Gorbachev Book Lauds Stalin’s Farm Collectivization of ‘30s

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in extracts published today from his forthcoming book, praised the late Josef Stalin’s collectivization of farms in the 1930s as essential to Soviet progress.

Gorbachev’s remarks were his most detailed public comments on an era in which millions of peasants were deported to labor camps and died from famine, and they fell short of reformist Soviet historians’ calls for a sweeping review of the period.

“Collectivization was a most important historical act, a most vital social turning point after 1917. Yes, it went ahead painfully, not without serious extremes and mistakes in methods and tempos,” Gorbachev said.

“But without it the subsequent progress of our country would have been impossible. Yes, industrialization and collectivization were a necessity. . . .

“The methods of carrying out these transformations did not always and in everything meet socialist principles, socialist ideology and theory. . . . Such is reality. Such is the fate of the people with all its contradictions: with its great achievements, its dramatic mistakes and its tragic pages,” he said.

Gorbachev has previously urged that the Soviet people be told the full truth about their history, but the extracts were limited to generalities and contained no estimate of how many millions died during collectivization.

Nor did the extracts refer specifically to Stalin’s 1930s purges, which also resulted in millions of deaths and detentions, but they praised Stalin’s crash industrialization as essential to consolidating the October Revolution.

Gorbachev also said Westerners will be disappointed if they think that the Soviet Union is in such dire straits that it will borrow Western methods of economic development.

“To exclude any idle rumors and speculations on this subject--and we hear quite a few from the West--I want to underline again: We are carrying out all these changes in accordance with our socialist choice,” Gorbachev said.

The extracts, issued by the weekly Moscow News, were from a Gorbachev book called “Restructuring and New Thinking for Our Country and the Whole World,” which will be published shortly.