Excerpts from the book Red Famine–The Peasants

Threatened by violence and afraid of hunger, hundreds of thousands of peasants finally relinquished their land, animals and machines to the collective farms. But just because they had been forced to move, they did not become enthusiastic collective farmers overnight. The fruits of their labour no longer belonged to them; the grain they sowed and harvested was now requisitioned by the authorities.

Collectivization also meant that peasants had lost their ability to make decisions about their lives. Like the serfs of old, they were forced to accept a special legal status, including controls on their movement: all collective farmers, kolkhozniks, would eventually need to seek permission to work outside the village. Instead of deciding when to reap, sow and sell, kolkhozniks had to follow decisions made by the local representatives of Soviet power. They did not earn regular salaries but were paid trudodni or day wages, which often meant payment in kind—grain, potatoes or other products—rather than cash. They lost their ability to govern themselves too, as collective farm bosses and their entourages supplanted the traditional village councils.

As a result, men and women who had so recently been self-reliant farmers now worked as little as possible. Farm machines were not maintained and frequently broke down. In August 1930 some tractors out of 16,790 in Ukraine were in need of repair. The problem was cynically blamed on "class struggle" and "wreckers" who were allegedly sabotaging the farm machinery.

Even when peasants did sow and till the fields, they often did their work without the care and enthusiasm they had shown in the past. Collective farms produced dramatically less than they could or should have done. Everyone tried to or take from the collective as much as possible: after all, the state's grain belonged to "no one." Men and women who would never have considered stealing in the past now had no compunction about taking from state organizations that no-one owned or respected. This form of "everyday resistance" was not unique to the peasantry.

Source: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017) by Anne Applebaum.