A Comparative Approach to

The Peasantry under Bolsheviks and Nationalist Socialists

 

A.                 Introduction

Historians of Europe have dealt with the European peasantry in a detailed way, both in general terms by handling all the European peasants at once, and in specific terms by concentrating on a local peasant group. Besides the situation of the peasantry has always been a subtitle in broad European history studies. Particularly peasantry in the Soviet Union, and peasantry under Hitler have been themes of lots of studies. Even specific comparisons have largely dealt with the roles and personalities of the dictators, the forms of the party regimes and the general ideological principles. However, only very sporadically have the studies on Germany and the Soviet Union touched on concrete comparisons between the situations of peasantry during the interwar period. There have been almost no comparative studies, bringing together the lives in the villages of these two states, when they went through a crucial social and political transformation.

The aim of this paper is to draw together the descriptions of the Soviet and German peasant politics and peasantry until World War II under Bolsheviks and Nationalist Socialists respectively. I will also reflect some of the major debates and different approaches among the historians. A comparative perspective will be presented in the conclusion, including some aspects of the French peasantry in the Vichy period for the purpose of comparison. This paper certainly does not claim to cover all the aspects of the peasant-related issues in the Soviet Union and Germany in every detail. However, major party policies and their implications are presented for the sake of comparison.

B.        Peasantry under Bolsheviks

Conceptual Framework

The Russian Marxists had their own interpretations of the peasantry. Although Marx did not foresee so, socialist revolution took place in a backward and basically peasant society. The term “peasant”, in Russia and most other places alike, was synonymous with misery and ignorance.In consequence, the peasantry was not expected to develop a class-consciousness and revolutionary activity against the elements of “capitalist exploitation”. However taking into account their high percentage in the total population of Russia, the peasantry was indispensable both for the conduct of socialist revolution and for its implications. Therefore, the role of peasantry in the October Revolution was explained in Marxist terminology in the following way: “October Revolution is a proletarian revolution flanked by a peasant war.”[1]

Both the Soviet and the western historians accept the contribution of peasantry to the revolution. However, there is hardly any agreement on the reasons of peasant participation in the revolution. Contrary to the classical Soviet presentation of the peasantry in an ideological framework, the western historians argue that the driving force for the peasantry was neither class consciousness nor socialist ideological concerns but to obtain their interests, which was to own the land. Peasants were involved in both 1905 and 1917 revolutions in large numbers. In both cases peasants joined in uprisings, which had started among other groups of people.[2] The unaccomplished desire of the peasants to redistribute the land owned by non-peasants was one of the reasons for the peasant uprisings.

Another important reason for peasants’ participation in these revolutions was their timing. On both occasions, stresses of a war were felt at the highest level. Both the Russian-Japanese War just before the 1905 revolution and continuing WWI in 1917 affected the emergence of revolutionary disturbances in the cities, which later spread into the countryside when peasants also wanted to take advantage of the situation to attain their own ends.[3] Thus, the Russian peasantry was indeed involved in the Bolshevik Revolution, however for different purposes than the revolutionaries pursued.

 

1917-1921 or War Communism

Immediately after the revolution, the Party issued both pragmatic and ideological policies. In October 1917, one of Lenin’s first acts was the Decree on Land (published on the night of the Revolution, 26 October 1917), which aimed at gaining the suppor of the peasantry, which proved to be weakly supporting the Bolsheviks. The Decree declared a nationwide repartition of the land. Traditional history describes the Russian agrarian revolution as consisting of two stages. At the fist stage, 1917-1918, the non-peasant landowners’ land was taken and distributed to the peasantry. At the second, 1919-1921, the poor peasants seized the land of the kulaks (rich peasants) in a civil-revolutionary way. Soviet historians explained these stages in Marxist terms: The first action swept away the remainders of feudalism, and the second stage was a revolution against the peasant bourgeois. Until 1970s western scholars followed the same interpretation. However, Theodor Shanin, in his prominent book, The Awkward Class, criticized this approach and argued that the land redistribution was on a much smaller scale than it is claimed to be, and that the expropriation of the kulak property by the poor peasants never took place.[4] Thus the Bolshevik policies on the peasantry were not as effective as it had been presented.

Whether the poor peasants acquired the kulak lands or not, the state policy of expropriating the rich peasant lands turned into forced expropriation of grains, which practically confronted both rich and poor peasants.[5] This naturally caused agricultural underproduction, and droughts in 1920-1921. Uprisings and revolts spread all around the country. The Kronstadt rebellion at the naval base in Petrograd together with labor unrest and strikes gave way to the abandonment of the first attempt to “communize” agriculture, and resulted in the declaration of the New Economic Policy, NEP, in March 1921.

