INDUSTRIALIZING AGRICULTURE AND THE NATION: THE WRONG WAY, RUSSIAN EDITION
You are a child of Russian peasants in 1920, south of Moscow but north of Ukraine. It is lonely in your village. Years ago you lost one brother fighting for the Tsar in World War I and another fighting for the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. You were fortunate in that the Civil War did not affect your village, and with the war there was no government interfering in your life or asking your for taxes. The Russian Revolution got rid of the landlords, and for the first time your family was able to farm your land without paying high land rents.
But once the Bolsheviks established power things began to change. You didn't really know what a Bolshevik was, but you knew what they wanted. They wanted your grain and to pay very little for it, something nothing. Before the revolution your father would sell your grain on the market, receiving whatever the market was paying at the time, and most of the time it was high enough that you earned profits.
You know this because a neighbor's daughter returned home from the Red Army (the Bolsheviks were the least sexist society at the time, and so allowed female soldiers) and the news she brought wasn't good. The Bolsheviks were rearranging the economy to an idea traced back to the Germans: War Communism. This meant the country would be administered as it if were at war: the government could take what it wants, when it wants, and you question its methods at the risk of death.
War Communism would industrialize the nation, the Bolsheviks thought, so that it would be ready for the next war (and remember, the goal of Marxism was to unite the workers around the world, which necessitated war). This meant investments in capital: ships, factories, machines, and the like. Investments were needed but the country was broke. They would get this money from the peasants by paying far, far less than the market price for grain, selling it on the world market, and using the proceeds to industrialize the USSR.
Your neighbor's daughter was right. First the Bolsheviks came to your village to inform you of what “the price” of grain would be. This was a price not set between negotiations between buyers and sellers but by the Communist Party. And the price was below the price of production. Moreover, you could only sell your grain to the party at this price. This year, your family was going to lose money, but since all indications were that this policy would last for years, there was no point farming anymore.
So you and your family moved your house deeper into the woods, harder for the government to detect. There is no point growing food for other people because you will do so at a financial loss, so your parents grew only what your family need to survive.
Others did the same, which meant the grain the government planned on selling in international markets was not there. There was far less food being produced all throughout Russia than before. Some travelers passing through the village talked of starvation in northern regions—even rumors of cannibalism. At the time, it seemed to repugnant to be true.
With little food being produced the cities were running out of food, so the government sent the Red Army out not to buy food at low prices, but to take the peasants' grain—whatever the cost. When they found your house you knew they would take the grain stored in the barn, but you didn't fear too much because they couldn't take the grain your father had hidden in the woods. Though proud of your father's foresight, he was not as clever as you thought.
The Red Army anticipated you had hidden stocks, and so they dug a whole and took you, a ten-year old, by the legs, holding you upside down, lowering you into the whole as soldiers began to fill it in. Later you would be unable to convey how panicked you were, but you would leave out the fact that you wet your pants. You were not so panicked as to not wonder whether your father was going to give away the grain to save you, or to sacrifice you to save the others. Truth be told, though you loved your family deeply, at the time all you cared about was the life of your own.
When the dirt covered your nose your father confessed to the hidden grain, and to save your life he led them to the hidden locations and watched them take it away. After you had given it all away they then asked, “Where is the rest of it?” You swear there is nothing else. With indifference, the soldiers shoot your father dead and drive away with the last of your food.
It took you one month to reach a city, and you are the only remaining member of your family. Your life was spared that day but without food or money your mother, older brother, and younger sister had died. Once at the city you found that begging for food would not be easy, as there was much competition from other orphans. One little orphan girl took a liking to you and showed you a reliable trick to earn a few kopecks a day—so long as you promised to do it only in a distant neighborhood. It was a debasing trick but it kept you alive: you would smear your face with your own excrement for the amusement and pity of others. Often you thought about the others who dealt with starvation by cannibalism, and you were not sure if it was less or more repugnant than your solution.
Your last die alive was spent lying by the street, where you heard two party officials chat as they walked by, avoiding eye contact with you, one dying of malnutrition and disease. They were laughing how the USSR was receiving free grain sent by the U.S., under the direction of the altruistic Herbert Hoover, and at the same time loading another ship with Russian grain confiscated from the peasants, grain to be sold to pay for the bombs that Russia would need in the next war.
