The Socialist Offensive

"This book picks up where E H Carr’s great history, The Bolshevik Revolution , leaves off. Carr’s history comprised 14 volumes, covering the period 1917-1929. Davies took up the baton by adding five more volumes, taking us from 1929 to1933. These five volumes deal with agriculture and the wider economy. Each of the five is a masterpiece of detail and research, providing an incredibly detailed picture of the history of the time. Just to give you an idea, Volume IV is on economics from 1931-33 and it alone is 612 pages long. This series is simply remarkable, compelling, fascinating, and genuine historical scholarship on the industrialisation of Soviet Russia. You have the feeling that you are actually living through each month of the early years of Soviet power, living with the struggles, living through the huge human and economic cost, living with the consequences of top-down-command-economy decision-making and legal implementation. He goes through the archives and examines what really happened. The volume I’ve chosen is the first of the series, on collectivisation. Davies has a huge understanding not only of the politics and history of the time, but also of the law. This whole book deals only with the legislation for collective farming 1929-1930, the early years of the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. Each chapter chronologically covers a few months taking you through the decisions, the debates and the terrible implications for Soviet farmers of the time and the traditional world in which they had lived for many years. You read about the food shortages and early ideological arguments that prompted the drastic step of forced political and legal collectivisation of agriculture. He shows how law was used as a pretext for going to the countryside and expropriating grain, how it was used as an engine for change from peasant subsistence farming to mass collectivisation. In March 1929 the notorious article 107 of the criminal code in 1929 was widely applied to those hoarding grain. You got three years’ “deprivation of freedom” for the crime of deliberately increasing prices by “buying up grain” or by “not putting it on the market” (ie, delivering it to the government) and you were also subject to “full or partial confiscation of your property”. And yet everybody was hoarding grain because the state was seizing as much as possible for the towns, there was nothing otherwise to eat and you feared for your next harvest or supply of grain."