 

NEP

With NEP, grain requisitioning was abolished and a tax in kind was set at a low level. Besides, small-scale peasant farming, private light industry and trade were allowed. NEP could not avert the mass famine of 1921-1922 during which around five million people died of hunger and disease. However, in general, the NEP period witnessed a resurgence of the traditional institutions of countryside, besides an increase in the production and acreage. The state especially emphasized industrial development, which at one point caused the scissors crisis, sharp increase in industrial products and decrease in agricultural ones. Nevertheless, the benefits of NEP were clear to everybody. The debate was not on the benefits of NEP, but was more about what would follow NEP.

 Contemporary politicians understood and evaluated NEP and its future in various ways. Some viewed it as a temporary concession, and socialist collective agriculture would ultimately be applied. Others argued that this concession would itself lead to socialism, and they made it a slogan: “Building socialism with capitalist hands.” NEP lasted until 1928-1929, when Stalin acquired power, and when he eliminated all his enemies in “the struggle for power” one by one. Stalin manipulated NEP and Lenin’s words about it successfully, first against the Left Opposition, who considered the kulaks, born with NEP, as a danger. After deposing the Left Opposition, Stalin turned against the Right Opposition, claiming that it was time to implement socialism and to liquidate the kulaks. When he eliminated all the opposition groups in the Party, and gained the full control of all the Party institutions in 1928-1929, he went on to collectivization.[6]

 

Collectivization

In 1928-1929, NEP was abandoned and a rapid industrialization and collectivization were emphasized. Besides, a war against the “peasant bourgeois class” (kulaks) was once more waged. Again, as it was ten years before, dekulakization turned into forced grain confiscation. Peasants, who resisted grain requisition or collectivization, were declared to be the “enemies of the state”. Thousands of peasant “disturbances” were sparked off in 1930. Collectivization came in a very rapid way. By March 1930 an estimated 55 per cent of peasant households had enrolled in collective farms (kolkhoz).[7]  However the structure of the collective farming system was accepted as a second serfdom and had no incentives for the farmer to produce more. Famine once more followed in 1932-1933. Estimates about the number of victims of this famine range between four million and seven million.[8]

Considering the reasons of the shift of policy and the following disaster, historians focus on different aspects. On this issue, Shanin, in line with the conventional western view, follows the reason for the drama of collectivization back to the mid-1920s. He argues that although the local Party representatives were well spread around the countryside, they had bad connections with the peasantry. They were no more than tax collectors in the eyes of the peasants. For him, the remoteness of the local representatives of the Bolshevik Party and the state from the peasantry blocked the ways for adjustment of policies. Shanin claims that this distance between the state and the peasantry set the stage for the collectivization tragedy.[9]

On the other hand, in his recent article, James Hughes names the conventional approach as a utopian view. For Hughes, this view fails to see the social fragmentation within the Russian peasantry. He separates dekulakization from collectivization, and argues that while collectivization, because of its negative implications on the material well being of the peasantry, failed to mobilize mass support, the poor peasants welcomed dekulakization. He adds that peasants actively participated in the dekulakization process. His view is parallel with the Soviet historiography claiming the existence of peasant class-consciousness and their participation in the liquidation of the peasant bourgeois during both dekulakization campaigns (first in 1918-1919, second in late 1928-1929 and early 1930s).[10]

However, considering the Party’s general policy creation and application framework, Lewin’s approach is much more consistent. He emphasizes the lack of a clear common understanding of “kulak”, thus stressing the arbitrariness of the dekulakization process. Lewin describes how the local officials, in order to save themselves by detecting more kulaks, accused even poor peasants of being kulak.[11] Hosking also supports this view with his description of a Red Army soldier, who warned a foreigner not to help some starving peasants because they were kulaks, i.e. “enemies of the Soviet Union”.[12] Contrary to Hughes’s view of peasant participation in dekulakization, Lewis stresses the passive nature of the peasant reaction against dekulakization:

“Undoubtedly the persecution of the kulaks deeply shocked the peasants, particularly as many of them could not understand wherein lay the essential difference between themselves and those whom the regime singled out.”[13]

 

Lewin, in contrast to Hughes’s argument, also describes dekulakization as an inseparable part of collectivization and argues that collectivization would have been impossible without dekulakization.[14] Thus, it is more relevant to perceive dekulakization as a Party-led persecution, rather than a natural prolongation of class distinction among the peasants.

