Stalin and the Peasantry: Reassessing the Postwar Years, 1945–53

Abstract

The structural transformation that occurred in the countryside in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a consequence of the Stalinist revolution was a truly national upheaval, affecting some three-quarters of the Soviet population. It was also characterized by the most ruthless brutality. Millions of peasants perished, either as a direct result of violence or, more commonly, indirectly, as a result of exile or famine. Millions of others ended up in the Gulags, the forced labour camps, in the inhospitable climes of Siberia or Northern Russia. By the end of the 1930s, the bulk of some 25 million peasant households, the majority of which in 1928 continued to live and work in village communities, had been reorganized into state and collective farms, controlled by the Party. Since the first flickers of glasnost appeared under Gorbachev, work on reassessing these years has been underway in the Former Soviet Union.KeywordsEconomic HistoryBaltic StateWestern ScholarRural LifeCollective FarmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.