ABSTRACT
Despite a fair harvest in the autumn of 1927, by the winter the country faced an agricultural crisis. Against the background of an international war-scare when it was widely believed that the capitalist powers were planning another military intervention, the peasantry began to withhold grain from the market and hoard it in anticipation ofhigher prices being paid by government ~rocurement agencies. A number of government and party officials were dispatched to the provinces to investigate the situation. Stalin personally travelled to the Urals and western Siberia. There he solved the problem with a characteristic lack of ceremony. Whereas other party stalwarts still tried to reason with the peasants and operate within the
constraints of the market and NEP, Stalin simply applied force. In a reversion to the coercive tactics of War Communism, he set up road-blocks and moved in military detachments and armed requisition squads, forcing the peasants to surrender their produce under threat of criminal prosecution for 'speculation' or even grimmer consequences. It worked. As grain procurements rose in volume, Stalin determined to employ the 'Urals-Siberian method' on an even wider scale in an effort to destroy the economic power of the rich peasantry, a policy which came to be sinisterly known as 'dekulakization'. This was the beginning of a wholesale campaign of agricultural collectivization and the 'liquidation of the kulaks as a class'.
