Kolektywizacja rolnictwa stalin biography

In November 1927, Joseph Stalin launched his "revolution from above" by setting two extraordinary goals for Soviet domestic policy: rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture.

His aims were to erase all traces of the capitalism that had entered under the New Economic Policy and to transform the Soviet Union as quickly as possible, without regard to cost, into an industrialized and completely socialist state.

The very essence of the kolkhoz (collective farm) system lay in the ease with which it facilitated extraction of heavy tribute from the land in the form of extremely cheap supplies of foodstuffs and industrial crops. Thus, the rise of the Stalinist land system was closely connected with the Party's program of break-neck industrialization, massive capital investments, and strategic projects at the expense of consumption.

The ever-tightening hold of the regime over the industrial working class made possible implementation of these policies without th