The Soviet Union introduced collective farming in its
constituent republics between 1927 and 1933. The
Baltic states and most of the
Eastern Bloc (except
Poland) adopted collective farming after
World War II, with the accession of communist regimes to power. In Asia (
People's Republic of China,
North Korea,
Laos, and
Vietnam) the adoption of collective farming was also driven by
communist government policies.
Soviet Union . Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black.
Leon Trotsky and the opposition bloc had originally advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed
agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis. According to
Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that
Joseph Stalin appropriated the position of the left opposition on such matters as
industrialisation and
collectivisation. Other scholars have argued the economic programme of Trotsky of voluntary collectivisation differed from the policy of forced collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928, due to the levels of brutality associated with the latter’s enforcement. As part of the
first five-year plan, forced collectivization was introduced in the
Soviet Union by Stalin in the late 1920s as a way, according to the policies of socialist leaders, to boost agricultural production through the organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (
kolkhozy). At the same time, Stalin argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the
kulaks (farmland owners). In what became known as
dekulakization, defiant
kulaks were executed or
mass deported to
Siberia by the
Soviet Communist Party in order to implement the plan. The centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in Ukraine. In 1932–1933, it is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people, about half of whom were Ukrainian,
died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into collectives. It was not until 1940 that agricultural production finally surpassed its pre-collectivization levels. Collectivization throughout the
Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was not aggressively pursued until the early 1960s because of the Soviet leadership's focus on a policy of
Russification of
Moldavians into the Russian way of life. Much of the collectivization in Moldova had undergone in
Transnistria, in
Chişinău, the present-day capital city of Moldova. Most of the directors who regulated and conducted the process of collectivization were placed by officials from Moscow. The efficiency of collective farms in the USSR is debatable. A Soviet article in March 1975 found that 27% of the total value of Soviet agricultural produce was produced by privately farmed plots despite the fact that they only consisted of less than 1% of arable land (approximately 20 million acres), making them roughly 40 times more efficient than collective farms. In 1935, the establishment of Personal Subsidiary Farms on collective land was allowed in the range of .25-1 hectare. Private cattle ownership existed after 1935 but was severely restricted by decree in 1956.
Romania In
Romania, land collectivization began in 1948 and continued for over more than a decade until its virtual eradication in 1962. Force sometimes had to be used to enforce collective agricultural practices. Collective farming in Romania was an attempt to implement the USSR's communist blueprint. These attempts often fell short. By strictly adhering to this Soviet blueprint, the implementation of communism in Romania inevitably created dilemmas and contradictions that led to violence. Kligman and Verdery state "The violence collectivization, emerges then, less, as an abhoration than as a product of sociocultural shaping and of deep problems with how the soviet blueprint came to be implemented... instead of a gradual and integrated process of moving from one form of society to another, Romanian society in the Soviet orbit was being completely rearticulated, a process in which violence was inevitable." On the other hand, as Kligman and Verdery explain, "Collectivization brought undeniable benefits to some rural inhabitants, especially those who had owned little or no land. It freed them from laboring on the fields of others, and it increased their control over wages, lending to their daily existence a stability previously unknown to them."
Hungary In
Hungary, agricultural collectivization was attempted several times between 1948 and 1956, with disastrous results, until it was finally successful in the early 1960s under
János Kádár. The first serious attempt at collectivization based on
Stalinist agricultural policy was undertaken in July 1948. Both economic and direct police pressure were used to coerce peasants to join cooperatives, but large numbers opted instead to leave their villages. By the early 1950s, only one-quarter of peasants had agreed to join cooperatives. In the spring of 1955 the drive for collectivization was renewed, again using physical force to encourage membership, but this second wave also ended in dismal failure. After the events of the
1956 Hungarian Revolution, the ruling
Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party opted for a more gradual collectivization drive. The main wave of collectivization occurred between 1959 and 1961, and at the end of this period more than 95% of agricultural land in Hungary had become the property of collective farms. In February 1961, the Central Committee declared that collectivization had been completed.