And you thought to yourself how easy it would have been to take fifty times the amount of grain they took from your father. All they had to do was to let him sell it at a fair price—a market price. For centuries your family had produced grain to feed themselves and to make a profit. With one policy, a policy preventing any farmer from earning a profit from their production, your family stopped producing.
The USSR believed it could loot the countryside to pay for industrialization, but what they did not understand was that it was impossible to loot unless the peasants produced something worth looting. And without the profit motive and free markets, the only thing left in the Russian countryside to loot was graves and skeletons.
References
Quotation 1—Richard Pipes on War Communism
In the summer of 1918, Moscow launched a campaign to extract grain from the villages, which the peasants were unwilling to sell to the government at unrealistically low fixed prices… One response of the peasants, rich and poor alike, to this terror was to curtail the sown acreage so as to reduce the “surplus” subject to confiscation. At the same time, shortages of draft horses, mobilized for the civil war, lowered yields. As a consequence, cereal grain harvests declined from 78.2 million tons in 1913 to 48.2 million in 1920.
—Pipes, Richard. 2001. Communism: A History. The Modern Library: NY, NY.
Quotation 2—HistoryLearningSite.co.uk on War Communism
War Communism was a disaster. In all areas, the economic strength of Russia fell below the 1914 level. Peasant farmers only grew for themselves, as they knew that any extra would be taken by the state. Therefore, the industrial cities were starved of food.
—History Learning Site. “War Communism.” Accessed December 23, 2013 at
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/war_communism.htm.
Video 1—ActiveHistory.co.uk on War Communism to the NEP
INDUSTRIALIZING AGRICULTURE AND THE NATION: THE WRONG WAY, CHINESE EDITION
As long as your family could remember they rented the land they farmed, paying such high rents they remained forever poor peasants. Then came World War II, and then the Communist Revolution, which took the land from the landlords and gave it to the peasants. It was a joyous yet dreadful day. Joyous because people like your family had power for the first time. Dreadful because you saw what peasants would become with this power. Though you had no affection for your landlord, you had to pity him as the village tied his hands behind his back, forced him to his knees, and took turns insulting him and spitting in his face. They drew a circle around him and forbid him to leave the circle or his family would be killed. It took three days for him to die of dehydration; his family feared they would be persecuted if they tried to help him, so they neither brought him water nor told him goodbye.
Your family was only given control of land for a short time though. You knew your parents' newfound freedom would be short when you started hearing of experimental communes being established to the south. The rumors were unbelievable but ultimately true, and it happened the same way across China.
First you heard warnings the Communists would be at your village in a matter of days, and when they did, there was no such thing as personal property. Rather than mourning, the village erupted into a feast. Every head of livestock would be slaughtered and consumed, for if they were alive when the Communists came they would be confiscated. More rice was cooked and grain made into bread than anyone could eat. Anything that could be sold for money was, but when everyone tries to sell at the same time no one gets a good price. It was all for the better, for that money would soon prove worthless.
Just as the rumors foretold, the Communist Party arrived and announced that the village would be blended with other villages to create a large collective farm. Everything was taken: spoons, blankets, clothes. You were told your country would take a “great leap forward” which would require considerable sacrifice now but would deliver paradise soon.
You could not protest. In fact, you could not even be stoic. Every person had to appear enthusiastic or they would be taken and “corrected.” Your father never really possessed a noble character, and once he saw that one could gain favoritism of the party by displaying an unending commitment to the Great Leap Forward he volunteered that your family's house be demolished for use as fertilizer. It was really a smart move. All houses would be torn down and plowed into the earth anyway, but by being the first to volunteer, your family might be treated favorably.
The giving up of personal property wasn't that big of a deal. Your family didn't own much anyway. Being in a collective farm was actually nice, at first, as you made many new friends.
Though only thirteen years old your father volunteered your services to the party officials managing the collective farms, and your job was to run between the farm and a party office ten miles away to deliver messages. Though you were told not to read the messages, your father ordered you to bring them to him first, and after opening the envelope and reading it he would write the identical message with his own hand, sealing it in another envelope, and charging you with delivering it as you were commanded.
