<P> The peasants traditionally mostly held their land in the form of large numbers of strips scattered throughout the fields of the village community . By an order of 7 January 1930, "all boundary lines separating the land allotments of the members of the artel are to be eliminated and all fields are to be combined in a single land mass ." The basic rule governing the rearrangement of the fields was that the process would have to be completed before the spring planting . </P> <P> The new kolkhozy were initially envisioned as giant organizations unrelated to the preceding village communities . Kolkhozy of tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of hectares were envisioned in schemes which were later to become known as gigantomania . They were planned to be "divided into' economies (ekonomii)' of 5,000 - 10,000 hectares which were in turn divided into fields and sections (uchastki) without regard to the existing villages - the aim was to achieve a' fully depersonalized optimum land area' ..." Parallel with this were plans to transfer the peasants to centralized' agrotowns' offering modern amenities . </P> <P> In the prevailing socio - economic conditions, little could become of such utopian schemes . The giant kolkhozy were always exceptional, existing mainly on paper, and in any case they were mostly soon to disappear . The peasants chose to remain in their traditional, primitive, villages . </P> <P> The price of collectivization was so high that the March 2, 1930 issue of Pravda contained Stalin's article Dizzy with success, in which he called for a temporary halt to the process: </P>

Which group suffered the most from the move toward collectivization in the soviet union