The Hell of Collectivization

The Alienation of All from All

Letters from Vienna #84

The Hell of Collectivization 

The rights of the individual need to be respected due to the fact that collectivization can, potentially, be hell. Nowhere was this truer than the Soviet Union of the 1930s, when a whole class of people (the so-called “kulaks”) were dehumanized, deported to concentration camps or simply murdered by means of starvation (a fate which awaits many of us on account of the policies of the Greens & WEF).

“In January 1930” Timothy Snyder tells us “the politburo authorized the state police to screen the peasant population of the entire Soviet Union. The corresponding OGPU order of  2 February specified the measures needed for “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” In each locality, a group of three people, or “troika,” would decide the fate of the peasants. The troika, composed of a member of the state police, a local party leader, and a state procurator, had the authority to issue rapid and severe verdicts (death, exile) without the right to appeal. Local party members would often make recommendations: “At the plenums of the village soviet,” one local party leader said, “we create kulaks as we see fit.” Although the Soviet Union had laws and courts, these were now ignored in favor of the simple decision of three individuals. Some thirty thousand Soviet citizens would be executed after sentencing by troikas. In the first four months of 1930, 113,637 people were forcibly transported from Soviet Ukraine as kulaks…All in all, some three hundred thousand Ukrainians were among the 1.7 million kulaks deported to special settlements in Siberia, European Russia, and Kazakhstan.”[1]

“In the first weeks of 1930, collectivization proceeded at a blinding pace in Soviet Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union. Moscow sent quotas of districts to be collectivized to capitals of the Soviet republics, where party leaders vowed to exceed them. The Ukrainian leadership promised to collectivize the entire republic in one year. And then local party activists, with an eye to impressing their own superiors, moved even more quickly, promising collectivization in a matter of nine to twelve weeks. Threatening deportation, they coerced peasants into signing away their claims to land and joining the collective farm. The state police intervened with force, often deadly force, when necessary. Twenty-five thousand workers were shipped to the countryside to add numbers to police power and overmaster the peasantry. Instructed that the peasants were responsible for food shortages in the towns, workers promised to “make soap out of the kulak.” By the middle of March 1930, seventy-one percent of the arable land in the Soviet Union had been, at least in principle, attached to collective farms. This meant that most peasants had signed away their farms and joined a collective. They no longer had any formal right to use land for their own purposes. As members of a collective, they were dependent upon its leaders for their employment, pay, and food. They had lost or were losing their livestock, and would depend for their equipment upon the machinery, usually lacking, of the new Machine Tractor Stations. These warehouses, the centers of political control in the countryside, were never short on party officials and state policemen. Perhaps even more so than in Soviet Russia, where communal farming was traditional, in Soviet Ukraine peasants were terrified by the loss of their land. Their whole history was one of a struggle with landlords, which they seemed finally to have won during the Bolshevik Revolution… In 1930, collectivization seemed to them to be a “second serfdom,” the beginning of a new bondage, now not to the wealthy landowners, as in recent history, but to the communist party. Peasants in Soviet Ukraine feared the loss of their hard-won independence; but they also feared starvation, and indeed for the fate of their immortal souls… Some believed that Satan had come to earth in human form as a party activist, his collective farm register a book of hell, promising torment and damnation. The new Machine Tractor Stations looked like the outposts of Gehenna. Some Polish peasants in Ukraine, Roman Catholics, also saw collectivization in apocalyptic terms. One Pole explained to his son why they would not join the collective farm: “I do not want to sell my soul to the devil.””[2]

The result of collectivization was disastrous: “By autumn 1931 the failure of the first collectivized harvest was obvious. The reasons were many: the weather was poor; pests were a problem; animal power was limited because peasants had sold or slaughtered livestock; the production of tractors was far less than anticipated; the best farmers had been deported; sowing and reaping were disrupted by collectivization; and peasants who had lost their land saw no reason to work very hard…By the end of 1931, many peasants were already going hungry. With no land of their own and with little ability to resist requisitions, they simply had no way to ensure that a sufficient number of calories reached their households. Then in early 1932 they had no seed grain with which to plant the fall crop.”[3]

