Soviet writer condemns Stalin’s collectivisation

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 37

Soviet writer condemns Stalin’s collectivisation

By

TONY BARBER

NZPA Moscow A Soviet writer, taking the drive for openness in the official press into new and highly delicate territory,’has condemned the collectivisation of farms under Josef Stalin as a time of violence and inconceivable hardship. Writing in the literary monthly, “Znamya,” Vladimir Shubkin said tens of millions of peasants had suffered in the forced collectivisation of 1929-33 and its effects were still felt in Soviet life.

Shubkin’s essay touched on a period that has never received full official treatment in the Soviet Union and has remained outside the realm of debate even as Soviet leader, Mr Gorbachev, has encouraged the press to tackle taboo subjects.

Mr Gorbachev himself made a mild reference to collectivisation in a speech to Soviet media representatives last month, saying it was “the fate of the people with all

its contradictions — its achievements and its mistakes”. Shubkin was much more outspoken, saying Stalin had brought a premature end to the relatively relaxed New Economic Policy (N.E.P.) of the Soviet State in the 1920 s and had replaced it with a campaign that broke the back of the peasantry. "Social myths and illusions often call forth catastrophic consequences,” Shubkin wrote. “In his time, when Stalin decided prematurely to abolish N.E.P., using purely administrative methods and direct violence, this — to put it mildly — brought lamentable results for the economy.

“Agricultural production collapsed. Hunger broke out in a number of districts of the country. The measures in the cities against artisans and small producers practically undermined a whole sphere of the service economy.

“The life of tens of millions of Soviet people — and I speak not about civil servants in the capital, but about the basic population of the country — was full of inconceivable deprivations and hardships, often taken to the limit of pure biological existence. “Decades divide us from those and other events, but they still have an influence on our life — all the more strongly, the more assiduously we pretend that they never happened.” Western historians estimate that at least 11 million people died between 1930 and 1937 as a result of Stalin’s deportation of rich peasants, known as “kulaks”, the collectivisation of farms and a related famine. Basing their estimates on Soviet censuses of the period, evidence in official books in the late 1950 s and early 19605, first-hand accounts by survivors and other materials, they say about

a further 3.5 million peasants died in camps after 1937.

Historians say the exact toll may never be known. Nikita Khrushchev, the late leader who denounced Stalin, wrote In his memoirs, published abroad: “I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.” The grim consequences of collectivisation became almost wholly taboo after Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964. Soviet scholars who had touched on the issue were attacked, although some writers of fiction continued to give it oblique coverage. Mr Gorbachev hinted In his speech last month that he might tolerate more frank discussion of the collectivisation years when he said there should be no “blank pages” in official accounts of Soviet history. i..