Why did Stalin pursue the policy of collectivization?

Question by Taz: Why did Stalin pursue the policy of forced collectivization?
Why did Stalin pursue the policy of forced collectivization? The answer to this is more than that he wanted peasants in collective farms. Why was that so important to him?

Answers and Views:

Answer by epublius76
Stalin had several reasons for forcing agricultural collectivization, which was a central element of the first Five Year Plan:

* To Increase Agricultural Production: The farming system of Russia had not changed much since the Middle Ages, and Stalin wanted to modernize it. To do this he needed greater efficiency, which could only come with larger farms using modern machinery.

* To Avoid Dependence on Foreign Nations: Russia had frequent food shortages (due to its poor farming techniques and unpredictable weather). In order to assure the country did not need to depend on imports from neighbors that didn’t particularly care for Russia after it became communist, Russia needed to increase its food production.

* To Industrialize the Country: Russia could not become a modern, industrialized country capable of manufacturing its own goods (especially military goods) if most of its population was working in the fields. In order to produce enough food to feed the population (while also having excess so some people could work in factories), Stalin followed a course of collectivization and modernization.

* To Make People Easier to Work With: This could also have been written as “To make it easier to force communism on the population.” By creating collectivzed farms, Stalin and his agents could keep better “tabs” on the people–what they were doing, etc. This allowed the process of “re-education” to work.

So, in short, collectivization served several purposes, most of them economic, but some of them social and political. Stalin’s primary guiding goal was to create a nation that was not dependent on its neighbors for assistance (Russia’s lack of indsutrialization and modern agriculture had proved disastrous during WWI). To achieve this goal, the first step was to modernize agriculture.

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