Czechoslovakia In
Czechoslovakia, centralized land reforms after World War I allowed for the distribution of most of the land to peasants and the poor, and created large groups of relatively well-to-do farmers (though village poor still existed). These groups showed no support for communist ideals. In 1945, immediately after World War II, new land reform started with the
new socialist government. The first phase involved a confiscation of properties of
Germans,
Hungarians, and
collaborators with the
Nazi regime in accordance with the so-called
Beneš decrees. The second phase, promulgated by so-called ''Ďuriš's laws'' (after the Communist Minister of Agriculture), in fact meant a complete revision of the pre-war land reform and tried to reduce maximal private property to of agricultural land and of any land. The third and final phase forbade possession of land above for one family. This phase was carried out in April 1948, two months after the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took power by force. Farms started to be collectivized, mostly under the threat of sanctions. The most obstinate farmers were persecuted and imprisoned. The most common form of collectivization was
agricultural cooperative (, JZD; , JRD). The collectivization was implemented in three stages (1949–1952, 1953–1956, 1956–1969) and officially ended with the 1960 implementation of the constitution establishing the
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which made private ownership illegal. Many early cooperatives collapsed and were recreated. Their productivity was low since they provided tiny salaries and no pensions, and they failed to create a sense of collective ownership; small-scale pilfering was common, and food became scarce. Seeing the massive outflow of people from agriculture into cities, the government started to massively subsidize the cooperatives in order to make the standard of living of farmers equal to that of city inhabitants; this was the long-term official policy of the government. Funds, machinery, and fertilizers were provided; young people from villages were forced to study agriculture; and students were regularly sent (involuntarily) to help in cooperatives. Subsidies and constant pressure destroyed the remaining private farmers; only a handful of them remained after the 1960s. The lifestyle of villagers had eventually reached the level of cities, and village poverty was eliminated. Czechoslovakia was again able to produce enough food for its citizens. The price of this success was a huge waste of resources because the cooperatives had no incentive to improve efficiency. Every piece of land was cultivated regardless of the expense involved, and the soil became heavily polluted with chemicals. Also, the intensive use of heavy machinery damaged topsoil. Furthermore, the cooperatives were infamous for over-employment. In the late 1970s, the
economy of Czechoslovakia entered into
stagnation, and the state-owned companies were unable to deal with advent of modern technologies. A few agricultural companies (where the rules were less strict than in state companies) used this situation to start providing high-tech products. For example, the only way to buy a
PC-compatible computer in the late 1980s was to get it (for an extremely high price) from one agricultural company acting as a reseller. After the
fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989 subsidies to agriculture were halted with devastating effect. Most of the cooperatives had problems competing with technologically advanced foreign competition and were unable to obtain investment to improve their situation. Quite a large percentage of them collapsed. The others that remained were typically insufficiently funded, lacking competent management, without new machinery and living from day to day. Employment in the agricultural sector dropped significantly (from approximately 25% of the population to approximately 1%).
East Germany Collective farms in the
German Democratic Republic were typically called (LPG), and corresponded closely to the Soviet kolkhoz. East Germany also had a few state-owned farms which were equivalent to the Soviet , which were called the (VEG). The structure of farms in what was called
East Elbia until German partition was dominated by
latifundia, and thus the
land reform which was justified on
denazification grounds and with the aim of destroying the Prussian
Junker class – which had been hated by the left during the
Weimar Republic and which was blamed for Prussian militarism and the authoritarian tendencies of the
German Empire and later
Nazi Germany – was initially popular with many small farmers and landless peasants. East German President
Wilhelm Pieck coined the slogan ("Junker land into farmer's hand!") to promote land reform, which was initially pledged to be more moderate than full-scale collectivization. Although the ruling
Socialist Unity Party and the
Soviet Military Administration in Germany promised to allow large landowners to keep their land, they were expelled as the LPG were introduced in 1953. After 1959 all farmers were required to surrender independently owned land and join the LPGs. Similarly to the Soviet Union, ultimately most of the land was transferred into
de jure or
de facto state controlled entities with the former farmers becoming employees – now of the state instead of the erstwhile
Junker class.
Poland The Polish name of a collective farm was , 'agricultural production cooperative'. Collectivisation in
Poland was stopped in 1956; later, nationalisation was supported.
Yugoslavia Collective farming was introduced as a
League of Communists of Yugoslavia government policy throughout the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after
World War II, by taking away land from wealthy pre-war owners and limiting possessions in private ownership first to 25, and later to 10 hectares. The large, state-owned farms were known as "Agricultural cooperatives" ( in
Serbo-Croatian) and farmers working on them had to meet production quotas in order to satisfy the needs of the populace. This system was largely abolished in the 1950s. See:
Law of 23 August 1945 with amendments until 1 December 1948.
