Agriculture
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people t ...
in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
was mostly
collectivized
Collective farming and communal farming are various types of, "agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise". There are two broad types of communal farms: agricultural cooperatives, in which member ...
, with some limited cultivation of
private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the
economy of the Soviet Union
The economy of the Soviet Union was based on state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, and industrial manufacturing. An administrative-command system managed a distinctive form of central planning. The Soviet economy was ...
. A number of food taxes (
prodrazverstka
''Prodrazvyorstka'', also transliterated ''Prodrazverstka'' ( rus, продразвёрстка, p=prədrɐˈzvʲɵrstkə, short for , ) was a policy and campaign of confiscation of grain and other agricultural products from peasants at nominal ...
,
prodnalog
Prodnalog ( rus, Продналог, p=prədnɐˈlok, from продовольственный налог, ''Prodovolstvenniy nalog''; "food tax"; , from {{Lang-uk, продовольчий податок, translit=prodovolchyi podatok, label=non ...
, and others) were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the
Decree on Land
The Decree on Land (), written by Vladimir Lenin, was passed by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies on , following the success of the October Revolution.
It decreed an abolition of private property, an ...
that immediately followed the
October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key mome ...
. The
forced collectivization and
class war
Class War is an anarchist group and newspaper established by Ian Bone and others in 1983 in the United Kingdom. An incarnation of Class War was briefly registered as a political party for the purposes of fighting the 2015 United Kingdom gener ...
against (vaguely defined) "
kulak
Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ove ...
s" under
Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the
Soviet famine of 1932–33
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
(most especially the
Holodomor in
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
). A system of state and collective farms, known as
sovkhoz
A sovkhoz ( rus, совхо́з, p=sɐfˈxos, a=ru-sovkhoz.ogg, abbreviated from ''советское хозяйство'', "sovetskoye khozyaystvo (sovkhoz)"; ) was a form of state-owned farm in the Soviet Union.
It is usually contrasted wit ...
es and
kolkhoz
A kolkhoz ( rus, колхо́з, a=ru-kolkhoz.ogg, p=kɐlˈxos) was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz., a contraction of советское хозяйство, soviet ownership or ...
es, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly
productive
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
and
fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...
,
Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev; uk, links= no, Леонід Ілліч Брежнєв, . (19 December 1906– 10 November 1982) was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1964 and ...
, and
Mikhail Gorbachev, many reforms (such as Khrushchev's
Virgin Lands Campaign) were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However,
Marxist–Leninist
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialect ...
ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of
market mechanism
In economics, the market mechanism is a mechanism by which the use of money exchanged by buyers and sellers with an open and understood system of value and time trade-offs in a market tends to optimize distribution of goods and services in at ...
to coexist alongside
central planning
A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, pa ...
, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the
precious metals mined each year in
Siberia
Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...
to pay for
grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an
economic indicator
An economic indicator is a statistic about an economic activity. Economic indicators allow analysis of economic performance and predictions of future performance. One application of economic indicators is the study of business cycles. Economic ...
showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate
analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...
of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as
consumer
A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. ...
s were familiar with the fact that foods, especially
meats, were often noticeably
scarce
In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good. ...
, to the point that not lack of
money
Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context. The primary functions which distinguish money are as ...
so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their
standard of living.
Despite immense land resources, extensive
farm machinery
Agricultural machinery relates to the mechanical structures and devices used in farming or other agriculture. There are many types of such equipment, from hand tools and power tools to tractors and the countless kinds of farm implements that they ...
and
agrochemical industries, and a large rural
workforce
The workforce or labour force is a concept referring to the pool of human beings either in employment or in unemployment. It is generally used to describe those working for a single company or industry, but can also apply to a geographic reg ...
