BOOK REVIEW by Andrew Taylor, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization by Lynne Viola

The Best Sons of the Fatherland:Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization, Lynne Viola, 1988: New York, Oxford University Press,A BOOK REVIEW By Andrew Taylor



In November 1929 at its Central Committee plenum, the Communist Party of the USSR volunteered to take on and organize collectivization of agriculture. Of 70,000 volunteers, 27,OOO plus were selected, and became known as “the 25,000ers”. In the main they were factory worker-activists, factory committee activists and union committee members. About 80 per cent of them were Communist party members, or in the party's youth organization. Over 50% were under 30 years of age; 8% were women. A strict vetting process was run to eliminate workers from wealthier farmer backgrounds, as well as drunkards, ‘bad characters’, and those with connections to party opposition factions.

After a brief training course the 25,000'ers were sent out amid communist party rallies to the rural areas in order to establish the organized collectivization of agriculture. They were of the most class-conscious layers of the industrial working class prepared to assume tasks as chairs of collective farms and administrators.

Soviet archival records reveal that the old rural officialdom, established in their roles, very often resented the urban volunteers' entry onto their turf, denigrated them, and frequently handed them shovels and pointed to the manure mound. The peasantry was to say the very least ambivalent from the start in their approach to the centre’s exacting grain requisitions, and was often hostile to the urban Party volunteers and their outsider, urban, working class culture. The letters of peasants to relatives show that there was resentment against the valorization of the urban industrial working-class at the expense of the peasantry. We might at this point refer to the long history of Marxian disdain for peasant ‘backwardness’.(“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life..(Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Sec. 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians). In organizing resistance to the post 1928 collectivization policy, the peasants circulated Stalin’s earlier pro-famine, authoritarian, speeches and essays as proof of the unfairness and novelty of the new line on Agriculture.

Lynne Viola notes that documents show the 25,000’ers general attitude towards the peasants was a distinct improvement on that of the average rural officials. But no influx of new organizers is accepted into a bureaucracy without incident, and a few volunteers were murdered with the utmost cruelty. At the close of the collectivization 25,000'er campaign at the end of 1931, fully 18,000 of the volunteers remained in the countryside and had retained leading positions in rural party and administrative structures.

The author states that collectivization was intended "to be a revolution which would undermine the old order, modernize agriculture, institute a reliable method of grain collection, stimulate a cultural revolution, and build a new social and administrative base in the countryside". Today we know modernization was achieved at a stunning human and political cost to the soviet people, but in light of new research from the soviet archives (including letters from 25,000’ers in the countryside back home) the enthusiasm and valor of the 25,000'ers themselves can not be gainsaid.

According to Viola, agricultural collectivization, though at the start a proletarian policy of political education launched by Stalin through the 25,000’ers, became limited in its potential by ad hoc policy responses made in response to immediate crises and widespread peasant resistance. And it is her contention that collectivization came over time to be shaped less by Stalin and the party center than by the often less-than-disciplined or irresponsible activity of rural officials, the experimental methods of collective farm leaders left to manage as best they knew how, and the stark realities of a backward countryside and the wealthier and middle peasantry who did massive wrecking by destroying cattle, hoarding, and destruction of reserves.1

According to Viola, the Centre’s response changed following the first wave of the 25,000'ers service in the vanguard of the revolution. In response to continued wrecking, strict repressive measures rather than class political action gave the lie to soviet “control” of agricultural policy.

And the policy of repression that grew with the resistance to collectivization, continued after the collectivization struggle had completed in distortions of Leninist norms and violations of socialist legality.

The author calls the 25,000'ers the cadres of the Stalin revolution, the advanced workers, served in the front lines of the Stalin revolution. The Centre had continuing outbreaks of food shortages in the cities and viewed the “kulaks” or wealthier peasants as the hindrance to socialist construction and the open enemy of the working-class. Shortages and dislocations became famine. And as we know, severe famine led to terrible famine in areas of the Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933. Millions are believed to have perished, though estimates vary considerably. Hundreds of thousands who were charged with kulak hoarding and wrecking of the Grain requisitions endured harsh exile to the north or east.