The messages at first seemed mundane. The party wanted to know how much your collective farm “pledged” to give to the party. At first the farm volunteered 250 tons—half of what everyone expected to produce.
Time went by and things were actually a bit better than before collectivization, but three things started to go awry.
First, the amount the farm pledged kept going up. Other farms of a similar size were pledging more than your farm, which suggested you were not as dedicated to the Great Leap Forward as you should be.
Second, party officials started interfering with how the peasants farmed. At first you were told these were scientific agricultural methods, so you just assumed they would increase output, but when you found out what these scientific methods were we knew it wouldn't work.
- The party told us to apply 30 tonnes of fertilizer per hectare, way more than peasants every applied, and as the peasants predicted, it was too much, and nothing grew. This left no fertilizer for other fields, where very little was harvested.
- Then you were told to plant in the early spring, even though it was too cold, and despite warning by the peasants that it was too early, you planted as commanded. The result? You were able to harvest something. But nothing near what was typically harvested when peasants were left to make their own decisions.
- Then you were told to transplant rice plants much closer than normal so that you could harvest more per acre.
- Rice production was possible because a the soil was tightly compacted several feet below the surface and prevented water from draining, but you didn't know this, and when you were ordered to employ deep ploughing methods you had nothing to fear. It was difficult work. All the livestock had been slaughtered for consumption before the confiscation and collectivization began, so you and others had to pull the plows by hand, or dig with shovel. As ordered, you plowed deep—so deep this hard pan was broken and the fields drained water quickly. It was too dry to grow rice and too wet to grow grain.
With every month that went by your food rations at the farm canteen dwindled.
Third came the command that peasants should not only farm but produce steel. Yes, the collective farm was ordered to find metals of any kind, build its own steel furnaces. Told it had to meet its quote of steel the peasants tore down nearby forests for fuel and used iron farm implements as raw material for the furnace. Though you met the steel quote when next year rolled around there were not enough shovels, hoes, and plows to farm much land.
Meanwhile, the farm's pledge of grain production increased, so high that your father remarked there would not be enough food to feed everyone at the farm. He said it with an indifference towards the lives of others. He wasn't worried about the misery that starvation would bring. He was worried how to save his own hide.
And he was able to feed himself by selling you and your brother to travelers. Though it sounds sad you were fortunate. Most everyone who remained at the village (save for your father) shrunk to bones. One collective farm began raiding others seeking the food that no one had. You heard that cannibalism had occurred to the east. Although he didn't do it out of love, your father selling you was the best thing he had ever done for you.
As you followed your new master to the city you noticed areas that were once farms but were now flooded. Overhearing others, the communists had built a large dam but didn't have the engineering knowledge to do it properly, and it only lasted four months but it diverted a river from its ancient path. Other farms that should have been moisture with green rice was dry and cracked—for the same reason, a poorly-build dam.
You also noticed that birds seemed to disappear. When you asked about you were told that Chairman Mao administered a sparrow eradication program, where every citizen was ordered to bang pots and pans, run through the fields, and step onto the roofs of houses to chase the sparrows away. Others were ordered to climb trees to knock out the sparrow nests—some of these fell to their death, doing their patriotic duty.
After explaining the sparrow fiasco, your master pointed to a field of rice destroyed by insects, saying, “See what havoc the insects did there [pointing to the field]? That didn't happen when we had the sparrows. It turned out the sparrows had been eating insects the whole time, we just didn't know.”
This master whom you now served was a party official, whose duty was to travel to various collective farms and verify they were being administered by a true party official. At one farm you stayed for up to two weeks as he investigated a crime. You were there for the arrest. It was a small shed just a few miles from the collective farm canteen. Coffins were scattered about the shed, their lids open, and smoke coming from the shed's chimney. The man was arrested for making fertilizer, fertilizer made by human corpses simmered for days in a cauldron, the extract containing much of the phosphorus that comprised just a few of the 55 million Chinese that would die from the famines of the 1950s and 60s.
References
Video 2—Why China adopted capitalism
(Williams, Sue [director, producer, and writer], Kathryn Dietz [co-director and producer]. 1994. China: A Century of Revolution. Part Two: The Mao Years 1949-1976. Zeitgeist Films.)
