What is the way out of this situation?

Some people see the way out of this situation in a return to kulak farming, in the development and extension of kulak farming. These people dare not speak of a return to landlord farming, for they realize, evidently, that such talk is dangerous in our times. All the more eagerly, however, do they speak of the necessity of the utmost development of kulak farming in the interests of—the Soviet regime. These people think that the Soviet regime can rely simultaneously on two opposite classes—the class of the kulaks, whose economic principle is the exploitation of the working class, and the class of the workers, whose economic principle is the abolition of all exploitation. A trick worthy of reactionaries.

There is no need to prove that these reactionary "plans" have nothing in common with the interests of the working class, with the principles of Marxism, with the tasks of Leninism. Talk about the kulak being "no worse" than the urban capitalist, about the kulak being no more dangerous than the urban Nepman, and therefore, about there being no reason to "fear" the kulaks now—such talk is sheer liberal chatter which lulls the vigilance of the working class and of the main mass of the peasantry. It must not be forgotten that in industry we can oppose to the small urban capitalist our large-scale socialist industry, which produces nine-tenths of the total output of manufactured goods, whereas in the countryside we can oppose to large-scale kulak farming only the still weak collective farms and state farms, which produce but one-eighth of the amount of grain produced by the kulak farms. To fail to understand the significance of large-scale kulak farming in the countryside, to fail to understand that the relative importance of the kulaks in the countryside is a hundred times greater than that of the small capitalists in urban industry, is to lose one's senses, to break with Leninism, to desert to the side of the enemies of the working class.

What, then, is the way out of the situation?

1)The way out lies, above all, in passing from small, backward and scattered peasant farms to united, large socially-conducted farms, equipped with machinery, armed with scientific knowledge and capable of producing the maximum amount of marketable grain. The way out lies in the transition from individual peasant farming to collective, socially-conducted economy in agriculture.

Lenin called on the Party to organize collective farms from the very first days of the October Revolution. From that time onwards the propaganda of the idea of collective farming has not ceased in our Party. However, it is only recently that the call for the formation of collective farms has met with a mass response. This is to be explained primarily by the fact that the widespread development of a co-operative communal life in the countryside paved the way for a radical change in the attitude of the peasants in favour of collective farms, while the existence of a number of collective farms already harvesting from 150 to 200 poods per dessiatin, of which from 30 to 40 per cent represents a marketable surplus, is strongly attracting the poor peasants and the lower strata of the middle peasants towards the collective farms.