Transition and the Agricultural Economy

The social transformation of the peasantry and the industrialization of agriculture were central to the Soviet conception of Russia's transition from a semifeudal capitalist system to a so-called socialist and thence to a communist system. In the Bolshevik conception, as Lenin affirmed many times on the eve of 1917, as long as Russia lived in a small peasant country, there was “a surer economic basis for capitalism in Russia than for communism.” Capitalism, he asserted, depended on small-scale production; the only way to undermine capitalism was to place the economy, including agriculture, on the basis of “modern large-scale production.” Emphasizing Lenin's thesis, Stalin affirmed on the eve of the planning era, in 1928, that Russia had to replace “the scattered and backward small-scale economy of the peasants” with an agricultural system based on the new technological foundation of “large-scale production.” Either we place the economy on the foundations of the most large-scale industry and of an agriculture of a new technical basis, added Stalin, “or we turn away from it and do not accomplish it, in which case a return to capitalism may become inevitable.” In essence, the transition to socialism was predicated on industry as the main foundation, but also on a reconstructed, industrialized, and collectivized agriculture, viewed as the necessary basis of industry's own development.