 

Prewar Period 1934-1940

The use of coercion for rapid collectivization lasted until 1934 when more emphasis was put on regulating and strengthening the collective farms. A charter promulgated in February 1935 played the major role in describing the new character of the kolkhozes. In this charter a relatively liberal policy was adopted. The charter asserted that the kolkhozes were to hold the land they occupied, which legally was national property, in perpetuity, that is forever.[15] This was to stabilize the land and prevent continuous redistribution of land, which caused the lack of peasant productivity. The charter affirmed the theoretical basis of the kolkhoz structure as democratic, self-governing and voluntary. However, practically none of these was the case. The collectives were directed with the government plans, which were prepared in Moscow. The goals set by these plans were often impossible to fulfill. This charter also affirmed the preset permission to hold little private plots besides collectives. However these little private plots became the cause of a future government reaction since the farmers devoted more time to private farming rather than they spent in the kolkhoz.[16]

In May 1939 a decree was issued with the title “Concerning Measures for Safeguarding the Socialized Land of Kolkhozes against Squandering.”[17] With this decree a campaign against the illegal expansion of private farming started. Besides, the tax on the earnings from private farming was significantly increased. Also a requirement of minimum annual amount of work performance was established.[18] With these measures, in the last two years before the German invasion, agrarian policy was toughened, and the government control over the countryside was increased.

 

C.        Peasantry under National Socialists

Historical Background

An analysis of the National Socialist success in the German countryside should start from 1914. The end of the First World War did not bring the end of the German peasant suffering. The period 1914-24 was a time of war, hyperinflation, state intervention, uncertainty and unpredictability for the peasantry.[19] The postwar years witnessed continuous turmoil. The 1918 revolution, communist riots, the burden of reparations, and ongoing military tension with France prevented the economy from settling down.

Although there were some positive developments on the side of the peasantry, the period was marked with the misery of the German peasantry. Frieda Wunderlich presents the positive developments of this period, such as increasing unionization, as the successes of the Weimar Republic.[20] One of the major incidents in the countryside was unionization. Jonathan Osmund names this as “a second agrarian mobilization”, the first of which occurred in 1890s.[21] In this period, the peasants associations spread widely and strengthened with a wider participation of peasants and launched successful attacks against the agricultural policy. In this way the agrarians also managed to become a force reshaping the political parties and their agendas. Although the years of “relative stability” (1924-28) saw a break in enduring economic crises and a decline of memberships to the associations, in 1929, depression was once more spread on a social level and increasingly affected the entire countryside.[22]

 

The Party Program

Historians propose various approaches in understanding and analyzing the Nationalist Socialists’ farming program. Wunderlich argues that the party came into power with a well defined agrarian program, and emphasizes three points as the major aims of the Nationalist Socialists: de-urbanization, the preservation, increase and immobilization of peasant class, and the attainment of self-sufficiency in the production of foodstuffs. On the other hand, Farquharson emphasizes that until 1930, the closest thing the part had as an agrarian program were two articles of Werner Willikens, and only after Richard William Darre’s entrance into the party, the party could proclaim an actual farming program. Farquharson adds that prior to 1933, there were two basic points that the Hitler movement proposed to the peasants: the party would regard the peasants as a necessary foundation in the state, and in return for this the peasants would serve the whole nation.[23] He also describes the two basic propositions of Darre, which formed the framework of the party farming program: The peasant base of the Nordic society played an essential role in the process of contribution of the Nordic “race” to the European culture, and secondly the existing elites failed and a new one emanating from the peasantry was required to revitalize Germany.[24] Gustavo Corni in Hitler and the Peasants does not deal with whether Hitler had a specific program for the agrarian question, which he coherently sought to implement. He rather emphasizes that, whether he had a specific program or not, the content of his political ideas did not play a significant role until 1933. Only after 1933, he argues, Hitler’s political agenda became an essential issue in appealing to the masses.[25]

 In the first policy program of the NSDAP published in February 1920, only one point was devoted to agriculture: “We demand a property reform, responding to the national needs, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for collective purposes, and the elimination of property taxes and all property speculation.”[26] Obviously “expropriation of land” scared the peasants, and that is why Werner Willikens, the NSDAP spokesman on agriculture in the Reichstag after March 1928, denied the “rumors” that the party aimed at land expropriation and promised a settlement program in eastern Germany and a reform of farm inheritance law together with an end to speculation in land. Hitler also tried to clear up any misunderstandings about the article by saying that this applied only to property gained by speculation and not to agricultural holdings as such. [27]