Instead of showing the slightest degree of sensitivity towards the needs of the populace the state imposed its will be force: “As of 14 January 1933 Soviet citizens had to carry internal passports in order to reside in cities legally. Peasants were not to receive them. On 22 January 1933 Balytskyi warned Moscow that Ukrainian peasants were fleeing the republic, and Stalin and Molotov ordered the state police to prevent their flight. The next day the sale of long-distance rail tickets to peasants was banned. Stalin’s justification was that the peasant refugees were not in fact begging bread but, rather, engaging in a “counterrevolutionary plot,” by serving as living propaganda for Poland and other capitalist states that wished to discredit the collective farm. By the end of February 1933 some 190,000 peasants had been caught and sent back to their home villages to starve. Stalin had his “fortress” in Ukraine, but it was a stronghold that resembled a giant starvation camp, with watchtowers, sealed borders, pointless and painful labor, and endless and predictable death.”[4]

The Alienation of All from All

“Two decades later, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt would present this famine in Ukraine as the crucial event in the creation of a modern “atomized” society, the alienation of all from all. Starvation led not to rebellion but to amorality, to crime, to indifference, to madness, to paralysis, and finally to death. Peasants endured months of indescribable suffering, indescribable because of its duration and pain, but also indescribable because people were too weak, too poor, too illiterate to chronicle what was happening to them. But the survivors did remember. As one of them recalled, no matter what peasants did, “they went on dying, dying, dying.” The death was slow, humiliating, ubiquitous, and generic. To die of starvation with some sort of dignity was beyond the reach of almost everyone. Petro Veldii showed rare strength when he dragged himself through his village on the day he expected to die. The other villagers asked him where he was going: to the cemetery to lay himself down. He did not want strangers coming and dragging his body away to a pit. So, he had dug his own grave, but by the time he reached the cemetery another body had filled it. He dug himself another one, lay down, and waited.”[5]

Modern Collectivization

What we’re currently witnessing are the bitter fruits of decades of a similar failed “globalist” policy: a policy which leads to massive waste on the one hand and starvation on the other. While we’re eating pears grown in Argentina and packed in Thailand daily deaths by starvation constitute nothing less than murder, and we, by virtue of our passive acquiescence, are guilty of this crime. It’s time to stop, rethink and reorganize our agriculture.

“According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization,” Covert Magazine recently reported “world food commodity prices made a significant leap in March 2022 to reach their highest levels ever, rising 12.6% in that month alone as war in the Black Sea region shocked the markets dependent on staple grains and vegetable oils. Global wheat prices rose by 19.7%, vegetable oil by 23.2%, and grains 20.4%. In Tunisia and in other countries, cooking oil, semolina, and rice have all but disappeared from grocery stores, and flour shortages have led to a run on bakeries.”

“In the Middle East, millions who already spend more than a third of their income on food, are being hit hardest by the war’s impact on the global food supply. Yet UN agencies have begun to divert sacks of grain that had been earmarked for other war zones to the Ukraine, leaving the people of Yemen and refugees from many areas in desperation.”[6]

“But today the world is in its worst food crisis since 2008” ZeroHedge warns us. “The number of people suffering acute food insecurity increased by 25% since January 2022 to 345 million, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. Why, then, is the UNEP trying to steer nations away from fertilizers that increase food production?

The UNEP’s Acting Director in 2019 said the reason was humankind’s “long-term interference with the Earth’s nitrogen balance.” In October of that year, the UNEP hosted a meeting in the capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo and issued a “road map” to push nations to cut nitrogen pollution in half.”

“But the Netherlands proves that nations can slash nitrogen pollution from livestock by 70% while also increasing meat production. Same for crops. Since the early 1960s, the Netherlands has doubled its yields while using the same amount of fertilizer. While rich nations produce 70 percent higher yields than poor nations, they use just 54 percent more nitrogen.”[7]

The Green New Deal

The Green justification for the attempt to starve the population is, of course, pure fiction:

“Many have forgotten the original scientific thesis put forward to justify a radical shift in our energy sources. It was not “climate change.” Earth climate is constantly changing, correlated to changes in the emission of solar flares or sunspot cycles affecting Earth climate.

Around the turn of the millennium as the previous solar-led warming cycle was no longer evident, Al Gore and others shifted the narrative in a linguistic sleight-of-hand to “Climate Change,” from Global Warming. Now the fear narrative has gotten so absurd that every freak weather event is treated as “climate crisis.” Every hurricane or winter storm is claimed as proof that the Climate Gods are punishing us sinful CO2 emitting humans.”

