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From the article by JV Stalin “The Year of the Great Turning Point. To the XII Anniversary of October ʺ. November 3, 1929

Source: The tragedy of the Soviet village. Collectivization and dispossession. Documents and materials Volume 1 May 1927 ‐ November 1929. Moscow ROSSPEN 1999. Pp. 740‐742.

Archive: True. 1929.7 November. No. 259; Stalin I.V. Op. T. 12. M., 1955.

S. 118‐135.

No. 265

The past year has been the year of a great turning point on all fronts of socialist construction. This turning point went and continues to go under the sign of the decisive offensive of socialism against the capitalist elements of town and country. A characteristic feature of this offensive is that it has already given us a number of decisive successes in the main areas of socialist restructuring (reconstruction) of our national economy.

It follows from this that the party was able to make good use of our retreat at the first stages of the New Economic Policy in order to organize a turning point and launch a successful offensive against the capitalist elements later, at its subsequent stages ...

III. In the field of agricultural construction

Finally, about the third achievement of the Party in the past year ... We are talking about a radical change in the development of our agriculture and backward individual farms to large‐scale and advanced collective farming, to joint cultivation of the land, to machine‐tractor stations, to artels, collective farms, relying on new technology, and finally, to gigantic state farms, armed with hundreds of tractors and combines.

The Partyʹs achievement here lies in the fact that we have succeeded in turning the bulk of the peasantry in a number of regions away from the old, capitalist path of development, from which only a handful of wealthy capitalists benefit, and the vast majority of the peasants are forced to ruin and live in poverty, to a new, socialist a path of development that displaces the wealthy capitalists, and re‐equips the middle peasants and the poor in a new way, equips them with new tools, equips tractors and agricultural machines, in order to enable them to get out of poverty and kulak bondage on the broad path of comradely, collective cultivation of the land.

The achievement of the party is that we have managed to organize this radical change in the depths of the peasantry itself and lead the broad masses of the poor and middle peasants, despite incredible difficulties, despite the desperate opposition of all and every dark forces, from the kulaks and priests to the philistines and the right opportunists ...

The assertions of the Right opportunists (Bukharinʹs group) about the following collapsed and scattered into dust:

a)  the peasants will not go to the collective farm,

b) the accelerated rate of development of collective farms can only cause massive discontent and a split between the peasantry and the working class,

c)  the ʺmain roadʺ of socialist development in the countryside is not collective farms, but cooperatives,

d) the development of collective farms and the attack on the capitalist elements of the countryside can leave the country without bread.

All this collapsed and scattered into dust, like old bourgeois‐liberal rubbish.

First, the peasants went to collective farms, went to whole villages, volosts, districts.

Secondly, the mass collective‐farm movement does not weaken, but strengthens the bond, giving it a new production base. Now even the blind can see that if there is any serious discontent among the bulk of the peasantry, it does not concern the collective farm policy of the Soviet government, but the fact that the Soviet government cannot keep up with the growth of the collective farm movement in supplying the peasants with machines and tractors.

Third, the controversy over the ʺpillar roadʺ of the socialist development of the countryside is a scholastic controversy, worthy of young petty‐bourgeois liberals like Eichenwald and Slepkov. It is clear that as long as there was no mass collective farm movement, the lower forms of cooperation, supply and marketing cooperation, were the “high road”, and when the highest form of cooperation, its collective farm form, appeared on the scene, the latter became the “high road” of development ...

Fourthly, now even the blind can see that without an attack on the capitalist elements in the countryside and without the development of the collective‐farm and state‐farm movement, we would not have now had decisive successes in the grain procurements gained in the current year, nor those tens of millions of poods of inviolable grain reserves that have already accumulated in the hands of the state.

Moreover, it can be said with confidence that thanks to the growth of the collective‐farm and state‐farm movement, we are finally emerging or have already emerged from the grain crisis. And if the development of collective and state farms proceeds at an accelerated pace, then there is no reason to doubt that in just three years our country will become one of the most lucrative countries, if not the most lucrative country in the world.

What is new in the present collective‐farm movement? What is new and decisive in the current collective‐farm movement is that peasants go to collective farms not in separate groups, as was the case before, but in whole villages, volosts, districts, even districts.

What does it mean? This means that the middle peasant went to the collective farms. This is the basis of that radical change in the development of agriculture, which constitutes the most important achievement of Soviet power over the past year ...

Stalin

 

Source;

Transcripts from Soviet Archives, Svitlana M, Erdogan A