 

Conceptual Framework

Whether or not the article mentioned in the first program was the real objective of the party, the rhetoric that the party leaders used was quite opposite to the hostile image of the article. As all the historians agree, de-urbanization, for the benefit of the peasantry, was one of the basic elements of Hitler’s propaganda. Indeed, the agrarian sector was given the top priority in the party politics. One reason for this attention on peasants was the operative function of the peasantry, who would provide Germany with enough food supply, which would bring self-sufficiency, and independence in foreign policy. The food shortage during World War I was strong in their mind, and self-sufficiency had a great significance among the security priorities of the state. Thus a strong Germany was directly related to the high productivity of its peasantry.

Besides, the low urban birth rate turned the Nationalist Socialists to the rural areas where the peasantry would be the life source of the German nation as a whole. Hitler told peasants at the Harvest Festival in 1933 that the demographic future of Germany depended on maintaining the peasantry.[28] Hitler’s emphasis on the increase of German population supports Wunderlich’s approach that all Hitler’s policies were towards preparation of a war that he had in mind. Corni also notes from a party program of March 1930, which, he states, was the last official statement on agriculture, that the role of the peasantry was emphasized especially for its position as the breeding-ground for the armed forces.[29]

At the same time for Nationalist Socialists peasantry represented the pure German race, least affected from “speculators”. Therefore a strong peasantry had to develop at the expense of the worker class, which was the main objective of the Marxist ideology, and at the expense of the urban social structure, which was the base of the capitalist or liberal system. Besides, tactically the support of the peasantry was essential to consolidate the Nationalist Socialist power.[30]  Thus, for the reasons mentioned, peasantry maintained the highest priority on the party agenda, particularly until NSDAP rose to the power and later the prewar armament policy prevailed.

 

RNS

One of the first acts of Darre, when he succeeded Hugenberg to become the Minister of Agriculture in July 1933, was the establishment of Reichnahrstand, RNS (Reich Food Estate). RNS was a mass organization, which would unite in a single corporation, under the supervision of the state, all agricultural producers, their families and anyone involved in the processing of agricultural products.[31] The director of the RNS, the Reich Peasant Leader, appointed by the Reich Chancellor, was also the Minister of Agriculture and leader of the Party Office for Agrarian Policy.[32] This organization would be responsible for all agriculture. In fact, its area of responsibility went beyond agriculture, covering all the issues related with food supplying. Gustavo Corni states Darre’s declaration in 1939, in which he emphasized the extensive role of the RNS in the NSDAP economic policy:

“The RNS and the food policy, which we have realized through this tool since 1933, was aimed at saving the German people from fate and providing the Führer with the indispensable respite, no matter what the cost, to guarantee the necessary war preparations for the country.”[33]

 

 RNS would incorporate all the other agricultural institutions and organizations in operation. The legal establishment phase of RNS lasted until September 1934, when it incorporated almost all the agriculture-related institutions, including rural banks and even commercial establishments. A strict hierarchical structure was formed at the top of which stood the Reichsbauernfuhrer, Darre, and at the bottom were local offices throughout the entire countryside.

The RNS tried to avoid strict, rigid central planning, however it took time for the new system to settle. Complaints about the inefficiencies of the new distribution system were made even in 1936.[34] Despite all the initial defects, the troubles were eventually overcome. The system provided a possibility of flow of healthy and non-fictitious information between the top party officials and the local people. Peasants were accustomed to the new structure to the extent that they would even ask for the maintenance of the organization after the war. Thus, historians agree on the fact that RNS achieved an international repute with its efficiency.[35] Organizational restructuring was accompanied with legal arrangements, the most prominent of which was the Erbhof Law.

 

The Erbhof Law

            One of the most distinctive and noteworthy ideas in Darre’s political conceptualization was materialized by the Erbhof Law that is the Law of Hereditary Entailment (EHB). This law, guaranteeing a single heir to farm property, was issued on 29 September 1933.[36] The law basically defined the hereditary holdings as indivisible, to be handed down to the oldest son or to the next inheritor (the hierarchy was strictly defined in the law). The mentioned land could not be sold or bought, and a minimum size of approximately 7.5 hectares was defined for such properties. The law also included racial elements in it; the dignified position of such inheritor could be held only by “Germanic breeding” people with perfect moral conduct.[37]

            The aim of the law was to protect the farm from foreclosure. Besides, continuous subdivision of land, which was pointed by statistics, would cause serious problems if not prevented. However, the sins of the law overcame its benefits. The side effects of the law affected both the Nationalist Socialist ideology and the peasantry, which it was intended to protect.

