Collectivization in USSR: Practice and Ideology, Some Aspects of its Impact on Rural Society

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive overview of the main approaches developed in historiography to understand the process of collectivization in the USSR, which determined several specific features of the transition of the domestic society from an agrarian phase to an industrial one. Arguing for the viability of the New Economic Policy’s rural economy and the deadlock of Stalin’s version of its collectivization, the author relies on the inherent “sympractical” type of peasant culture. The historically developed worldview of rural community members formed the basis for high labor motivation. The destruction of this worldview during the process of collectivization became the cause of tragedy. The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of two stages of socialist transformation in the village. It examines the destructive impact of the expropriation of peasants on the economy in the first stage and explores the issues of crisis resolution in the second stage through the removal of certain restrictions on private farming. The article analyzes the factors of social degradation in the Soviet countryside in the 1930s and identifies their manifestation in interethnic relations. The novelty of the research lies in the author’s examination, based on the materials from the declassified “special file” of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU(B) in the 2000s, of peculiar manifestations of collectivization contradictions in the fate of the Finnish population in the Leningrad region.