, Soviet agriculture was relatively unproductive. Output was hampered in many areas by the
climate
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorologi ...
and poor worker productivity. However, Soviet farm performance was not uniformly bad. Organized on a large scale and relatively highly
mechanized, its state and collective agriculture made the Soviet Union one of the world's leading producers of
cereals, although bad
harvests (as in 1972 and 1975) necessitated imports and slowed the economy. The
1976–1980 five-year plan shifted resources to agriculture, and 1978 saw a record harvest. Conditions were best in the temperate
chernozem
Chernozem (from rus, чернозём, p=tɕɪrnɐˈzʲɵm, r=chernozyom; "black ground"), also called black soil, is a black-colored soil containing a high percentage of humus (4% to 16%) and high percentages of phosphorus and ammonia compou ...
(black earth) belt stretching from
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
through
southern Russia
Southern Russia or the South of Russia (russian: Юг России, ''Yug Rossii'') is a colloquial term for the southernmost geographic portion of European Russia generally covering the Southern Federal District and the North Caucasian Feder ...
into the east, spanning the extreme southern portions of
Siberia
Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive region, geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a ...
. In addition to cereals,
cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor pe ...
,
sugar beets,
potato
The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae.
Wild potato species can be found from the southern Unit ...
es, and
flax were also major crops. Such performance showed that underlying potential was not lacking, which was not surprising as the
agriculture in the Russian Empire
Agriculture in the Russian Empire throughout the 19th-20th centuries Russia represented a major world force, yet it lagged technologically behind other developed countries. Imperial Russia (officially founded in 1721 and abolished in 1917) was am ...
was traditionally amongst the highest producing in the world, although rural social conditions since the
October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key mome ...
were hardly improved. Grains were mostly produced by the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, but
vegetable
Vegetables are parts of plants that are consumed by humans or other animals as food. The original meaning is still commonly used and is applied to plants collectively to refer to all edible plant matter, including the flowers, fruits, stems, ...
s and
herbs often came from private plots.
History
During the
Russian Civil War
{{Infobox military conflict
, conflict = Russian Civil War
, partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I
, image =
, caption = Clockwise from top left:
{{flatlist,
*Soldiers ...
,
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
's experience as political chief of various regions, carrying out the dictates of
war communism
War communism or military communism (russian: Военный коммунизм, ''Voyennyy kommunizm'') was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921.
According to Soviet histo ...
, involved extracting grain from peasants, including extraction at gunpoint from those who were not supportive of the
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks (russian: Большевики́, from большинство́ ''bol'shinstvó'', 'majority'),; derived from ''bol'shinstvó'' (большинство́), "majority", literally meaning "one of the majority". also known in English ...
(Red) side of the war (such as
Whites
White is a racialized classification of people and a skin color specifier, generally used for people of European origin, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, and point of view.
Description of populations as ...
and
Greens). After a grain crisis during 1928, Stalin established the USSR's system of state and collective farms when he moved to replace the
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy (NEP) () was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, ...
(NEP) with collective farming, which grouped peasants into collective farms (''
kolkhoz
A kolkhoz ( rus, колхо́з, a=ru-kolkhoz.ogg, p=kɐlˈxos) was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz., a contraction of советское хозяйство, soviet ownership or ...
y'') and state farms (''
sovkhoz
A sovkhoz ( rus, совхо́з, p=sɐfˈxos, a=ru-sovkhoz.ogg, abbreviated from ''советское хозяйство'', "sovetskoye khozyaystvo (sovkhoz)"; ) was a form of state-owned farm in the Soviet Union.
It is usually contrasted wit ...
y''). These collective farms allowed for faster mechanization, and indeed, this period saw widespread use of farming machinery for the first time in many parts of the USSR, and a rapid recovery of agricultural outputs, which had been damaged by the
Russian civil war
{{Infobox military conflict
, conflict = Russian Civil War
, partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I
, image =
, caption = Clockwise from top left:
{{flatlist,
*Soldiers ...
. Both grain production, and the number of farm animals rose above pre-civil war levels by early 1931, before major famine undermined these initially good results.