In regard to the peasantry, the law most badly affected the co-heirs. There was almost no other way for the disinherited children to obtain property, so they were prevented from upward mobility. The compensation provided for the non-inheriting children was far too small to set up their own economic activity. Besides, it pushed the peasantry into passivity; it restricted the rural demographic growth and froze the entrepreneurial freedom of the peasantry, while also freezing the credit flow because of the hyper-protected position of the farmers.[38]

Historians agree on the failure of this law, which caused an inexorable decline of the rural population. However, they vary in handling the issue. Wunderlich accepts the law as a unified act of the Nationalist Socialist government. Thus he focuses on its effects on the peasantry and overlooks the debates and opposition against the law within the government. On the other hand, Corni deals in detail with the reactions to the law from within the government and from various governmental institutions, and he indicates how the criticisms were rightly pointing the deficiencies of the law.

At the same time, Wunderlich describes the law as taking all the property rights of the peasants. He states:

“With the elimination of the right to sell and to dispose at death, property rights were so restricted that it was doubtful whether the remaining rights should be called property rights at all.”[39]

 

He adds that peasants were tied to the soil, and thus implies that a kind of serfdom was established. However, both Corni and Farquharson do not go beyond criticizing the law for its negative effects both on the peasantry and on the Nationalist Socialist ideology. The suffering of the peasantry went further, as the wartime approached.

 

Self-sufficiency and Armament

            Self-sufficiency was one of the major issues in the Nationalist Socialist program. The main idea of self-sufficiency was at the first level to have enough supplies to attain international independence, and then to have enough stock to feed the country in time of war. The aim of the policy was to increase domestic production as much as possible, but “without tightening the belt too far.”[40] For this aim, the “battle for production” characterized the party’s agrarian policy. Modernization of agriculture was the major part of the battle for production. The use of fertilizers increased, purchase of machinery was promoted by credits and low prices, funds were allotted for lending of machinery.

            The increase of food supplies is an issue on which historians come to an agreement. Indeed, in the period from 1933 to 1940, the silos for stockpiling feed increased, and fats deficit was considerably reduced. However, historians also agree upon that in the last evaluation the battle for production did not fulfill the expectations. The main reason for this failure was the rearmament campaign. There was a considerable decline in the governmental supplies for agricultural investments due to the preference given to the production of war machinery. By 1938-1939 less machinery was supplied to agriculture; the quotas for raw materials for farm machinery were cut.[41] Thus, the Nationalist Socialists tightened their agrarian policy on the eve of the war, in order to get prepared.

 

D.        Conclusion

            As historians, we believe that each case in the history is unique in itself, and no event can recur identically. However, to follow up the similarities and differing points of a concept in various contexts is one of the beneficial ways of increasing our understanding of that notion. Thus, a comparative view of German and Soviet peasantry under Nationalist Socialists and Bolsheviks is helpful for students of both areas of study. In this section, examples from the peasant politics in France in the Vichy era will be included in the comparison to give an enriched comparative outlook.

            The first point of comparison reveals itself as the very conceptualization of peasantry in these regimes. The Bolsheviks, having Marxism as their basis and endeavoring to apply it in Russian conditions, set their goal as the establishment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The revolution and the following socialist state would be built on the workers’ efforts. Thus, at the outset of the theory, there was hardly a place for the peasantry in the revolutionary process and its aftermath. National Socialism, however, just like the Vichy in France, was also described as “peasantism”. The peasantry formed the backbone of the regime; it had to be supported at any expense of the workers and the urban people. The future of the state and the people was based on the improvement, productivity and rise of the peasantry. Setting this clear conceptual distinction between Bolshevik and fascist approaches to peasantry, it should be added that in the demographic conditions of a country like Russia, where more than eighty per cent of the population consisted of peasants in 1918, Bolsheviks had to appeal to the peasantry, since they were extremely in need of popular support against their enemies, especially during the Civil War. To establish the Bolshevik regime throughout the entire country and to gain the peasants to the “cause”, “peasantry” entered into the theoretical construction of the revolutionary ideology. The peasants were accepted as the strong supporters of the revolutionary workers, and the revolution was described as not only workers’, but as “workers’ and peasants’ revolution”. However, this injection of peasantry into the Marxist proletarian ideology is still far from the “peasantist” Nationalist Socialism, which declared, “The Third Reich will be a peasant Reich, or will not be at all,” or from the Vichy claim, “It is the peasant that ensures our economic and spiritual stability”.[42]

