A post of mine from 2018:
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Writing in the late 1950's, Philip Mosley suggested some reasons why collectviization was a more protracted and less violent process in eastern Europe than in the USSR:
"...except in Bulgaria the process of imposing the collective system has been longer and more gradual than it was in the Soviet Union after 1928.
"One reason for this generally slow development of collectivized agriculture is that the post-1945 regimes inherited from the period of Nazi control a workable system of forced deliveries from the individual peasants. Particularly in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland the Communists took over a highly centralized system of deliveries which went on operating with only slight interruption and which has, in large measure, met the immediate needs of the regime for large-scale deliveries from the peasantry. Thus, the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe have not generally faced the same problem in collecting from the peasants their surpluses after subsistence as did the Soviet government by 1928-1929. The satellite countries, unlike Russia of 1929, have an existing administrative alternative to collectivization. All-out pressure for collectivization would, of course, disrupt an already operating system of collections, and this may well have been another reason why the puppet leaders have proceeded more cautiously than did the Soviet regime.
"Another factor which may well have slowed down the impact of collectivization in Eastern Europe, except for Bulgaria, is the much greater role of individual investment and reinvestment in agriculture, a factor far more productive then it was in the Soviet Union up to 1928. The willingness of the peasants in Eastern Europe to scrimp, to perform extra work in draining their fields, cleaning their pastures, and raising their livestock--generally, to improve their work on the basis of several generations of agricultural advance--has built up a relatively satisfactory level of prosperity in the past, at least in the surplus-producing parts of the region. The same factor of individual effort and private savings is still indispensable today to the satellite governments in meeting their plans.."
https://books.google.com/books?id=9-UeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA62
Mosely also notes that in the USSR collectivization was a trial-and-error process in which the form finally adopted--the artel--was considerably short of full communism:
"A third aspect of the triai-and-error process was illustrated in the uncertainty over the preferred structure of the collective farm. In the early stage of collectivization, from 1929 to 1933, the government and the Party assumed, and the peasants were told, that the goal was complete collectivization in the form of the commune, with its suppression of private use of land and of privately owned livestock or poultry. Under the commune, of which a substantial number were created, there was no private livestock, no private market gardens, and no direct private earnings apart from sharing in the collective income of the commune. During this same period the 'society for joint cultivation of land" (TOZ), under which the peasant harvested the crop from his own land while cooperating in certain heavy farm operations with his fellow members, was suppressed. A third type, the artel rapidly became the dominant form of the collective farm, and by 1935 it was the only type permitted. The artel represents a compromise between the government's goal of complete collectivization and the immediate demands and needs of the peasants. Under it, the collectivized peasant is given a small market garden of his own, averaging between one-quarter and one-half acre, on which he raises potatoes and vegetables; he is also allowed to keep for his own use two or three pigs, a cow, two calves, and other small livestock. The importance of this permitted private sector within collectivized agriculture can be measured by the fact that even in 1952 more than one-half of the livestock was actually owned by the individual members of the collectives. At no point, however, has the peasant received the full return from his market garden and livestock, for he has to make heavy payments to the government from his private produce..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=9-UeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA57
Mosely also points out that not only was collectivization in east Europe far from complete (when he was writing in the late 1950's) but that it had omitted the stage of experimenting with "communes":
"In Eastern Europe, collectivization has proceeded to different levels, ranging from 6 percent to 50 percent, whereas in the Soviet Union the political factors forced the government to carry out almost complete collectivization within a very few years.
"In several countries of Eastern Europe, again except in Bulgaria, there are several types of collectives, ranging from (1) the cooperative use of machinery on individual plots, like the Soviet pre-1930 "society for joint cultivation," with a defined individual return for labor invested in an individual plot, through (2) the more common type, a collectively operated farm with a part of the return distributed in accordance with the amounts of land contributed by the peasant households, all the way to (3) the Soviet kolkhoz, or artel, in which no separate return is made for the land contributed. However, there is no evidence of the earlier Soviet "commune," forbidden in the Soviet Union today..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=9-UeBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA63
Some additional reasons for the differences between collectivization in east Europe and the USSR are given in
Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 by Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery:
"Fourth, collectivization in the multinational Soviet Union had a stronger component of denationalization than occurred in Eastern Europe (see, e.g., Gribincea 1996:130; Levesque 2006:1; Martin 2001: 320-25; Swath 2003). Part of this was intentional, part was simply an effect of expropriating and deporting national elites in areas like Ukraine and, later, Moldova and the Baltic states, an action that struck at the heart of potential national movements. Part was the result of Stalin's fear that in the impending war, minorities would form a fifth column against the Soviet state (Shearer 2001: 530-32). More than in Eastern Europe, Soviet collectivization involved mass deportations of minority peoples; resistance to it was stronger in the non-Russian areas (Martin 2001: 294) and was often couched as a fight for national existence. This is not to say that there was nothing comparable in Eastern Europe. In several countries, for example, Germans were targeted for discriminatory treatment, as ineluctably "bourgeois" and as representatives of the fascist wartime enemy. In Romania, beginning in 1946 Germans were deported for war reparations labor in the Soviet Union, and those who returned to Romania thereafter might subsequently be deported again within the country. Nonetheless, this link between nationality and collectivization policy was less marked than in the Soviet experience.
"A final difference between the Soviet and the East European cases was that the latter did not face grain crises as catastrophic as the former. There were indeed serious food shortages and famines, and there were war reparations that had to be paid to the Soviets in foodstuffs, but two things mitigated the food problem. First, according to Mosely, World War II bequeathed to these countries the systems the Nazis had put in place for requisitioning food from peasant households; those systems would initially help to supply the necessary grain. "The satellite countries, unlike Russia of 1929, had an existing administrative alternative to collectivization" (Mosely 1958: 62). This did not mean the grain would flow automatically, but at least the infrastructure was there. A second mitigating factor applies to only some East European countries: Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and to some extent Hungary. They had higher industrial capacity than did the Soviet Union, and correspondingly, the "primitive accumulation" plan that underlay Soviet collectivization was less urgent for them. It remained a factor, however, in the Balkan countries..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=rmzOtWapThUC&pg=PA82
Of course another factor may just have been luck. Stalin in 1952 in
Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR indicated some discontent with the kolkhoz system as insufficiently communist, but if he was planning to move further toward "full communism" in the countryside in both the USSR and the "people's democracies" he died before this could be accomplished. And of course one reason there was not a bloodbath of 1937-8 proportions in eastern Europe is that there also wasn't any in the USSR in 1945-53, whatever Stalin may have been planning toward the end of his life.
