Description:
This is a study of Collectivisation in the 1930s when the Soviet State set out to organise rural life and ensure enough grain was produced to allow the Five Year Plans to work. Most studies look at this period from the point of view of Stalin and the Party. Using new evidence and peasants’ own accounts of events, this thorough, yet immensely readable, account looks at those dramatic events from the point of view of the peasants and their experiences.
The text looks carefully at the strategies peasants used to try to retain some of their old freedoms and of bending the wishes of the Party to meet their needs and priorities. It paints a picture of collectivisation as a ‘big idea’, and shows how the details and practices were moulded by interplay between peasants and Party over the whole of the 1930s – indeed it highlights concessions made by Stalin in the mid 1930s to try to appease peasant resistance.
Sheila Fitzpatrick gives a much more rounded view of the chaotic events in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and suggests that in many small ways peasants were able to assert their will and to subvert the wishes of the State. An interesting and thought-provoking book.