            Related with the conceptual aspect of peasantism, the approach to industrialization also differed in each case. When Stalin in late 1920s launched a campaign for industrialization together with collectivization, he had in mind the strengthening of the country, the “development of socialism in one country”, and the use of all resources of the Soviet Union. The two policies were supposed to support one another. However in the German and French cases, the emphasis on industrialization generally meant to serve the higher cause of peasantism. At the very beginning, the onset of agrarianism was related with anti-industrial reaction. The rural world was to be strengthened at the expense of the urban. Investment in industry was to be made, if not for armament, whenever it would support the agricultural advance.

Indeed, “tractorization” was one of the main attributes of the collective farms in the Soviet Union. If the collectives accomplished an increase in the agricultural production, this was due to the efficiency of tractors in larger farms. This fact that tractors increased the productivity especially in larger farms was one of the inspirations behind the Erbhof Law, which set a minimum allotment size to be able to benefit from the privileges of the law, if there was any at all. However, when “tractorization” was introduced, or promoted further, the time had come for rearmament and preparation for the upcoming war, for which the industrial investments had to be dedicated. On the other hand, in France, modernization and mechanization in agriculture went in a slow pace before the Vichy, due to the small size characteristics of farms and also because of the lack of government interest in rural modernization. The situation did not change under Vichy because of the wartime deficiencies.

Centralized peasant politics is another characteristic shared by the three regimes. Collectivization in the Soviet Union meant strictly centralized organization and planning of agriculture. The Party went so far in controlling farming that party officials even calculated the prospective amount of grain in a harvest and accordingly determined the amount of the grain to be confiscated. In the German case, the RNS represented the state hand in agriculture. Although, as a differing point from the Soviet planning, the RNS did not establish strict control over all aspects and stages of agricultural production, it did incorporate all the rural institutions including even some of the private trade bodies. Thus it provided a highly centralized structure through which state exercised control over the peasantry. In the Vichy period, the Peasant Corporation, which was founded with the Peasant Charter in December 1940, was established to become “a decentralized organization possessing disciplinary powers”. “The Corporation paysanne sought to foster peasant unity and further peasant interests.”[43] It did achieve its aim to bring all the agricultural organizations under a decentralized syndical structure. Thus, the Corporation was accused of becoming the most “perfect instrument of oppression one can imagine”.[44]

In all three instances, the peasantry increasingly suffered in the prewar period. Hitler diverted state investments from agriculture to arms industry. Stalin, both in early and late 1930s, tightened collectivization policy and pushed harder for increased agricultural production for an approaching war with the “capitalist world”. In France, the agricultural crisis of mid-1930s lasted throughout World War II. Although peasantry seems to be suffering in each case, the Soviet peasantry has to be distinguished from the others. The German and French peasantry, when faced with an agricultural crisis, lost from their prosperity, and returned to some kind of subsistence economy. However, the Soviet peasantry normally lived in subsistence economy. So, an agricultural or policy crisis in the Soviet Union resulted in mass starvation. When German peasants, during World War II, and French peasants, towards the end of World War II, fell into a shortage of grain, they were experiencing their worst times. However, in the Soviet Union, there was always a shortage of grain, actually shortage of everything, and in the worst periods, as in early 1920s, and in early 1930s, draught prevailed and killed millions. Besides, in Germany and France, peasantry did not face an attack from the state, while in the Soviet Union, the Party launched three campaigns against certain sections of the peasantry, which was named as “kulaks” but practically covered much more than the rich peasants.

A comparative overview of the peasantry under Bolsheviks, National Socialists and Vichy, provides a better understanding of the effects of contemporary ideological politics on the peasantry, while telling us at which points their policies resembled and differed. However, further comparative analysis of the issues is necessary, and will obviously lead to thriving results and invaluable contributions to the study of the area.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

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Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Socialist Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

 

Hughes, James. “Re-evaluating Stalin’s Peasant Policy.” In Transforming Peasants, edited by Judith Parrot. London: MacMillan Press, 1998.

 

Lewin, M. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. NY: The Norton Library, 1968.

 

Moeller, Robert G. German Peasants and Agrarian Politics 1914-1924. London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

 

Moon, David. The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930. London: Longman, 1999.

 

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Wunderlich, Frieda. Farm Labor in Germany 1810-1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.