Hammer, Sickle, and Soil: The Soviet Drive to Collectivize Agriculture by Jonathan Daly (review)

There is such an abundant literature on the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR (including works by L. Viola, S. Fitzpatrick, R.W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, A. Applebaum, M. Lewin, and N. Jasny) that one may wonder whether anything significantly new and important can be written about this traumatic event. Jonathan Daly's Hammer, Sickle and Soil answers this question in the affirmative, and he does it in a very unique way.

A well-published historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Daly focuses on one of the most significant and devastating policies initiated by Joseph Stalin. He adopts the format of a coffee table book to convey the real drama of a large-scale agricultural reform that an authoritarian regime enforced upon its citizens. Daly has chosen from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives more than 60 Soviet propaganda posters from the 1920s and 1930s to illustrate the history of the collectivization of agriculture—a large-scale experiment in social engineering that was intended, in tandem with a frenetic industrialization drive, to take the country to Karl Marx's promised land of socialism. These colourful and beautifully reproduced posters express the Communist authorities' desire to create a new proletarian art, one that was anchored in the ideology of socialist realism, an official artistic movement that represented life as envisioned in the bright socialist future, not the harsh present. They also attest to the authorities' attempt to gain control of the public discourse in regions that were hostile to a national policy that proved to be so damaging to the Soviet peasants, already deeply offended by a vigorous antireligious campaign. The visual syntax of these posters—the hammer, the red star, and the sickle; the demonized "kulaks" (the so-called rich peasants) and clerics; the tractor; the enthusiastic peasant woman; and the fatherly image of Joseph Stalin overlooking plentiful harvests of grain—reveals the wide gap between the idealized propaganda and the brutal reality of the whole experience. Indeed, to single out just one important example, women did not eagerly rush to join the collective farm; rather, they constituted the bulk of the peasants protesting forced collectivization. These posters provide a remarkable foil for the economic devastation wrought by the first Five-Year Plan in the countryside, but a necessary one for Soviet leaders who often perceived the peasants as uneducated, superstitious, and hostile to the revolution.

Numbers eloquently attest to the magnitude of this disaster: the forced merger of some 26 million family farms into approximately 250,000 collective farms; over 40 million cattle and horses slaughtered; 2.1 million peasants herded into boxcars and exiled to remote and often inhospitable localities; at least 5 million victims of the famine of 1932–1933—a tragedy completely denied by the government, but no less real—and roughly 12 million people, envisioning a bleak future in the countryside, left it for urban areas. Even though peasant unrest reached massive proportions, the authorities successfully crushed this resistance. Such a victory, Daly concludes, came at a price: though grain was ultimately squeezed out of the peasantry in order to finance, through its exportation, the industrialization of the country and feed a much enlarged urban population, Stalin's collectivization removed from the countryside a significant number of hardworking and competent farmers, had a negative impact on the work ethic of those who remained in the collective farms, and, ultimately, "sowed the seeds of destruction of the entire Soviet experiment" (p. 128). That this country, the former breadbasket of Europe under the last tsars, had to import large quantities of grain from the West, beginning in the late 1950s, is arguably the best possible proof that collectivization was a real disaster for the USSR. Furthermore, the fact that the collective farms gradually disbanded in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 validates this conclusion.

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