Collectivization

Having largely won the counter-insurgency struggle against the UPA by the late 1940s, the Soviet government introduced the mass collectivization of agriculture at the end of 1948.⁷³ Modelled on the Soviet Union’s collec­tivization campaign of the 1930s, the post-1948 drive sought to master the countryside completely without providing an interlude of economic mod­eration, as did the New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

Transcarpathia, the most isolated of the newly acquired Ukrainian ter­ritories, became the first to complete its collectivization drive by the spring of 1949.⁷⁴ Due to the party’s weakness in the countryside and to the ob­struction of the nationalist underground, it took another two years for the overwhelming majority of peasant households in Bukovina and Galicia to join collective farms. By early 1951, Soviet authorities claimed that 95.1 per cent of all households in the countryside belonged to these new rural or­ganizations. In light of the extensive armed resistance by the UPA and the overall passive resistance by the Ukrainian population, the Soviets em­ployed widespread violence to consolidate their control of the country- side.⁷⁵ As in Volhynia, both sides engaged in violence. Not surprisingly, the stronger force won.