“The Russian and non-Russian peasants, probably four-fifths of the total Soviet population in 1929, were herded into collective farms, without anyone truly knowing how collectivized agriculture was supposed to work.” Soviet UnionPeasantsCollective FarmsCollectivized Agriculture Book:Life in Stalin's Soviet Union Source: Life in Stalin's Soviet Union
“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.” Soviet UnionPeasantsIndustrializationModernizationJoseph StalinCollective FarmsSoviet Daily Life Book:Life in Stalin's Soviet Union Source: Life in Stalin's Soviet Union