Resolution “On safekeeping property of state enterprises, collective farms and cooperatives and strengthening public (socialist) property (excerpt)” (excerpt)*

August 7, 1932

II

  1. Make all property belonging to collective farms and cooperatives (harvests in the fields, public reserves, livestock, cooperative stock and stores, etc.) equivalent to state property and fully strengthen the protection of this property against theft.
  2. Use judicial repressions of the highest degree as measures of social protection against theft of kolhosp and collective property: execution by shooting and confiscation of all property, variable under mitigating circumstances to ten years imprisonment with confiscation of all property.
  3. Amnesty cannot be granted to criminals sentenced in cases of collective farm and cooperative property theft.

III

  1. Conduct decisive battle with all anti-public, kulak-capitalist elements that use violence and threats, or promote the use of violence and threats, against collective farmers, forcing them to leave or purposefully destroy collective farms.
  2. Use measures of judicial repressions for protecting collective farms and collective farmers from violence and threats on the part of kulak and other anti-public elements: imprisonment for five to ten years in a concentration camp.
  3. Amnesty cannot be granted to criminals sentenced in these cases.

Head, USSR Central Executive Committee, M. Kalinin

Head, Council of Peoples’ Commissars, V. Molotov(Skryabin)

Secretary, USSR Central Executive Committee, А. Yenukidze

Communist newspaper, August 9, 1932; “Collectivization of agriculture: the most important resolutions of the Communist Party and Soviet government, 1927-1935,” Moscow, 1957, pp. 423-424.

* This law made collective farm property equal to state property and provided extremely severe punitive measures for encroaching on the harvest. In popular lore, this resolution became known as “the law of five ears of wheat.” Stalin would later invoke the law in a January All-Union Politburo resolution.

Ruslan Pyrih, ed, pp. 46-47