A Generation, a Time, and Remembering

This concluding chapter reflects on why the Soviet system survived. Recent studies of collectivization in Ukraine and Kazakhstan make clear that the Soviet systems endured under Stalin's leadership through brute force and terror. In this Uzbekistan-based research, many respondents emphasized that they joined collective farms against their will, in response to threats and pressures, in accounts that resonate with post-Soviet critical analysis of collectivization. But in many other accounts, there is evidence of support for the Soviet system from below. Interviews with dehqons from the collectivization generation who were not critics of the Soviet project but who spoke from their own class-based standpoints that had developed over decades of involvement with kolkhozes reveal their enduring identity with the collective farm as a place where they invested their labor and from which they said they had benefitted. The Soviet system relied not only on coercion but also on the millions who, like these interviewees, continued to hope that Communism would improve their lives and who at least occasionally saw evidence of promised improvements.