At the same time, individual farming and
khutir
A khutor ( rus, хутор, p=ˈxutər) or khutir ( uk, хутiр, pl. , ''khutory'') is a type of rural locality in some countries of Eastern Europe; in the past the term mostly referred to a single- homestead settlement. s were liquidated through class discrimination identifying such elements as
kulak
Kulak (; russian: кула́к, r=kulák, p=kʊˈlak, a=Ru-кулак.ogg; plural: кулаки́, ''kulakí'', 'fist' or 'tight-fisted'), also kurkul () or golchomag (, plural: ), was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned ove ...
s.
In the Soviet propaganda kulaks were portrayed as counterrevolutionaries and organizers of anti-Soviet protests and terrorist acts. In Ukraine the Turkic name "korkulu" was adopted, which meant "dangerous".
The word itself is foreign to Ukraine. According to the
Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia
The ''Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia'' ( uk, Українська радянська енциклопедія, ''Ukrayinska radyanska entsyklopediya'') was a multi-purpose encyclopedia of Ukraine, issued in the USSR.
First attempt
Following th ...
, struggle with kulaks in Ukraine was taking place more intensely than anywhere else in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
.
[Korkulism](_blank)
at the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia
The ''Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia'' ( uk, Українська радянська енциклопедія, ''Ukrayinska radyanska entsyklopediya'') was a multi-purpose encyclopedia of Ukraine, issued in the USSR.
First attempt
Following th ...
.
Coincidentally with the start of First "pyatiletka" (
5 year plan), a new commissariat of the Soviet Union was created, better known as ''
Narkomzem'' (People's Commissariat of Land Cultivation) led by
Yakov Yakovlev
Yakov Arkadyevich Yakovlev (real name: Epstein; russian: Я́ков Арка́дьевич Я́ковлев, 9 June 1896, Grodno – 29 July 1938) was a Soviet politician and statesman who played a central role in the forced collectivisation of ag ...
. After the speech on collectivization that Stalin gave to the
Communist Academy, there were no specific instructions on how exactly it had to be implemented, except for liquidation of kulaks as a class.
Stalin's revolution is often regarded as one of the factors which led to the severe
Soviet famine of 1932–33
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
, better known in
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
as the
Holodomor. Official Soviet sources blamed the famine on counterrevolutionary efforts by the Kulaks, though there is little evidence for this claim.
A plausible alternative explanation, supported by some historians, is that the famine occurred at least in part due to poor weather conditions and low harvests.
The famine started in Ukraine in the winter of 1931 and despite the lack of any official reports the news spread by word of mouth rapidly.
During that time restrictions on rail travel were set by authorities.
Only next year in 1932-33 the famine spread outside of Ukraine to agricultural regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, while the "news blackout continued".
The famine led to the introduction of the internal passport system, due to the unmanageable flow of migrants to the cities.
[ Fitzpatrick, Sh. ''Everyday Stalinism''. "Oxford Press". 1999. p 6.] The famine finally ended in 1933, after a successful harvest.
Collectivization continued. During the second five-year plan Stalin came up with another famous slogan in 1935: "Life has become better, life has become more cheerful." Rationing was lifted.
In 1936, due to a poor harvest, fears of another famine led to famously long breadlines.
However, no such famine occurred, and these fears proved largely unfounded.
During the second five-year plan, under the policy of "cultural revolution" , the Soviet authorities established fines that were collected from farmers. Citing
Siegelbaum's ''Stakhanovism'' in her book ''Everyday Stalinism'', Fitzpatrick wrote: "...in a district in the
Voronezh Region
Voronezh Oblast (russian: Воронежская область, Voronezhskaya oblast) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast). Its administrative center is the city of Voronezh. Its population was 2,308,792 as of the 2021 Census.
Geography
V ...
, one rural soviet chairman imposed fines on kolkhoz members totaling 60,000 rubles in 1935 and 1936: "He imposed the fines on any pretext and at his own discretion - for not showing up for work, for not attending literacy classes, for 'impolite language', for not having dogs tied up... Kolkhoznik M. A. Gorshkov was fined 25 rubles for the fact that 'in his hut the floors were not washed'".
