Central Committee of the VKP(B), On the Rate of Collectivization and State Assistance for Collective-Farm Construction. January 5, 1930

Original Source: V. N. Malin and A. V. Korobov (eds.), Direktivy KPSS i sovetskogo pravitel'stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam (Moscow, 1957), Vol. 2, p. 137 (extract).

1. In recent months the collectivization movement has taken another step forward and has embraced not only separate groups of individual households, but also entire raions, okrugs and even oblasts and krais. The movement is based on collectivization of the means of production of poor and middle-peasant households.

All the rates of development of the collectivization movement envisaged by the plan have been surpassed. By the spring of 1930 the sown area worked on a communal basis will be significantly more than 30 million hectares, i.e., the five-year collectivization plan, which envisaged a coverage Of 22-24 million hectares for the collectives towards the end of the five-year period, will already be significantly overfulfilled this year.

We therefore have the material base for replacing large-scale kulak production by large-scale collective-farm production, and for making a mighty stride forward towards the creation of a socialist agriculture, not to mention state farming, the growth of which is significantly overtaking all the planned objectives.

This circumstance, which has a decisive significance for the whole economy of the USSR, has given the Party every right to switch, in its practical work, from a policy of limiting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to one of liquidating the kulaks as a class.

2. It may be established without any doubt on the basis of all this that within the limits of the five-year plan, instead of collectivization of 20per cent of the sown area as envisaged by that plan, we can solve the problem of collectivizing the overwhelming majority of peasant households. At the same time the collectivization of such important grain areas as the Lower Volga, the Middle Volga, and the North Caucasus may be basically completed by the autumn of 1930, or in any case by the spring of 1931; the collectivization of other grain areas may be basically finished by the autumn of 1931, or in any case by the spring of 1932 ...

Source: Mervyn Matthews, ed., Soviet Government: a selection of official documents on internal policies (New York: Taplinger, 1974), pp. 331-332.