Change and Consolidation 1929–1930

Abstract

The defeat of the Right removed any restraint on implementing the radical policies of forced collectivisation and ‘elimination of the kulaks as a class’. Molotov’s prominence in the attack on the Right meant that he was in the forefront of the collectivisation campaign, but he had already demonstrated his own inclination to extreme policies in his attitude towards the kulaks. In February 1929, he wrote of a ‘deep chasm’ between ‘the policy of an offensive against the kulak and the theory of the peaceful growth of the kulak into socialism’. The latter led to ‘an emancipation of the capitalist elements, and finally to the re-establishment of the power of the bourgeoisie’.1 At this time Molotov was preoccupied with the struggle against the Right, and at the Central Committee plenum, 16–23 April 1929, prior to the XVI Party Conference, Kalinin introduced the main proposals on agriculture for the Conference.2 In mid-July, however, in his speech to the Ivanovskii oblast’ party conference, one of the first in which he dealt in any detail with industrialisation and the pyatiletka, Molotov asserted that ‘our chief difficulties lie in agriculture’. He claimed that ‘the influence of the petty-bourgeois factor … puts its stamp on a certain number of party proletarians, especially those who have close connections with the countryside’. Later in the speech he made a clear distinction between the ‘offensive’ against the kulak and Trotskyite ‘panic in face of the kulak’.3