ABSTRACT
A generation ago, an expert on the Soviet economy could treat the initial phase of collectivization almost entirely from the perspective of the Soviet authorities.1
Such an approach now seems to be archaic, for the archival revolution and new methodologies have shifted the focus relentlessly toward the millions of peasant small-holders who were expropriated and either forced into the new kolkhozy or deported into exile. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the workers who toiled in the factories set up during the First Five-Year Plan (1929-32), some of them giant enterprises that symbolized the regime’s hectic drive for modernity. In both cases, the emphasis is on the high social costs of Stalin’s command economy: low wages, primitive working conditions, shortages of essential goods and, in 1932-4, even a catastrophic famine. Cultural historians go beyond such matters to inquire into the physical and mental world of ordinary folk, seeking to establish what meaning they attached to traditional customs or religious observances – and to property, the matter that so exercised contemporary political activists.
