There is no way back from collective farming either.
We cannot know with certainty whether or not the great majority of Soviet peasants are inwardly reconciled to the collectivist system. All the old Russian emigres and many vocal recent refugees from the Soviet Union take it for granted that the peasants are still longing to return to the old smallholdings, and are only awaiting the opportunity. Though there is some evidence to support this view, against it must be set the fact that collective farming withstood the shock of the last war much better than might have been expected; and that it did not show any serious signs of a break-up. Nor does it seem probable that the younger generation of peasants brought up under the new system is really hankering to return to small-scale private farming.
But even if it were assumed that the peasants are still full of nostalgia for the pre-collectivist economic system, they are no more free to go back to it than the mass of workers in Ford's factories are to become small, independent artisans.
At the beginning of the Stalin era the peasants were kept within the collective farms primarily by political force. At its end they are kept within them primarily by the force of economic circumstances, especially by the nature of the technological processes established in agriculture. A collective farm can now no more be broken up into a hundred smallholdings than a great modern liner can be broken up into small sailing boats.
If the present system of farming were to disintegrate, this would be the death sentence to innumerable human beings, town-dwellers and peasants alike. Even if a large section of the peasantry were still bent on demolishing the collectivist structure, there is no reason to suppose that Russia, under whatever regime, would allow this sectional interest to drive her to commit national suicide.
A similar view has recently been taken by so well-known and extreme a critic of Soviet agricultural policy as Dr. N. M. Jasny, quoted before. While in Dr. Jasny the anti-Soviet emotionalist is sometimes at loggerheads with the scholar, he nevertheless argues from a thorough knowledge of Soviet agriculture. In the January 1953 issue of the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik he published an essay which was a cri de coeur against those ‘irresponsible’ Russian emigre politicians who ‘promise’ the peasants that, after the overthrow of the Soviet regime, they will abolish the collective farms.
Dr. Jasny argues that if Russian farming were to go back to the pre-collectivization System ‘it could feed barely half the present urban population. Consequently a simple return to those forms would be equivalent to a huge calamity.’ He also argues that if the anti-Bolsheviks were to assume power, they would have to re-enforce the compulsory food deliveries introduced by Stalin in order to prevent starvation in the towns. ‘What will the Russian people eat after the overthrow of the Soviet regime and in what will they be clad?’ It is enough to pose this question, says Dr. Jasny, to see the complete unreality of promising the peasants ‘a free choice of the forms of farming’.
He concludes: ‘I think that the preservation of the collective farms is inevitable for an indefinite time, for, in the event of their abolition., the situation after liberation from Stalinist rule, which will be difficult enough anyhow, will amount to a most enormous catastrophe.’
It is easy to see why Russian anti-Bolshevik politicians are loath to accept this view. If they did accept it., they could in effect only promise the Russian peasants that they would virtually continue the agricultural regime established by Stalin. In this instance Dr. Jasny, however, argues from realities, not from the hallucinations of political quixotry. He analyses the technological structure of Soviet farming to prove that it does not permit any break-up into smallholdings.
Most of the Soviet tractors are of the ‘Leviathan’ type, larger than any known outside Russia and useful only on giant farms. This type of machine., says Dr. Jasny, could be replaced by smaller ones in the course of many years (and with the help of American lend-lease deliveries!) so as to allow for a break-up of the present collective farms into smaller (but still collective) farms. But if the choice is to be only between smaller and larger collective farms, and if even this choice may become available only after a re-equipment taking many years, then the mountain of the anti-Stalinist ‘revolution’ in farming would give birth to no more than a mouse. All the same, the argument serves to underline the fact that Russia cannot afford to renounce even collectivization, that once most hateful and still most controversial part of the legacy of the Stalin era.