Describe_the_Effect_of_Stalin's_Policy_of_Collectivisation_on_Russia.

Describe the effect of Stalin’s Policy of Collectivisation on Russia. Prior to 1928 Russian agriculture was in a very primitive state, peasants would work their own small plot of land producing enough for their own consumption, any surplus that they did produce was sold on locally for profit. This set up was not producing enough food for the workers in the towns and cities and in order for Stalin’s plans for modernisation and industrialisation to succeed something had to be done. That something was collectivisation, this was his idea of pooling together all of the peasants small areas of land into larger, collective farms or kolkhoz, large enough to enable the use of tractors and other machinery which would increase their yield and speed up production. 90% of the produce from the kolkhoz was sold to the state at a low fixed rate, the profit from this was then split between the workers, and the other 10% was kept by the workers to be shared out for their own consumption. These Kolkhoz were run by a manager and a committee who was responsible for ensuring that the kolkhoz reached its targets set by the government. Initially there was very strong opposition to this new way of farming with many peasants setting fire to their land and killing livestock, they saw this action as preferential to handing it all over to the state; half of Russia’s 60 million cows were slaughtered as a result. Stalin sent in the OGPU to put an end to this opposition and around ten million kulaks (affluent farmers who had made profits from selling produce) were arrested and either imprisoned or shot. In summary Stalin’s policy of collectivisation between 1928 and 1941 greatly improved methods of farming in Russia, but fell short of improving agricultural output, this was due mainly to the opposition to the policy and the inexperience of the peasants working the land, an example of this is the fact that although the peasants could now hire tractors from the Motor Tractor Stations, many of them had not been trained in the effective use of them, ironically, the peasants who had the knowledge and experience to improve farming were the kulaks whom Stalin had had arrested. Eventually though more and more of the farms in Russia were collectivised, by 1932 62% of farmland was part of a kolkhoz and this rose to 93% in 1937. Collectivisation was successful in modernising the way farming was carried out, the Motor Tractor Stations were an integral part of this, and as a result enough food was now being produced to feed the Red Army, however Russian farming was still inefficient compared to western standards and there were still food shortages in the towns and cities leading to the worst famine in Russian history, in 1932 where around 20 million people died. Hardest hit was the Ukraine where around 5 million people lost their lives. In fact there was a sharp decline in production figures in many areas of agriculture, mainly due to the lack of expertise that there was with the kulak’s that Stalin had imprisoned. It wasn’t until 1940 that figures for grain production reached the levels of 1914