ABSTRACT
The collective farm system created during the collectivization drive of 1929–1930 was consolidated prior to the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s, complementary features designed to improve its workings were progressively introduced, the most important of which being the adoption in 1935 of the Model Statutes of the Collective Farm artel’, which served as a pseudo-constitution regulating most aspects of the relationship between the collective farm peasantry and the Soviet state. Furthermore, the Stalinist party-state continued its clamp-down on the last remnants of peasant individual agriculture not only through the enactment of increasingly harsh legislation and the implementation of fiscal measures against individual householders, but also by developing methods of sharing kolkhoz income that would force ‘idlers’ to participate actively in the economic life of the collective farm. While it can be argued that more energy was spent on collecting grain and other foodstuff than on policing Soviet villages, the campaign methods used during the collections eventually left an imprint on other policies directed at the countryside. The campaign-type (kampaneishchina) of policy implementation usually brought short-lived effects and made it very difficult to sustain efforts that could settle core problems in a more effective way.