Khrushchev Era 1955-1963
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...
was a top expert on agricultural policies and looked especially at collectivism, state farms, liquidation of machine-tractor stations, planning decentralization, economic incentives, increased labor and capital investment, new crops, and new production programs.
Henry Ford
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that ...
had been at the center of American technology transfer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s; he sent over factory designs, engineers, and skilled craftsmen, as well as tens of thousands of Ford tractors. By the 1940s Khrushchev was keenly interested in American agricultural innovations, especially on large-scale family-operated farms in the Midwest. In the 1950s he sent several delegations to visit farms and land grant colleges, looking at successful farms that utilized high-yielding seed varieties, very large and powerful tractors and other machines, all guided by modern management techniques. Especially after his visit to the United States in 1959, he was keenly aware of the need to emulate and even match American superiority and agricultural technology.
Khrushchev became a hyper-enthusiastic crusader to grow corn (maize). He established a corn institute in Ukraine and ordered thousands of hectares to be planted with corn in the
Virgin Lands. More than 1.5 million people went to Kazakhstan, the Volga Region, Siberia, and the Ural Mountains. In 1955, Khrushchev advocated an Iowa-style corn belt in the Soviet Union, and a Soviet delegation visited the U.S. state that summer. The delegation chief was approached by farmer and corn seed salesman
Roswell Garst
Roswell "Bob" Garst (June 13, 1898 – November 4, 1977) was an American farmer and seed company executive. He developed hybrid corn seed in 1930 that allowed greater crop yields than open-pollinated corn. He was perhaps most well known for hosti ...
, who persuaded him to visit
Garst's large farm. The Iowan visited the Soviet Union, where he became friends with Khrushchev, and Garst sold the USSR of seed corn. Garst warned the Soviets to grow the corn in the southern part of the country and to ensure there were sufficient stocks of fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides. This, however, was not done, as Khrushchev sought to plant corn even in Siberia, and without the necessary chemicals. The corn experiment was not a great success, and he later complained that overenthusiastic officials, wanting to please him, had overplanted without laying the proper groundwork, and "as a result corn was discredited as a
silage
Silage () is a type of fodder made from green foliage crops which have been preserved by fermentation to the point of acidification. It can be fed to cattle, sheep and other such ruminants (cud-chewing animals). The fermentation and storage ...
crop—and so was I".
Khrushchev sought to abolish the Machine-Tractor Stations (MTS) which not only owned most large agricultural machines such as combines and tractors but also provided services such as plowing, and transfer their equipment and functions to the ''kolkhozes'' and ''sovkhozes'' (state farms). After a successful test involving MTS which served one large ''kolkhoz'' each, Khrushchev ordered a gradual transition—but then ordered that the change take place with great speed. Within three months, over half of the MTS facilities had been closed, and ''kolkhozes'' were being required to buy the equipment, with no discount given for older or dilapidated machines. MTS employees, unwilling to bind themselves to ''kolkhozes'' and lose their state employee benefits and the right to change their jobs, fled to the cities, creating a shortage of skilled operators. The costs of the machinery, plus the costs of building storage sheds and fuel tanks for the equipment, impoverished many ''kolkhozes''. Inadequate provisions were made for repair stations. Without the MTS, the market for Soviet agricultural equipment fell apart, as the ''kolkhozes'' now had neither the money nor skilled buyers to purchase new equipment.
In the 1940s Stalin put
Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (russian: Трофим Денисович Лысенко, uk, Трохи́м Дени́сович Лисе́нко, ; 20 November 1976) was a Soviet agronomist and pseudo-scientist.''An ill-educated agronomist with hu ...
in charge of agricultural research, with his crackpot ideas that flouted modern genetics science. Lysenko maintained his influence under Khrushchev, and helped block the adoption of American techniques. In 1959, Khrushchev announced a goal of overtaking the United States in the production of milk, meat, and butter. Local officials kept Khrushchev happy with unrealistic pledges of production. These goals were met by farmers who slaughtered their breeding herds and by purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded production.