Dikötter, Frank. 2010. Mao's Great Famine. Walker & Company: NY, NY.
Williams, Sue [director, producer, and writer], Kathryn Dietz [co-director and producer]. 1994. China: A Century of Revolution. Zeitgeist Films.
Planet Money [podcast]. January 20, 2012. “The Secret Document That Transformed China.” Accessed December 23, 2013 at http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china.
REINVENTING THE WHEEL OF CAPITALISM
The 20th century began with great optimism that rational man, guided by new discoveries in science, including the "scientific" theory of Karl Marx, could invent a new economy, a new society. This optimism proved to be hubris. As Russia and China tried to ban the use of money, pursuit of profit, and commerce, they found themselves falling into poverty, stomach aching from hunger. Both countries reverted back to an economy where money, profit, and trade guided much activity, and there have been no famine since.
The sad thing is that man had already attempted an economic system based on communal property, and it failed so miserably they reverted back to private property to survive. Who were these people? The Pilgrims!
Video 3—The Pilgrims learn the value of private property
Who decides how to farm?
To be fair, there have been instances when an economy's agricultural sector thrives despite central planning and government ownership of property.
The first centrally planned economy was probably ancient Egypt under the Ptolemy Pharaohs. Egypt was under Persian control until Alexander the Great made his heroic sweep of military victories and added Egypt, along with many other nations, to his domain. When Alexander died (323 B.C.) his Generals split his empire among themselves, with Ptolemy taking Egypt, and was eventually declared a Pharaoh by the priests (Ptolemy was played by Anthony Hopkins in the movie Alexander). The Ptolemies ruled until 30 B.C., with the last Ptolemy being the most famous: Cleopatra.
The Ptolemies didn't just govern Egypt, they tightly controlled every part of the economy. The Egyptian peasants were micromanaged so intensely and forced to farm so much land owned by the Pharaoh that they were little different from slaves. The Pharaoh's administration maintained a monopoly on grain, dictated exactly how the Egyptian peasants would farm and monitored them closely, owned and/or controlled many of the farm inputs the peasants would use (e.g., tools, seed), constructed and maintained the irrigation infrastructure, and much more. Roughly half of all the arable land was owned by the Pharaoh, which meant he personally received the wealth from that land.
The justification for such micromanagement was simple: to control and confiscate. The tighter the population was controlled the easier it was to confiscate their wealth. To take wealth, one must first know the wealth was created, and that is why the entire economy was monitored and why all inputs to production came from the government. Roughly two thousand years later communists and socialists would also attempt a centrally planned economy.
There is one key difference between Ptolemy's Egypt and the communist countries of Russia and China: Ptolemy did not try and alter time-tested agricultural practices. He did invest in large public projects like irrigation, but he made sure they were overseen by competent engineers, not political favorites. Both Russia and China forced its farmers to employ new experimental methods on an enormous scale before they were proven on a small scale. As such, most ended in disaster.
This brings up another failing of agricultural in communist Russia and China: the decision of who would be considered an "authority" on agricultural science. Germany established a series of experimental farms in the 19th that forced scientists to prove their ideas correct in a controlled setting. A scientist had to earn his prestige, you might say. The rest of Europe and America adopted this practice, and if a scientist today begins espouses theories about farming he is quickly revealed as a quack and excluded by the scientific community.
Contrast that to Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet scientist who claimed to have disproven the theory of genetic inheritance (he did not), and whose wacky theories of inheritance convinced some Chinese scientists to try and breed pigs to cows (BAILEY GET CITE) (it didn't work). In America or Europe Lysenko would suffer public humiliation, but in the Soviet Union the politicians decided who possessed scientific authority. Lysenko was a better salesmen than scientist, and he convinced the Communist Party of his theories so thoroughly that to question Lysenko's ideas was to risk one's life. Just ask geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, Lysenko's main rival, who was sent to the gulag where he died of illness and malnutrition.
References
Taubman, William. 2003. Khruschchev: The Man and His Era. W. W. Norton & Company: NY, NY.
Dikötter, Frank. 2010. Mao's Great Famine. Walker & Company: NY, NY.
