Amid reports of массов seizures and destruction of livestock in villages in the Novosibirsk region, historian Rustam Aleksander recalled how the Soviet authorities carried out collectivization and dekulakization nearly a century ago.
In the winter of 1929-1930, peasants who owned land, cows, and horses were forced to transfer their property to collective farms and hand over harvests to the state at nominal prices. Officially, this was presented as a way to boost grain procurement and improve agricultural efficiency, but many villagers saw it as exploitation.
At the same time, dekulakization was underway: wealthier peasants were stripped of property and sent into exile. According to the article, local officials had no clear instructions, so village campaigns were carried out by council workers, communists, Komsomol members, laborers, and students, many of whom had little understanding of rural life.
Meetings at which peasants were expected to sign away their land and livestock were often disrupted. People resisted in different ways, from demonstrative acts to efforts to break up the proceedings. Pressure then intensified. Those who refused to join collective farms were threatened with being labeled kulaks, losing their property, and exile. Some were arrested on the spot, while agitators, according to the cited accounts, sometimes brandished weapons, detained villagers in local council buildings, and beat them.
Livestock was often taken without warning: animals were driven away by force after barn locks were broken. Rather than surrender cows, pigs, sheep, and horses, many peasants slaughtered them themselves. The material says that in the Central Black Earth region alone, during the first three months of 1930, about 25% of cattle, 53% of pigs, 55% of sheep, and 40% of poultry were destroyed.
“Those joining the collective farm, sign up with me; those who do not want to, sign up with the police chief,” one official in the Urals was quoted as saying.
On March 2, 1930, Pravda published Joseph Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success,” which shifted responsibility for the excesses onto local leaders. The campaign briefly slowed, and some peasants left the collective farms, but collectivization and dekulakization soon resumed, leaving, as the text notes, millions of shattered lives.