Władysław Leopold Jaworski 

The Peasant Commune

Russia is entering a new stage of the revolution. The latest ordinances are aimed at proletarizing the peasant. This means that individual land ownership will completely disappear. But this is not everything. The independent peasant, the kulak, cannot (even if he wanted to) become a member of the commune. Instead, like the bourgeois at the beginning of the revolution, he is to be removed from among the living in one way or another. What is the organizational form of these regulations and what consequences might they have?

Externally, the reform is manifested in giving a uniform form to the collective farms which so far have existed in various forms. The selected form is that of the artel, which consists not in collective farming of some larger area, but in distribution of crops among the artel members according to a certain criterion. At the same time, artels have received a lot of support and assistance, while individual owners have been burdened so heavily that all they can do is to flee to a commune. The prohibition of leasing and wage labor, the exorbitant taxes, the price of grains fixed by the government, and the destruction of the internal market give us some idea about the means used to accelerate the attainment of the goal. Thirty million hectares of land have already been allocated for collectivization — more than the approximately twenty-two million planned within the framework of the pyatiletka, that is, the five-year economic plan. As for the kulaks, their land is allocated to artels, while they are deported to the borderlands, so that they do not infect the orthodox proletarians with their spirit.

This is not to mention the further reforms that will have to be carried out in connection with the formation of artels, such as, a new economic division of the country and reconciling it with the political division, the building of new towns and cities, etc. What I have already said proves that the Soviets have undertaken a work of gigantic proportions. Can they succeed?

It is easy to imagine that it is not enough to create artels for they have to be equipped with suitable means of production. Where will the Soviets get the money for that? Let us also bear in mind that the cost of state production is so great that it cannot be profitable. These two considerations already cast doubt on the plan’s success. But as lives of millions of people mean nothing in the USSR, then let us assume that after years of indignation and misery, the plan does succeed, that individual property has disappeared, and that the peasant has become a proletarian like the factory worker (namely that he has become a hired hand of the state), and, last but not least, that the Russian countryside has become classless. If this dream of the Bolsheviks comes true, what will be the effect of these reforms? There will be two proletariats facing each other: the factory one and the rural one, with the latter being as strong as the former, precisely because of its being organized into artels. Does this not mean that in the state which was to be classless, the very reforms that were to abolish classes ended up creating new ones that are much stronger because they are better organized? But will this really happen? Does the rural proletarian have to be the factory proletarian’s adversary? Will they not merge into one uniform mass? This is a general problem. In Russia, the next few years will bring some solution to it. Europe might have to wait for that for several generations. This problem can be presented in the following way: Can the industrialization of the countryside be carried out without a reminder? That is, do mentality and soul of the peasant remain different from the soul of the worker who works in the industry? If these differences cannot be erased, then Russia will become the scene of a new gigantic war, a war of two proletariats: the urban and the rural one. But this is not all! If these differences are so strong that even the Soviets’ ruthlessness and cruelty cannot erase them, then the whole plan of the collectivization of the land and the complete eradication of individual ownership will not succeed and will have to — despite those 30 million hectares mentioned above — collapse because the peasant’s soul would stand in its way.

For these reasons, the events in Russia deserve our utmost attention.

“Komuna chłopska,” Dziennik Poznański 32, 8 February 1930, p. 1.