwa;

57

Russia (New York, 1994).

Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. A Study of Collectiviaation (New
York, 1968).

Malia, Martin. The Soviet Tragedy: A Histog of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New
York, 1994).

 

Maksudov, Sergei. Neuslyshannye golog: Dokumenty Smolenskogo arkhiva. Kn.1 (Ann
Arbor, 1987).

Manning, Roberta. Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties. The
Case of Belyi Raion in 193 7. The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies
(University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, October 1984).
Nove, Alec. An Economic History of the USSR (Harmondsworth, 1982).

Osokina, Elena. Q fasadom "stalinskogo izobiliia”: ragredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii
naseleniia v gody industrializatsii (Moscow, 1998).

Pipes, Richard. Russia under the Bolshevik regime (New York, 1984).
Platonov, Andrei. Yuvenil’noe more (Moscow, 1988).

Popov, Vasilii. Krest’ianstvo i gosudarstvo: 1945-1953 (Paris, 1992).

 

Rosenberg, William, Siegelbaum, Lewis, eds. Social Dimensions of Soviet
Industrialization (Bloomington, 1993).

Scott, James. W_eapons of the Weak: Everyday Fomrs of Peasant Resistance (New Haven,
1985)

Sholokhov, Mikhail. Virgin Soil Uptumed (Moscow, 1984).

Sitnikov, Vladimir. “Khronika vremeni moego deda”, Sovetskaia Rossifi, August 26,
1988.

Sokolov, Andrei, ed. Golos naroda: Pis’ma i otkliki riadovih sovetskih ggazhdan o
sobitiiah 1918-1932 (Moscow, 1998).

Sokolov, Andrei, ed. Obshchestvo i vlast’ v l930-gody: povestvovanie v dokumenta_kh
(Moscow, 1998).

Solov’ev, A. “Tetradi krasnogo professora,” Neizvestnaia Rossiazfi XX vek, vol. 4
(Moscow, 1994), 140-231.

58

Vakhitova, T.M., V.A. Prokof’eva, eds. “Prokliatiia krest’ian padut na vashu golovu...
Sekretnie obzori krest’ianskih pisem v gazetu “Pravda” v 1928-30 godakh.” Novii Mir,
1993, 4: 166-83.

Viola, Lynne. The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vangaard of Soviet
Collectivization (New York, 1987).

 

Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels under Stalin: CollectivizatioL and the Culture of Peasant
Resistance (New York, 1996).

 

Viola, Lynne, McDonald, T., Zhuravlev, S. V., Mel’nik, A. N. Riazanskaia derevnia v
1929-1930 gg.: Khronikagolovokruzheniia. Dolgumenti i materialy (Moscow, 1998).

Christine Worobec. Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation
Period (Princeton, 1991).

59

"I17111111111111lilies