[SOUND] In November 1929, Stalin announced universal and immediate collectivization. All peasant land, all livestock, all other property had to be confiscated. Peasants had to be moved to large scale collective farms called "Kolkhozi". That means that they were actually turned into salaried workers. In December, Stalin announced the campaign of the liquidation of the kulak as a class. Here, you can see peasants voting to join the collective farms. Look at their eyes. They are rather hollow. And even a small child that is raising his hand, either they do not understand what they are doing or they have absolutely no way out of it. And on the right, there is a picture of the new collective farm workers working together in the field. Of course, they were promised that they would be given practice and other agricultural technology. But this did not happen, or happened very slowly. And these are the anti-kulak posters. What you can see here is the posters calling to destroy the kulaks as a class. The kulak on the left picture is very angry because you see, he's trying to hide his crops, but the crops are being taken away. The other picture is the same. Kulaks have to be destroyed as a class and you can see the lower part of the picture, there's kulaks and churches and all other enemies of socialism being squashed by a tractor like some vermin. Here is a picture of questioning of a kulak. The local authorities had the right to define who was actually a kulak and who was not, because there was no exact criteria and of course the local authorities were happy to pronounce as many people being kulaks as possible, because then they could confiscate more property. Even the poorest of the poor pheasants, if they did not want to join the kolkhozes or did not want to give whatever they had, to the collective farms, they were called "podkulachnik" which is a person who served or helped the kulaks. The campaign for de-kulakisation of the country was truly dreadful. These are kulaks on trial, and then a kulak family evicted. You can see that they are allowed to take the bare minimum. And down below, you see the picture of the kulak's, or a kulak, trying to speak to the OGPU officials. He is obviously showing them his hands and showing, I am a working person, look how hard I work. They are not interested. The leadership of the country did not really believe that the collectivisation could be successful without pressure. And so groups of young enthusiasts from factories and from cities mostly, the majority of them communists, were sent to the villages. There were several dozen thousands of them and these enthusiasts who understood nothing in agriculture at all, who did not have any local roots as, for example, some of the local administrators did. They were particularly cruel. They drove the collectivisation and often they stayed to lead the new kolkhozes. Simultaneously, a campaign of destruction of the churches and the rest of the clergy unfolded. The churches were looted and destroyed. And the clergy was humiliated. In fact, what was going on was not just the war against the kulaks. It was the war against a whole peasant way of life. The pace of collectivisation was amazing. By brute force from 1st, October '29 to 20th, February 1930, just a few months, the percentage of the collectivized peasantry grew from 7.5% to 52.7%. The peasants responded with uprisings. You can see the number of uprisings by year. Particularly have a look at 1930, there are thousands of uprising and in 1930, about 3.4 million peasants participated in the uprising in different parts of the country. The most dangerous thing for the Soviet government was that the murmurs of discontent reached even the army because the young recruits came from the villages. And they knew what was going on. And their relatives wrote to them what was going on. So of course, all these uprisings were very severely suppressed. OGPU send its unitive detachments, and they had to be suppressed. The result of collectivization was devastating. Peasants often killed their cattle rather than allow it to be expropriated for collective farms. 5.7 million households were destroyed. The number of economically active peasant population in the countryside, dropped by about 20 million. Stalin could not fail to see all that. So on 2nd March, 1930, he published an article in the Pravda, Dizzy with success. He praised the peasants' radical turn to socialism but he said that not all peasants joined the kolkhozes voluntarily. So he actually blamed the excesses on the local administration. The secret order was sent out, and the content was that some poultry should be returned to the peasants, and some livestock, and even some plots adjacent to their houses. The easing of policy on churches also was advised. At that moment, about 5 million peasants left the kolkhozes. But in autumn of the same year, the pressure to join the kolkhozes started all over again. In 1932, hundreds of thousands of kulaks were shot, imprisoned, or sent to labor camps. 2 million kulak families were exiled to far away regions of the country. Many died of starvation and exposure. The majority of peasants were forced to join the kolkhozes, but their life there was hard. Soviet agriculture never recovered after the excesses of collectivisation. Here is the grain production and you can easily see that the years of collectivisation were the worst in terms of grain production. A drop in livestock numbers just have a look that by 1935, cattle, pigs, sheep, there was about half of them compared to the beginning of collectivization. So the only benefit of collectivization, real benefit, was that the Soviet state could manage peasants easier. One of the most horrific results of collectivization was the man-made famine of 1932, 33. The regions that suffered most, you can see the map here. They were Kazakhstan, lower Volga Basin, Southern Siberia, North Caucasus, Ukraine. These were the areas which were the richest with the best soils and which used to be the granary of Russia. That is why the opposition to collectivization here was the strongest. The peasants had to be punished so all their grain, all their reserves were confiscated. And the government allowed people to die, because they did not get any assistance. The government continued to export grain while the people were dying. And unlike 1920s, when Lenin allowed external aid, Stalin did not allow it. Now, these are the pictures from the famine. You can see that they are quite awful. The areas suffering from famine were cordoned off. Those who tried to flee were returned. 5 to 7 million people died. And in 1932, 33, about 70 million people were in one way or another suffering from hunger or famine. The famine led not only to the deaths but also to moral degradation. The OGPU reported many murders, and even the cases of cannibalism. On 19th November, 1932, Stalin's wife committed suicide. She had a quarrel with Stalin on the eve of that and probably that was the reason for her decision to end her life. But there was speculation that Nadejda Allilueva accused her husband of butchering people. It was said that she heard about the famine in industrial academy where she studied from her colleagues there. If even she did not know about famine. What can we say about the rest of the population? The fact of famine was not advertised. Nobody could read about it in the media. Nobody could hear about it. Some knew very little, others knew nothing at all. In February 1933, Stalin spoke at the congress of the best kolkhoz workers. This is what he said. One of our achievements is that the vast masses of poor peasants, who formerly lived in semi-starvation, now, in the collective farms, became middle peasants, have attained material security. [SOUND]