“But wait. The entire reason for the transition to alternative energy sources such as solar or wind, and abandoning carbon energy sources, is their claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that somehow goes up to the atmosphere where it forms a blanket that supposedly warms the Earth below—Global Warming. Greenhouse gas emissions according to the US Environmental Protection Agency come mostly from CO2. Hence the focus on “carbon footprints.”

“What is almost never said is that CO2 cannot soar up into the atmosphere from car exhaust or coal plants or other manmade origins. Carbon dioxide is not carbon or soot. It is an invisible, odorless gas essential to plant photosynthesis and all life forms on earth, including us. CO2 has a molecular weight of just over 44 while air (mainly oxygen and nitrogen) has a molecular weight of only 29.”

“The specific gravity of CO2 is some 1.5 times greater than air. That would suggest that CO2 exhaust gases from vehicles or power plants do not rise into the atmosphere some 12 miles or more above Earth to form the feared greenhouse effect.”[8]

The Dangers of Hyper-Concentration

The key problem is the massive concentration of wealth and land in ever fewer, ever more inefficient and ever more irresponsible hands: “Privatization and the imposition of industrial agriculture have also led to hyper-concentration in all levels of the food system. Global agricultural commodity trade is dominated by four main transnational corporations: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM), Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus Company (who alone accounts for 10 percent of world agriculture trade). From 1995 to 2020 global food trade, primarily done by these four corporations, has nearly doubled, totaling $1.5 trillion in 2018, with the global south accounting for over one-third of trade. This level of concentration has been achieved through a systematic shaping of global agrifood systems through policy, pushing of the ideologies of the market, and handpicking justifying discourse. It is a concentration that is also reliant on an industrial agriculture system that has caused unprecedented ecological damage, biodiversity loss, destruction of livelihoods, malnutrition and ill health, and weakened food systems overall.”

“Seven countries, plus the EU make up 90 percent of world wheat exports. As previously stated, Russia and Ukraine together provide around 25 to 30 percent of global trade in wheat, and more than 50 percent of global trade in sunflower oil, seed, and meal. The system has been built so that about 30 countries directly depend on Russia and Ukraine for at least 30 percent of their wheat imports, 26 countries depend over 50 percent, and at least 40 percent of all African wheat imports come from the region. For example, Lebanon and Egypt import up to 80 percent, Eritrea 100 percent last year, Somalia over 90 percent, the Democratic Republic of Congo over 80 percent, and East Africa as a whole imports up to 84 percent, all from the Black Sea Region.”

“While farmers have bred hundreds of thousands of varieties of thousands of species, the Green Revolution has reduced the agriculture and food base to a handful of globally traded commodities, with only 30 plants supplying 95 percent of global food demand. Today only 9 species account for 66 percent of total crop production, and three species– maize, wheat, and rice– account for 60 percent of our daily calories.”[9]

This is, to say the least, a disastrous state of affairs. It’s necessary to break up industrialised, inefficient and ecologically unsound Big Agriculture and switch to small-scale, organic farming if we’re to survive and not starve to death; we must reorganise, restructure and re-orientate ourselves or die.

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[1] pp.25-26 Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder

[2] pp.28-29 Ibid

[3] pp.33-34 Ibid

[4] p.45 Ibid

[5] pp.46-47 Ibid

[6] https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/05/31/war-within-the-war-the-fight-over-land-and-genetically-engineered-agriculture/?fbclid=IwAR1E8R2ZubGcMIyTZ0egcjuswZ6-wCGvWYm__DyE7hSDYOLyww0j3fzeF4g

[7] https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/why-united-nations-promoting-kind-food-production-proven-reduce-yields-raise-prices-and?fbclid=IwAR32d81ebBtglxr4nhMu3rHCKVqdXEX97kqr8Q6BlVYXcevU66RGbWmllFo

[8] https://canadianpatriot.org/2022/08/21/the-great-zero-carbon-conspiracy-and-the-wefs-great-reset/?fbclid=IwAR3fjQRlYIJn93FbuIv_zO-4Zk1a5h9Zhau-BNJPQ8crl_AaiomR_kbVY6I

[9] https://navdanyainternational.org/new-report-sowing-hunger-reaping-profits-a-food-crisis-by-design/