Agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture has always been the weak link in the Soviet economy. Collectivisation had been designed to place agriculture on a modern, mechanised footing, thereby providing both a pool of potential labourers for work in industry and construction, and an increased supply of food and agricultural raw materials. In reality, the brutal methods by which collectivisation was enforced and the widespread peasant resistance which these provoked led to a sharp fall in livestock herds and agricultural produce, as peasants slaughtered their animals and burned their grain rather than give it over to the new collective farms which they did not want to enter. The result was a drastic decline in the standard of living. The low point of this process was the famine of winter 1932–1933, already referred to above.