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Video: "Dance us a lezginka, katso", or how Stalin traveled to Siberia
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In 1927, the Soviet government faced a problem: the peasants refused to sell grain to the state at a reduced price. As a result, Joseph Stalin himself went to Siberia to agitate the peasants to hand over grain, and in one Omsk village they answered him: "And you, Katso, dance us a Lezginka - maybe we will give you some bread."
They say that Katso did not appreciate the answer and decided to crush the entire peasantry under the state machine. At least, this is how the reasons for collectivization are sometimes explained. In fact, the history of Stalin's trip to Siberia was somewhat more complicated …
Grain procurement crisis
During the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the Soviet Union, relations between the state and the peasants were based on the principles of mutual benefit: the peasants sold grain to the state, and the state exported it abroad and used the proceeds to build industry. But there was still not enough money for large-scale industrialization, as a result of which the purchase prices for the peasants began to be lowered so that the profit from resale was greater.
In response, the peasants began to reduce grain sales. Party leaders viewed this problem differently. The "right deviators" headed by Nikolai Bukharin considered it necessary to make concessions to the countryside and invest in the development of agriculture. The "Left Opposition" of Leon Trotsky proposed striking the village with a "fist" and forcibly withdrawing the resources necessary for industry from it.
Stalin hesitated between the two party groups and wanted to show that he kept the situation in the economy under his own control. Therefore, at the beginning of 1928, he undertook a trip to Siberia, which was not written about in the newspapers and almost nothing was mentioned in the clerical documents.
Secret business trip
In 17 days, Stalin visited Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Rubtsovsk, Omsk and Krasnoyarsk. He met with local leaders and repeated to them that the kulaks and speculators who were buying grain from other peasants in order to enrich themselves were to blame for disrupting the procurement plan. His personal pressure, bypassing the collective decision of the party leadership, led the Siberian authorities to unleash a wave of repression on the resisting peasants, holding them accountable for hiding grain and refusing to sell.
Trotsky's supporters, although they considered Stalin's trip "epigone tyranny," agreed with the need for a violent solution of the peasant question. Stalin was inclined to this decision, because he was afraid of a possible war with the capitalist powers and insisted on the rapid construction of industry - the costs did not bother him. The Siberian "practice" was subsequently extended to the whole country.
The trip strengthened Stalin's confidence that he could make and implement decisions on his own, regardless of the rest of his comrades. His solidarity with the Trotskyists in village politics did not prevent him from launching an active struggle against the "left opposition" and expelling Trotsky to Alma-Ata, and then completely from the USSR. Probably, it was precisely because of political goals that the trip was furnished with some secrecy, and only twenty years later, part of the materials about it was published in the published collected works of Stalin.
Unknown conversation with a peasant
The fact that from Omsk Stalin went to some village to agitate the peasants for the delivery of bread is written in popular books and told in documentaries. The vivid image of the leader, offended by the mocking answer, is, of course, very beautiful, but it does not find confirmation in the documents. In addition, it would be wrong to explain a whole turn in the history of the country with a historical anecdote.
We do not even know if Stalin personally wanted to travel to the villages - in Siberia he met with local party and economic leaders and did not need open "meetings with voters" in a modern manner. He had come to the idea of violent methods of obtaining bread even before the trip, and it only strengthened the trend towards future collectivization, which turned the Russian peasantry into "agricultural workers" and residents of collective farms.
Continuing the conversation about Stalin, the story about how Stalin persuaded Bulgakov to stay in the USSR and why he gave secret gifts to Vertinsky.
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