China At the end of the
Land Reform movement, individual families in China owned the land they farmed, paid taxes as households, and sold grain at prices set by the state. Rural collectivization began soon after the CCP announced its 1953 "general line for the transition to socialism". Over the next six years, collectivization took several incrementally progressing forms: mutual aid groups, primitive cooperatives, and people's communes. During 1954–1955, farmers in many areas began pooling their land, capital resources, and labor into beginning-level agricultural producers' cooperatives (
chuji nongye hezuoshe). Later, the country was hit by massive floods and droughts. This, combined with the usage of severely flawed policies of
Lysenkoism and the
Four Pests Campaign, caused "
The Great Chinese Famine of 1959," where nearly 30 million people died of hunger. The party officially blamed floods and droughts for the famine; however, it was clear to the party members at the party meetings that famine was caused mostly by their own policies. Recent studies also demonstrate that it was career incentives within the politburo system as well as political radicalism that led to the great famine. Collectivization of land via the commune system facilitated China's rapid industrialization through the state's control of food production and procurement. This allowed the state to accelerate the process of
capital accumulation, ultimately laying the successful foundation of physical and
human capital for the economic growth of China's
reform and opening up. A 2017 study found that Chinese peasants slaughtered massive numbers of draft animals as a response to collectivization, as this would allow them to keep the meat and hide, and not transfer the draft animals to the collectives. The study estimates that "the animal loss during the movement was 12 to 15 percent, or 7.4-9.5 million dead. Grain output dropped by 7 percent due to lower animal inputs and lower productivity." Collectivization however was seen by the communist leadership as a half-measure when compared to full state ownership. Following the
Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975,
South Vietnam briefly came under the authority of a
Provisional Revolutionary Government, a
puppet state under military occupation by
North Vietnam, before being officially reunified with the North under Communist rule as the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam on 2 July 1976. Upon taking control, the Vietnamese communists banned other political parties, arrested suspects believed to have collaborated with the United States and embarked on a mass campaign of
collectivization of farms and factories. Private land ownership was "transformed" to subsume under State and collective ownership. Reconstruction of the war-ravaged country was slow and serious humanitarian and economic problems confronted the communist regime. In an historic shift in 1986, the
Communist Party of Vietnam implemented
free-market reforms known as (
Renovation). With the authority of the state remaining unchallenged, private enterprise, deregulation and foreign investment were encouraged. Land ownership nonetheless is the sole prerogative of the state. The
economy of Vietnam has achieved rapid growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction and housing, exports and foreign investment. However, the power of the Communist Party of Vietnam over all organs of government remains firm, preventing full land ownership. Conflicts between the state and private farmers over land rights have grown with the potential to spark social and political instability. Despite the reforms however, over 50% of all farms in Vietnam remain collective cooperatives (over 15,000 farming cooperatives in Vietnam), and almost all farmers being members of some kind of cooperative. The state also heavily encourages collective cooperative farming over private farming.
Cuba In the initial years that followed the
Cuban Revolution, government authorities experimented with agricultural and farming production cooperatives. Between 1977 and 1983, farmers began to collectivize into
CPAs – (Agricultural Production Cooperatives). Farmers were encouraged to sell their land to the state for the establishment of a cooperative farm, receiving payments for a period of 20 years while also sharing in the fruits of the CPA. Joining a CPA allowed individuals who were previously dispersed throughout the countryside to move to a centralized location with increased access to electricity, medical care, housing, and schools. Democratic practice tends to be limited to business decisions and is constrained by the centralized economic planning of the Cuban system. Another type of agricultural production cooperative in Cuba is
UBPC –
Unidad Básica de Producción Cooperativa (Basic Unit of Cooperative Production). The law authorizing the creation of UBPCs was passed on 20 September 1993. It has been used to transform many state farms into UBPCs, similar to the transformation of Russian
sovkhozes (state farms) into
kolkhozes (collective farms) since 1992. The law granted indefinite
usufruct to the workers of the UBPC in line with its goal of linking the workers to the land. It established material incentives for increased production by tying workers' earnings to the overall production of the UBPC, and increased managerial autonomy and workers' participation in the management of the workplace.
Laos Tanzania The Tanzanian socialist approach of
ujamaa supported by President
Julius Nyerere focused on collectivizing ownership of property and communal organization of agriculture in the Tanzanian countryside. This re-organization of the countryside began on a voluntary and experimental basis. From 1973 to 1975, these goals were pursued through the forced villagization process of
Operation Vijiji. ==Other collective farming ==