In any case, as we sort through the debris that was Soviet Communism, we can learn from this long string of attempts to form a socialist utopia. The realm of agriculture is a good example. Author Michael Savage writes that
Prior to Stalin's tinkering with the system, the farms in the Soviet Union were individually owned and operated by small family farmers, much as you might have in parts of this country today. These farmers, known as kulaks or individual landowners, were the backbone of the agricultural industry for the Soviets, having worked the soil for generations. Before Stalin intervened, the kulaks were quite productive and the people were eating fairly well.
It is worth noting that the kulaks were left in place for some years after the Communist-Socialist takeover in 1917. Stalin didn't come into power until after Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, died in 1924. Why did Stalin want to re-organize the agricultural system, if it had been working fairly well for the first few years after the revolution?
Because he had embraced Marx and Lenin's view that evil capitalists were the antithesis of socialism. For socialism to work, the capitalists had to be weeded out. And, as Marx had taught, "The theory of Communism may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property." Since the farmers were landowners who sometimes employed a handful of others, that made them a threat to communism and, as such, Stalin said they had to go.
The mere fact that they owned land made these farmers 'enemies of the state' and they paid dearly for that: they were killed by the millions.
Stalin was of the opinion that the government, with the help of a centralized game plan, could run the farms better than the farmers. He figured he'd eliminate the profit motive of these greedy individual farmers and, by nationalizing the agricultural business, make it more efficient, increase productivity, and expand farmland output.
Farming takes two things: experience and hard work. There are a great many decisions and judgments to be made by a farmer: when to plant, when to harvest, which type of fertilizer to use, which type of grain is best suited for a particular field, etc.; such decisions require experience. Farming is also brutally physically demanding: strong farmers are exhausted at the end of a day's work. Guys sitting behind a desk in a government office have little notion of how to run a farm.
Let's not dwell on the fact that Stalin never planted a turnip and had no idea what was involved in running a farm. For whatever reason, Stalin placed his faith in the brilliant government bureaucrats in Moscow, believing they could do a better job than the kulaks who actually had dirt under their fingernails. Almost overnight, Stalin's regime swung into action, enforcing the collectivization of agriculture.
Imagine a swarm of government agents showing up at a farm, summarily removing the family which had operated and owned that farm for generations, and installing an official with several hired hands to run the farm - people who had never farmed before, following a set of instructions written by someone who had also never farmed before. It was a recipe for disaster.
In the early 1930's, Stalin proceeded to steal the land from the people - ordinary men and women like you and me - arresting those who refused to go along with the program. Millions of kulaks were exiled to distant corners of Russia. Many landed in Stalin's Gulag labor camps, and more than twenty thousand who resisted were executed. Yes, there was widespread resistance because, in simple terms, as musician Frank Zappa once quipped, "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." What was the fruit of Stalin's takeover of the farming industry?
As the resistance to Stalin grew stronger, he ordered that more and more farmers be executed or shipped off to a labor camp. When other farmers saw what was happening, they, too, resisted. To stop the cycle, Stalin knew that something massive would be needed. Michael Savage continues: "Russia experienced widespread famine of biblical proportions." But it was worse than that - these were deliberate famines, manufactured food shortages. Stalin saw that if he could starve several million of his enemies to death, he could blame the deaths on the few farmers who remained. A brilliantly evil plot: create a famine to starve half of your enemies to death, and then blame it on the remaining half, so that you have an excuse to execute or imprison them.
An estimated ten million Russians died from starvation because Stalin's promise of government efficiency and increased output turned out to be nothing more than fiction, a product of Stalin's fertile yet warped thinking. In fact, "the people who grew the grain were dying at a rate of 25,000 a day."
As late as the 1970's, people from Moscow would drive out to the countryside to see the 'ghost towns' - farming villages in which everyone had died, and the buildings had simply been left. These were eerie reminders of Stalin's habit of starving his own people - the houses still had clothing and personal possessions in them, left as they were the day the last person in the village died. At the time, there were too few remaining people to bother packing them up.
Prior to 1917, Russia had always been a significant exporter of grain. In fact, Russia was the "most important grain exporting country" in the world. After Stalin's communist takeover and the practice of a state-controlled agricultural industry, Russia's grain export business ground to a halt. In fact, in order to meet its own needs, years later Russia was forced to import upwards of six million tons of grain annually. This embarrassing situation continued until 1994 when Russian farmers were finally able to begin modest exports of grain.
The socialist government managed to ruin the world's most successful grain-growing nation.
This loss of productivity and massive, unnecessary loss of life occurred because Stalin put socialism into practice, bringing it out of the theoretical realm in ways that neither Lenin nor Marx himself had ever tried on such a large scale. What's more, this dictator and disciple of Marxism-Leninism became one of the worst mass murderers in history.
The lesson is clear: any large-scale intervention by government into the lives of ordinary humans will lead to misery, loss of freedom, and loss of life.
