Using the source and your own words,explain how forced grain expropriation led to the decline of production
Answers
Grain procurement
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Image - Soviet officials confiscate grain from a peasant household in Ukraine (early 1930s). Image - Grain requisition in the Baryshivka district, Kyiv region (1930).
Image - Search party confiscating foodstuffs, fall 1932, Odesa region.
Grain procurement. The means by which the state obtains large grain reserves to feed the armed forces, the civil service, and the industrial work force, to use as export, and to be fully able to satisfy the consumption needs of the population. In contrast to purchase on the open market, procurement is compulsory in nature and involves a fixed, stable, and, as a rule, low price.
Grain procurement was introduced by the tsarist regime during the First World War. The Ministry of Agriculture and a special board of food supply procured grain at fixed prices that were, at first, higher than the market prices. Rampant inflation and speculation caused an increase in the market prices, however, and farmers became reluctant to sell grain to the state. The authorities then resorted to requisitioning, which aroused deep discontent among the peasantry. In 1914–15, the state procured 41.7 percent of the grain available on the open market; in 1915–16, 51.3 percent; and in 1916–17, 67.9 percent. Even though it possessed two-thirds of all marketable grain on the eve of the Revolution of 1917, the state was unable to supply the population adequately.
During the period of War Communism the Bolshevik state applied the policy of forced grain expropriation on a massive scale. A surplus appropriation system (prodrazverstka) was introduced, whereby each peasant household was ordered to turn over its food surplus to the state at a fixed price. As a result of rampant inflation and the lack of manufactured market goods, however, money lost its value, and state payments for grain deliveries became worthless; when they were finally abolished the farmers did not even notice it. In March 1919 the prodrazverstka (Ukrainian: prodrozkladka) was extended to Ukraine. It was implemented with the help of committees of poor peasants, armed workers' detachments, and the Cheka, which seized grain and punished the ‘hoarders.’ The peasants, left with almost no food, naturally resisted, and armed struggle ensued between the Soviet regime and the peasants and among the peasants themselves. Peasant partisans (see Partisan movement in Ukraine, 1918–22) resisted and attacked the Reds and the Whites throughout Ukraine, and until the Red Army emerged victorious, the Ukrainian peasantry combated the prodrazverstka via armed struggle, the black market, reduced sowings, and concealment.
In 1920–1, when the main anti-Bolshevik forces had been defeated, Ukrainian grain deliveries to the Soviet state amounted to 2.6 million t out of a gross harvest of about 8.6 million t. This expropriation, combined with drought and reduced sowings, led to the Famine of 1921–3 and millions of deaths in the five southern gubernias of Ukraine. Faced with declining productivity and mass unrest, the authorities decided to replace the prodrazverstka with a less stringent tax in kind. This shift marked the beginning of the New Economic Policy and the restoration of the private sector in small-scale trade and industry. In 1921–2 grain deliveries to the state amounted to 1.9 million t, parts of which were used to create local reserves. In 1924 compulsory deliveries of food supplies were abandoned and were replaced by a monetary tax.
In contrast to common practice, however, the contracts were not entered into voluntarily by the peasantry and the state did not assume any obligations, such as supplying seed, equipment, or goods. Directives for the procurement plan came from the center, were confirmed at a general meeting of the poor peasants or of all the inhabitants of a village, and then were vigorously implemented by local officials, who were given the authority to impose fines up to five times the imposed quota for late or incomplete grain delivery and even to confiscate the property of unco-operative peasants. Deliveries were officially viewed as the ‘natural’ fulfillment of the agricultural tax and of other obligations, which were numerous by the late 1920s—self-assessment, compulsory insurance, obligatory loans for the consolidation of peasant holdings, and obligatory industrialization loans—and often exceeded a peasant family's total income.
After collectivization began, extremely high delivery quotas were levied to compensate for earlier shortfalls. When the kulaks and other peasants refused or were unable to meet them, practically all their grain stocks were confiscated. After the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class,’ the collective farms and state farms assumed the burden of grain deliveries. Peasant opposition to collectivization caused agricultural production to decline dramatically, yet the state continued to demand delivery of the same and even greater grain quotas (see table).
The 1928 Soviet grain attainment crisis, sometimes called as the "NEP crisis," was a major economic movement that took place in the Soviet Union starting of January 1928, during which the supply of rye, wheat, and other cereal crops are attainable to secure by the state fell to levels considered by planners to be inadequate to help the urban population needs of the country.
Explanation:
- A regime of increasingly tough administrative penalty against the Soviet peasantry was met with the State's failure to make successful utilization of the price system to improve sufficient grain sales.
- The ensuing state of national crisis led to the withdrawal of the 'New Economic Policy' and spurred a move toward agricultural collectivization in 1929.