Viola's closely documented study using original documents from the Soviet Archives illustrates the jury is still out on the precise conjunction of factors responsible for the famine. Some other prominent historian-agronomists do not concur in the claim made by many Ukrainian nationalists that the famine was an "act of genocide" and question the whole thesis of a collective persecution of the Ukrainian nation. Professor of History at the University of West Virginia , Mike Tauger and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Steven Wheatcroft, argue that the famine was not a result of a deliberate policy against the Ukrainians, and they bring out agricultural and political documentation to illustrate their contention that the widespread 1932 starvation in Ukraine and western Russian areas was due to a lack of control over the dynamics of collectivization by the central leadership, misguided or misapplied economic policies during collectivization, to severe drought conditions, and to a harvest that turned out to be much smaller than originally anticipated.

This is on one level an academic debate among experts on soviet agricultural and national history. But it is at the same time an impassioned often extremely politicized contended space with an ongoing vigorous global campaign by Ukrainian nationalists, anti-communists, revisionist communists and the crisis-ridden “orange revolution” government of Ukraine (which is pressing a charge of genocide at the UN as one front of its ongoing struggle with Moscow). The head of the Russian State Archive, Vladimir Kozlov, rejects claims of genocide in 1930’s Ukraine. Kozlov claims not a single document exists in the archival materials that would even indirectly suggest that a strategy was adopted against Ukrainians that was different from other regions, never mind a strategy aimed at genocide.

Viola affirms the 25,000ers as enthusiastic idealist workers fighters for Socialism, the best of their generation. She shows that early in the collectivization campaign the Soviet state mobilized working-class activist support for collectivization and also shows from Soviet Archive documentation that, contrary to previous anti-communist claims, the 25,000ers went into the countryside as enthusiastic recruits 2. Her unique social history uses an "on the scene" approach from letters and documents of cadre to offer a new understanding of the process of the USSR agricultural revolution under Stalin.


Second, I suggest to academic readers that they read RW Davies & SG Wheatcroft's book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-33 (NY: Macmillan, 2004)esp p 214; Also see Mark B Tauger's article: "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933", Slavic Review, 50:1 (1991) esp p 89; and see Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 (Cornell U Press: 2001) esp 273-308

NOTE: None of these scholars are ‘Stalinists’. They are social scientists and historians of Soviet agriculture who do not however support the notion of a conscious conspiracy by Stalin and the CPSU of 1929-31 to create a "Ukrainian Holocaust". Their careful research shows there are intermediate positions.
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1. From 1929 to 1933 the number of cattle fell from 70.5 to 38.4 million, pigs from 26 to 12.1 million, horses from 34 to 16.6 million, and sheep and goats from 146.7 to 50.2 million.

2.Such an upsurge [pod" em] which we now observe is characteristic only
of large revolutionary overturns. This is not an ordinary upsurge, but a
revolutionary upsurge, especially the upsurge among workers. All
questions of workers' daily life [byt], all questions with which the trade
unions are concerned in relation to wages, etc. are now subsumed by the
question of collectivization. All problems in workers' provisioning, all
questions about inefficiencies, food shortages, high prices, etc., are
subsumed by collectivization. All the attention of the working class is
centered on collectivization. It [the working class] instinctively feels that
the key to all these problems is collectivization and that the sooner this
issue is resolved, the sooner all the remaining problems will be resolved
. . . We presently have a real revolutionary movement in the working
class for collectivization: a real revolutionary socialist campaign to the
countryside for collectivization when workers gladly decline a high
salary and go to the countryside. There are masses of cases of the best
skilled workers refusing high salaries and going to the countryside.

A. A. ANDREEV, speech at the Third Plenum of the North
Caucasus Regional Party Committee, 13 January 1930
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Chapters of Viola text are as follows:

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
by Lynne Viola; Oxford University Press, 1987. 292 pgs.
Introduction
1: Workers to the Countryside: from Revolution to Revolution

2: The Recruitment of the 25,000ers

3: Setting the Campaign in Motion

4: The Drive to Collectivize Soviet Agriculture: Winter 1930

5: The 25,000ers and the Cadres of Collectivization: The Offensive on Rural Officialdom

6: The 25,000ers at Work on the Collective Farms

7: The Denouement of the Campaign
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
A Note on Sources
Index