Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Industrialising the countryside, the ironclad Leviathan had one method of interfering in the moral economy of the village: brute force. Explaining his goals in the summer of 1928, Stalin said that, in capitalist countries, industrialisation had happened at the cost of plundering the colonies. The Bolsheviks, he said, built their industries at the cost of ‘internal accumulation’ – in other words, by plundering the countryside. The state confiscated the modest reserves accumulated in peasant smallholdings, transferring the proceeds into the development of mines and factories. ‘This is an additional tax on the peasantry in the interests of raising industry … it’s a little bit like “tribute” … It is, not to mince words, an unpleasant task,’ said Stalin. He didn’t agree with the opposition, who proposed ‘an alliance between towns and villages’, which meant supplying more textiles in exchange for food. ‘We will not just give the peasants calico. We will give them every sort of machine, seeds, ploughs, fertilisers … so the alliance will be based not only on textiles but on metals as well.’ Stalin spelt out the details. ‘An alliance through textiles is concerned, primarily, with the personal needs of the peasants’, but ‘an alliance through metal’ signified the collective remaking of the peasantry. ‘In general, how can you rework, remake the peasant, his psychology, his productivity?’ asked Stalin. To this end, his plans presumed ‘the mechanisation of agriculture, the collectivisation of peasant labour, the electrification of the country’. 40 To turn the Russian peasantry into a proletariat, sugar wasn’t necessary and there was precious little calico. For collectivisation and urbanisation – the Soviet versions of enclosures and resettlements – what was needed was metal.

Notes

Notes

1   Braudel, A History of Civilizations , p. 378. 2   Haigler et al., ‘Cotton fiber’. 3   Seneca, Declamations , 375. 4   Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice ; Rezakhani, ‘The road that never was’; Classen, The Deepest Sense . 5   Kosunova, ‘Krimskii kokon’. 6   Crosby, America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon . 7   Ibid. 8   Green, ‘John Dee, King Arthur, and the conquest of the Arctic’. 9   Rutherfurd, The Importance of the Colonies to Great Britain ; Kaplan, Russian Overseas Commerce with Great Britain . 10  Małowist, ‘Poland, Russia and Western trade in the 15th and 16th centuries’. 11  Liubimenko, ‘Angliiskii proekt 1612 g’; Dunning, ‘James I, the Russia Company, and the plan to establish a protectorate over North Russia’. 12  Crosby, America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon . 13  Kulisher, Istoriya russkoy torgovli , p. 227; Tengoborskii, O proizvoditel’nykh silakh Rossii . 14  Klein, The Mesta ; Phillips and Phillips, Spain’s Golden Fleece ; Phillips and Phillips, ‘Spanish wool and Dutch rebels’. 15  Kamen, ‘The decline of Castile’; Engstrand, ‘The Enlightenment in Spain’; Bacigalupo, ‘Two journeys with one vision’; Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development . 16  Bisson, The Merchant Adventurers of England . 17  More, Utopia , p. 12. 18  Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England . 19  Leng, Fellowship and Freedom ; Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade . 20  Brown, ‘The artist of the Leviathan title-page’; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes ; Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes, Der Leviathan ; Malcolm, ‘The titlepage of Leviathan ’. 21  Martinich, Hobbes , p. 6. 22 Agamben, Stasis . 23  Davenant, ‘An essay on the East-India trade’, pp. 88, 100. 24  Hoppit, ‘The political economy of wool’; Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England . 25  Hoppit, ‘The political economy of wool’. 26  Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 248. 27 Riello, Cotton . 28  Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain , p. 2. 29  Williams, Capitalism and Slavery ; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence ; Beckert, Empire of Cotton . 30  Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain ; Riello, Back in Fashion . 31  Riello, Cotton , pp. 238–45; Sugden and Cockerill, ‘The wool and cotton textile industries’; Sidorova, Indiiskii khlopok i britanskii interes . 32  Hamilton, Report on the Subject of Manufactures . 33  Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great transformation , p. 42. 34  Chapman, ‘The cotton industry and the industrial revolution’; Riello, Cotton ; Beckert, Empire of Cotton . 35  Pomeranz, The Great Divergence ; Berg, ‘From imitation to invention’. 36  Stolbov, ‘Kapitalistye krest’jane-staroobrjadcy’; ‘Selo Ivanovo’. 37  Allen, Global Economic History . 38  Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams ; Allen, Farm to Factory . 39  Moon, The Russian Peasantry . 40  Stalin, ‘Ob industrilizatsii i khlebnoi probleme’.