The choice for the Soviet leadership was to either have a working agricultural sector, or a Party that remained in power. To allow farmers that owned/controlled their farms would open up a can of worms - from higher food prices for the workers in the cities, higher standard of living in the countryside than in the cities, creation of a kulak class et cetera.
Classical communists (ie the europeans) hated farmers, agriculture and the countryside, that they worked very hard to replace with laborers, industry and cities. Farmers existed to produce food, that then was given to the workers without any payment.
I've pretty much been saying this, as a first approximation. Marx has got some phrases that can easily be read as a simple damnation of the country life (the two-word "rural idiocy" comes to mind) and I think he was a city man at heart. Certainly his analysis identifies the proletarian worker as the vanguard of history, the cause from whom the way forward would come, the nucleus of a new society. Mixing this with the pretty well known fact that Bolshevik high leadership generally was not actually proletarian in background (someone with more detailed knowledge of the second tier of names who come up might find someone whose parents really were laborers in some capitalist enterprise but I can't name any--until you get to Khrushchev and later perhaps; his people were miners in Ukraine, the Donbass IIRC); typically they were children of professionals and maybe a few actual peasants. (Mainly thinking of the long-time Charman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet under Stalin,
Kalinin; known as the "people's Grandfather" or some such--as in chief village elder. He was a puppet, as the Soviets (in the sense of nominally governing "Councils," the literal translation of the word "soviet") at all levels were in the sense of being strictly subordinated to Party organs, but a closer analysis of Soviet society shows that the Soviets did have roles--they, or newspapers via letters and crusading journalists, were the organs to which people would address complaints and petitions, and were held responsible for strictly administrative stuff the Party did not wish to mess with from a policy point of view--the Party was about policy, the Soviet state organs about execution. Of course in the USSR Party people generally always held some formal state office in the Soviet hierarchy and all important Soviet officials or delegates were Party members. They all wore two hats as it were.
Anyway as individuals with few personal proletarian credentials before the Revolution, the Party leadership was anxious to define and lead an authentically "proletarian" party as they decided it should be, by Marxist-Leninist logic (so often a mere agent of expediency of course). Again I have to wonder what it might have been like had more of their lower-rank cadres, who were indeed largely recruited from actual proletarian ranks, survived the Civil War--but the fact the whole top tier was cluttered with sons of lawyers and former seminarians (Stalin) and so forth does not augur well. Kalinin by the way became a metalworker after moving to St. Petersburg, so his life experience would be much closer to typical post-Revolutionary young Party people who were recruited from the new working class largely immigrating to the cities or other industrial sites from the peasant countryside.
Now the nuance I really wanted to get to here is that these recruits to the Party line included people from the countryside who adhered to and promoted the collective farm system, including legions of schoolteachers. For these people, and they were many though I can't be sure of the true nature of their relationship with the peasant people they came from, the Bolsheviks were bringers of light and progress as well as of course personal opportunity and they were enthusiastic advocates of the regime. Exactly how many less privileged peasants they brought round to their sincere Soviet patriotism I do not know, but this was as it were a two-way ideological "transmission belt" to the central Party machinery.
Perhaps if someone did a TL where Stalin falls down some stairs or something early on, they could do something with a "Kalinin wing" of the Party rising that brings more nuance and sensitivity into the Bolshevik leadership regarding the countryside situation.
But it is inherently difficult to conceive of "Collectivization with a Human Face" or some such--the Party for reasons of Marxist logic wanted and perceived themselves as needing to clamp down on the peasantry and demand production with no backtalk from them, none of course but humble praise and thanks anyway, which they got from their schoolteachers and such. A clever and deeply humane writer might conceive of plausible ways whereby the countryside POV is mixed with a brilliant scheme to bring about suitably non-capitalist socialist enthusiasm and creativity so the peasants were more or less voluntarily self-organizing to produce more efficiently, and get due recognition for their pro-socialist volunteerism and the coercive approach never is imposed in favor of reinforcing the moral authority of countryside progressives. Perhaps PODs making the Social Revolutionaries more cooperative with the Bolsheviks and vice versa before the revolution, more interested in meshing with the Bolsheviks as urban/industrial leaders cooperating with the countryside radicals.
But you are not wrong that aside from pragmatic issues and this all relying on a sort of moral Mary-Sueism that might be plain ASB, the preconceptions of the Marxists in general and the Leninists in particular were disdainful of the country dirt and unlikely to give them a hearing, all the more so if they came from there themselves since they'd think "hey, I woke up and saw the light of the future, why can't you?"
