Moscow is Far Away: Peasant Communal Traditions in the Expulsion of Collective Farm Members in the Vyatka–Kirov Region 1932–1939

Abstract

This article examines how collective farmers and collective farm administrations used expulsion to police their communities. They expelled people who threatened the economic stability of the collective farm by engaging in otkhod (seasonal migrant labour), theft or absenteeism. These expulsions often ran directly counter to central directives which targeted class enemies for expulsion in the early 1930s and later sought to curtail the practice and then forbade it outright. The fact that collective farms repeatedly expelled people in defiance of central or regional guidance demonstrates the lack of control the Soviet state and Communist Party often had over the countryside in the 1930s.