Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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For that reason, when Marx comes up with this tableau, this tremendous display of historical transformation taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there is negligible. peasants get called conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes in Marx's historical vision because they're limited in their horizon.
They farm their land, their plot, and don't have greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and having it free and clear. By contrast, industrialization, that's progress.
I mean, images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist sensibility, smokestacks, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry, a landscape transformed by the factory model, that's what Marx and then later the Bolsheviks have in mind.
Similarly, the goal, even as articulated in Marx's writings, is to put agriculture and farming on a factory model so that you won't need to deal with this traditional role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you'll have people who benefit from progress, benefit from rationalization by working factory farms. So in approaching the question of collectivization,
We have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades who are bound and determined to drag Russia kicking and screaming into the modern age and not to allow it be beaten because of its backwardness, as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are not what they have in mind. And in their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive heavy industry, is the sine qua non.
That's their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below. So in that case, The crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis like during the Civil War when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor, and the factories are at a standstill.
So this is really the core approach to collectivization, to put the productive capacities of the farmers in a regimented way, in a state-controlled way, under the control of the state. This produces vast human suffering because for the farmers— Their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the revolution is now taken away.
They no longer have the same incentives they had before to be successful farmers. In fact, if you're a successful farmer and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors who have no cow, you're defamed and denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter, even though you might be helping to develop agriculture in the region that you're from. So the result is human tragedy on a vast scale.
And allied to that, incidentally, is Stalin's sense that this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime for other reasons, whether it's because of their Ukrainian identity, whether it's because of a desire for a different nationalist project. So for Stalin, there are many motives that roll into collectivization.
And the final thing to be said is you're quite right that collectivization proves to be a failure because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the problems of agricultural production. By the end of the Soviet Union, they're importing grain from the West and In spite of having some of tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide.
And the reason for that had to do in part, I think, with the incentives that had been taken away. Prosperous individual farmers have a motive for working their land and maximizing production there. By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory-style agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in very different directions.
And the joke that was common for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries with similar systems was, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. So even labor... which is rhetorically respected and valorized in practice is rewarded with very slim rewards and the last point, immobility.
The collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed, because of internal passports, to move to the cities unless they have permission. They're locked in place. And I've got to say, at the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or neo-feudalism in terms of the restrictions on workers in the countryside.
That's right. And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine. Not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of...
this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice. And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or prettifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to
have vengeance visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, right? There's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole, and which is supposed to have accurate statistics. All of this is founded upon a foundation of sand. That's inadvertent. That's not an intended side effect.
But what you described in terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was you bring civil war. Now, had there been social... tensions before? Of course there had. Had there been envies? Had there been differentiations in wealth or status? Of course there had been.
But a deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage. And not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection.
those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized, will be winnowed again and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. And this pattern, incidentally, gets transposed and
in tremendously harrowing ways also to the entire group of Russian intelligentsia and intellectuals of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly that to... be independent, to have a voice which is not compliant, carries with it tremendous penalties, especially in Stalin's reigns of terror.
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