A strawman. Farmers alone could never account for the record Soviet rates of economic growth. And neither could they if combined with convicts/POWs. In late 20

A strawman. Farmers alone could never account for the record Soviet rates of economic growth. And neither could they if combined with convicts/POWs. In late 20s this was the deal: - Poor peasantry cannot provide wheat due to very poor productivity. They use primitive and crude tools, because by definition they cannot afford anything better and can barely even feed themselves, let alone produce any meaningful surplus that can be exchanged for goods or money. - Rich peasantry is not incentivized to, since the state has monopoly on pricing and is the only legal buyer. - It's impossible to offer industrial goods to the peasants in exchange for wheat because all resources are directed toward industrialization to create means of production. - There are foodstamps in the cities, food becomes more expensive, the workers are discontent. - The state loses most of it's export revenue because the global price of wheat declines as the Great Depression begins. - The West refuses to trade with USSR even in exchange for gold. The entire point of collectivization was to raise workforce productivity in agriculture to free enough people to work in cities and to allow these farms to be able to buy industrial goods. Forced collectivization mostly stopped in 1932-1933, you could run a farm on your own if you wanted to, but you would have been taxed at a much higher rate than a collective farm. The other key point is that state monopoly allows for concentration of capital that cannot otherwise be achieved in a dirt poor country. Would an efficient soviet land owner (or a foreign investor) have invested in a tractor factory in 1929? The answer is: No, because the demand simply did not exist. And even if it would have appeared, it would have been much easier for a land owner to just buy Ford's tractors worth $300-350 each, not invest in a tractor factory. And even though the West refused to trade, the US engineers played pivotal role in construction of key soviet factories and plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Tractor_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Lincoln_Cooper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Lincoln_Cooper