Translation: Let's give record harvests for the country!

Collectivisation in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin, between 1928 and 1940, consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms. The Soviet leadership was confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms would immediatly increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. In the early1930s over 90% of agricultural land was "collectivised" as ruralhouseholds entered collective farms with their land, livestock, other assets. The sweeping collectivisation often involved tremendous human and social costs while the issue of economic advantages of collective farms remains largely undecided.

The Soviet Communist Party had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivisation as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed "Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions". Apart from ideological goals, Stalin also wished to embark on a program of rapid heavy industrialisation which required larger surpluses to be extracted from the agricultural sector in order to feed a growing industrial work force and to pay for imports of machinery.

Artist: Maria Alexandrovna Voron (1904 - 1935)

Year: 1931