A TL where the whole SR party was more hard leftist and pro-Marxist, but with a forthrightly pro-agrarian slant, and instead of hating and rivaling the Bolsheviks (and I think the reality was more dogmatism, contempt and anxious sense of rivalry on the Bolshie side, the peasants being the numerical majority in the nation after all--as well as a class the old Romanov regime had successfully manipulated into obedient service for centuries, though things had changed for the peasants by the 1910s and '20s) and the more or less "October" revolution was a firm consolidation of the naturally dominant SR-Bolshevik coalition (in that order, what with SR's base being the majority's peasants) might be somehow workable and if plausibly done, fascinating. But the key would be to change Bolshevik and to a secondary degree SR attitudes, and soften them toward a less aggressively radical, more "bourgeois" parliamentarian mentality deferring more to formal votes and less to the inevitable agenda of Marxist scientific advancement. I mean Leninists would remain confident Marx shows the way but more committed to getting genuine mass approval rather than believing they could simply take over by force and then reshape consciousness to their will. This is pretty much a call for a very different Lenin and radical Russian Social Democrat mentality in general. As I said, the mostly bourgeois class origin leadership cadre of the Bolshevik circle distrusted their own conventional training as probably the seductive voice of treasonous to the proletarian cause revisionism they were quick to condemn in Second International circles generally.
Before I leave the subject though I just want to clarify I don't mean a total surrender to parliamentary procedures, but somewhat more respect for the wisdom of checks and balances, for making and keeping alliances with people whom one does not agree with 100 percent but who are moving in roughly the same direction, for the power of persuasion over compulsion, and yeah, quite a bit more compassion and empathy.
So--yeah, moral Mary Sueism. But not to the point they wouldn't denounce some opponents all out, such as the Kadets and the Tsarist restorationist generally, or the whole self-appointed "Provisional Government" which IMHO had zero legitimacy, not in Russian terms anyway--it mainly looked like a real government to the foreign Entente allies, and of course conservatives preferred it to the Soviets. But to my mind, after the February Revolution the city Soviets were the legitimate government; the PR appointed Constituent Assembly was a farce although one could plausibly have the SR-Bolshevik alliance consolidate their power through packing and overwhelmingly winning in the CA by force of votes probably with some intimidation, force or trick the PR backers to be the ones who violently strike against the Soviets (as they did in OTL anyway) and use the moral authority of winning electorally on all fronts combined with superior street fighting to formally ratify a Soviet-democratic form of state, one in which SR, Bolshevik and a few more on the lefty side genuinely contend for electoral victory with mixed results leading to an ongoing balance of power and gradual largely merging and reconfiguring, with factions disputing different approaches rising and falling by free vote in Soviets.
The way the Soviet system as a democratic hierarchy was supposed to work by the way--all individuals (at least those with standing as working class since grass roots Soviets were formed first within workplaces, and excluded managerial people, just as unions would) vote in their local Soviets as a sort of class-oriented town meeting, only the unit is typically a lot smaller than a town, unless the town is very small. They choose delegates to go to the next level up regional Soviet, on the scale of a town, big part of a city, or portion of a county, then those Soviets in turn send delegates up to a wide regional Soviet such as a province (equivalent to US state here for scaling purposes) and thus on to a national (SFSR) and finally all-Union Supreme Soviet. If we had several parties contending, with no set election times, if we can envision a dynamic whereby the desire of each to "purify" the system by packing the Soviets or hold a coup outside the Soviet hierarchy is checked so the protocol of respecting democratic outcomes in hope of coming back later and remaining fractionally present to form a loyal opposition develops, then I see the system as being driven by percolation from below as it were. Pretty much the whole nation meets in their local Soviets town meeting style, with real power devolving to very local levels, the regional Soviets through local ones combining legislative, executive and judicial power--all actions tend to emerge via the low level Soviets, but checked by the higher levels. People are thus engaged in vigorous local democracy, which can have a mob/lynch tendency but this is policed to limit irrevocable violence. Then formally the grassroots Soviets fluidly change their delegations to the next level up, and so shifting tendencies percolate. Say instead of one representative there are traditionally three going up, and custom and law makes them proportionally chosen, so a divided Soviet sends two from the majority tendency and one from the largest dissenting one, or splits all three for three tendencies, shifting the balances fluidly and continuously going up. With four to say seven levels between the grassroots and the Supreme Soviet, there is considerable time delay, but seeing a wave of a rising tendency percolating upward higher level delegates can trim their sails as it were. The delay factor serves to provide some continuity, as does the irrepressible persistence of dissenters. All parties might agree in principle that party factionalism as such should be deplored in favor of all-worker vision which everyone claims, so formal party structures might dissolve in favor of claims to be a citizen-worker leader first and individuals formerly labeled Bolshevik or SR might wind up shifting back and forth.
It would not be very Soviet if they settled on a basically capitalist economy but there might be space for a fluid and somewhat contradictory swaying back and forth between somewhat privatized versus strongly socialized economic flows, with the visionary communists striving to prove the superiority of planned, coordinated flows in contrast to market-based ones, and this might lead to a workable form of democratically regulated coordinated development.