Problems of Governance in the Collectivization Period and Their Impact on the Historiography (the Case Study of Kalmykia)

Abstract

The article is aimed to analyze the organizational, legal and administrative decisions of the central authorities of the Soviet State and methods of their implementation on the territory of a certain region of the country as well as their impact on the historiography of the collectivization process during its years. The sources used for the analysis were based on the historiographical works published in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods written by the historians of the national republics, who discovered the regional and national specifics of socio-economic transformations in rural areas in 1928-1940. As a result of the research the author gives her own interpretation of the collectivization process in the autonomous Republic of Kalmykia. During that period, agriculture and peasantry of Kalmykia were evolving in line with socio-economic and political processes taking place in the country and they were not ready to move to a collective farming due to the lack of both economic and socio-psychological prerequisites. The «Continuous collectivization» of the national autonomy was not conceived as a voluntary and mass influx of peasants into collective farms. It was imposed on the peasantry from above, and for its implementation the government took various administrative decisions, used different methods, mainly, tight administrative control of agriculture. Despite the efficiency of individual farm labor, farms were completely eradicated and their owners were expelled from their homes or sent to prison. The collective farms were seen as the only feasible way for the agricultural recovery and improvement of peasants’ lives. Dispossession of kulaks, arm-twisting, administrative pressure became the most important constituent parts of the process of collectivization. Thus, the author concludes that the agrarian transformation of 1930s in the Kalmyk Autonomous Region was an act of forced collectivization and dekulakization. And the only alternative to the forced collectivization could be the intensification of market relations in agriculture by supporting small rural producers and providing them with greater autonomy, as well as introducing the elements of commodity-money relations, self-sufficiency etc. under the condition of a gradual, voluntary, industrial co-operation of the owners.