Collectivization and National Question in Soviet Udmurtia

Abstract The subject of this article is the collectivization of agriculture in Soviet Udmurtia at the turn of the 1930s. Situated in the Urals, Udmurtia was an autonomous region, largely agricultural, and with a developing industrial center, Izhevsk, as capital. The titular nationality of the region, the Udmurts, represented slightly more than 50% of the total inhabitants, while the rest was made up by Russians and other national minorities. Udmurts were mostly peasants and concentrated in the countryside, whereas city-dwellers and factory workers were mostly Russians. Due to these and other circumstances, collectivization in Udmurtia was carried out in a very specific way. The campaign began here in 1928, one year before than in the rest of the Union, and had possibly the highest pace in the country, with 76% of collectivized farms by 1933. The years 1928–1931 were the highest point of the campaign, when the most opposition and the most violence took place. The local Party Committee put before itself the special task to carry out a revolutionary collectivization campaign in the Udmurt countryside, which should have been a definitive solution to its “national” backwardness and to all its problems, from illiteracy to trachoma, from syphilis to the strip system (that is, each family worked on small “strips” of land far from each other). The Party Committee failed to exert much support from the peasant Udmurt masses, which stayed at best inert to collectivization propaganda, or opposed it openly. However, the back of the Udmurt peasantry was finally broken, and Udmurtia was totally collectivized by the end of the 1930s.