(REVISED) BOOK REVIEW by Andrew Taylor, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization

(REVISED)BOOK REVIEW by Andrew Taylor, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization, , 1988: 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, just under 8% were women. A strict vetting process was run to eliminate workers from wealthier farmer backgrounds, as well as drunkards 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 least ambivalent in their approach to the centre's grain requisitions that had begun in 1928, and were often hostile to the urban Party volunteers and their outsider, urban, working class culture. Based on her groundbreaking work in the Soviet archives, Lynne Viola notes that the volunteers' 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 '31, 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".

According to Viola, collectivization, though an initiative from the Centre, became limited in its potential by ad hoc policy responses. It is her contention that collectivization came over time to be shaped less by Stalin and the Party militants 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 and stubborn realities of a backward countryside and a traditional peasantry which maintained defiance to the communist workers in their midst with their new ways.

According to Viola, the Centre’s response changed following the first wave of the 25,000'ers revolutionary service in the vanguard of the revolution. In response to continued wrecking and uneven response from the peasantry and officials, strict repressive measures rather than class political action belied soviet control of agricultural policy.

The author calls the 25,000'ers the cadres of the Stalin revolution who, as advanced workers, served in the vanguard of the revolution. But a large percentage of the kulaks destroyed their livestock rather than submit them to socialist ownership in the collectives 1. The Centre had continuing outbreaks of food shortages in the cities and viewed the “kulaks” or wealthier peasants as the open enemy of the working-class. Shortages and dislocations became famine. And as we know, the severe famine led in many areas of the Ukraine to mass death. Millions are believed to have perished. Thousands faced exile to the east.

Viola's closely documented Study using original documents from the Soviet Archives illustrates the jury is still out on the precise conjunction of reasons for the Ukrainian 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 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, 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 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 personal contended space with an ongoing vigorous global campaign by Ukrainian nationalists, anti-communists, and the “Orange Revolution” government of Ukraine which is pressing a charge of genocide at the UN as a front of its ongoing struggle with Moscow.

Viola affirms the 25,000ers as enthusiastic idealist workers fighters for Socialism, the idealist youth of their generation. She shows that the Soviet state mobilized working-class 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 militant cadre to offer a new understanding of the process of the USSR agricultural revolution under Stalin.

On a personal note my ex-mother in law was a child of 10 living on her parents farm on the outskirts of Ternopil, Ukraine in 1932 and has no memory of any famine in her area. So we need to be careful about which regions were most impacted by famine.

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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Information on the Viola book:

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
Conclusion
2: The Recruitment of the 25,000ers
Conclusion
3: Setting the Campaign in Motion
Conclusion
4: The Drive to Collectivize Soviet Agriculture: Winter 1930
Conclusion
5: The 25,000ers and the Cadres of Collectivization: The Offensive on Rural Officialdom
6: The 25,000ers at Work on the Collective Farms
Conclusion
7: The Denouement of the Campaign
Epilogue
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
A Note on Sources
Index