Nature's Evil

Industrialising the countryside, the ironclad Leviathan had one method of interfering in the moral economy of the village: brute force. Explaining his goals in the summer of 1928, Stalin said that, in capitalist countries, industrialisation had happened at the cost of plundering the colonies. The Bolsheviks, he said, built their industries at the cost of ‘internal accumulation’ – in other words, by plundering the countryside. The state confiscated the modest reserves accumulated in peasant smallholdings, transferring the proceeds into the development of mines and factories. ‘This is an additional tax on the peasantry in the interests of raising industry … it’s a little bit like “tribute” … It is, not to mince words, an unpleasant task,’ said Stalin. He didn’t agree with the opposition, who proposed ‘an alliance between towns and villages’, which meant supplying more textiles in exchange for food. ‘We will not just give the peasants calico. We will give them every sort of machine, seeds, ploughs, fertilisers … so the alliance will be based not only on textiles but on metals as well.’ Stalin spelt out the details. ‘An alliance through textiles is concerned, primarily, with the personal needs of the peasants’, but ‘an alliance through metal’ signified the collective remaking of the peasantry. ‘In general, how can you rework, remake the peasant, his psychology, his productivity?’ asked Stalin. To this end, his plans presumed ‘the mechanisation of agriculture, the collectivisation of peasant labour, the electrification of the country’. 40 To turn the Russian peasantry into a proletariat, sugar wasn’t necessary and there was precious little calico. For collectivisation and urbanisation – the Soviet versions of enclosures and resettlements – what was needed was metal.

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Notes