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History’s Most Catastrophic Man-made Errors

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 34 min

Wanggongchang Explosion - Beijing — The Wanggongchang Explosion devastated Beijing. Pintrest

24. Collectivization Was Unpopular With Soviet Peasants – Especially the Best Soviet Peasants

Propaganda poster depicting a too-well-fed prosperous kulak peasant getting pushed off the land so it could get collectivized by the rest of the peasantry. Wikimedia

To Stalin and those who thought like him, collectivization sounded good in theory – win, win, all around. In practice, it turned out to be a disaster. For one thing, most peasants were reluctant to give up their private plots in order to join the collective farms. That was especially so among the more prosperous peasants, known as kulaks. “Prosperous” when it came to peasants was relative in the Soviet context, often denoting those successful enough to afford a cow or a few pigs.

In addition to radical changes to traditional village life, collectivization forced peasants to forfeit their land and livestock to the collective farms. It also entailed selling their produce to the government at minimal prices, set by the government itself. Stalin’s USSR being what it was, it was decided to force collectivization down the peasants’ throats, and crush all who objected.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.