In June 1962, food prices were raised, particularly on meat and butter, by 25–30%. This caused public discontent. In the southern Russian city of
Novocherkassk
Novocherkassk (russian: Новочерка́сск, lit. ''New Cherkassk'') is a city in Rostov Oblast, Russia, located near the confluence of the Tuzlov and Aksay Rivers, the latter a distributary of the Don River. Novocherkassk is best known ...
(
Rostov Region
Rostov Oblast ( rus, Росто́вская о́бласть, r=Rostovskaya oblast, p=rɐˈstofskəjə ˈobləsʲtʲ) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast), located in the Southern Federal District. The oblast has an area of and a populati ...
), this discontent escalated to a strike and a
revolt against the authorities. The revolt was put down by the military. According to Soviet official accounts, 22 people were killed and 87 wounded. In addition, 116 demonstrators were convicted of involvement and seven of them executed. Information about the revolt was completely suppressed in the USSR, but spread through
Samizdat
Samizdat (russian: самиздат, lit=self-publishing, links=no) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the document ...
and damaged Khrushchev's reputation in the West.
Drought struck the Soviet Union in 1963; the harvest of of grain was down from a peak of in 1958. The shortages resulted in bread lines, a fact at first kept from Khrushchev. Reluctant to purchase food in the West, but faced with the alternative of widespread hunger, Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves and expended part of its gold stockpile in the purchase of grain and other foodstuffs.
Agricultural labour
![USSR stamp 1959 CPA 2345](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/USSR_stamp_1959_CPA_2345.jpg)
Stalin's campaign of forced collectivization relied on a
hukou system
''Hukou'' () is a system of household registration used in mainland China. The system itself is more properly called "''huji''" (), and has origins in ancient China; ''hukou'' is the registration of an individual in the system (''kou'' lit ...
to keep farmers tied to the land. The collectivization was a major factor explaining the sector's poor performance. It has been referred to as a form of "neo-
serfdom
Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which deve ...
", in which the Communist bureaucracy replaced the former landowners. In the new state and collective farms, outside directives failed to take local growing conditions into account, and peasants were often required to supply much of their produce for nominal payment.
Also, interference in the day-to-day affairs of peasant life often bred resentment and worker alienation across the countryside. The human toll was very large, with millions, perhaps as many as 5.3 million, dying from famine due largely to collectivisation, and much livestock was slaughtered by the peasants for their own consumption. In the collective and state farms, low
labor productivity
Workforce productivity is the amount of goods and services that a group of workers produce in a given amount of time. It is one of several types of productivity that economists measure. Workforce productivity, often referred to as labor product ...
was a consequence for the entire Soviet period. As in other economic sectors, the government promoted
Stakhanovism as a means to improve labor productivity. This system was thrilling to a few workers who had both the
talent and the
vanity
Vanity is the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others. Prior to the 14th century it did not have such narcissistic undertones, and merely meant ''futility''. The related term vainglory is now often seen as an archaic ...
to make everyone else's performance look bad, but it was generally regarded as dispiriting and a form of
apple polishing by most workers, especially in the later decades of the union, when socialist idealism had become moribund among the rank-and-file. It also tended to be destructive of the state's capital equipment, which was thrashed and soon trashed instead of being well maintained.
The ''sovkhozy'' tended to emphasize larger scale production than the ''kolkhozy'' and had the ability to specialize in certain crops. The government tended to supply them with better machinery and
fertilizer
A fertilizer (American English) or fertiliser (British English; see spelling differences) is any material of natural or synthetic origin that is applied to soil or to plant tissues to supply plant nutrients. Fertilizers may be distinct from ...
s, not least because Soviet ideology held them to be a higher step on the scale of socialist transition.
Machine and tractor station
The machine tractor station (MTS) (russian: машинно-тракторная станция ''mashinno-traktornaya stantsiya'', МТС) was a state enterprise for ownership and maintenance of agricultural machinery that were used in kolkhozy ...
s were established with the "lower form" of socialist farm, the kolkhoz, mainly in mind, because they were at first not trusted with ownership of their own capital equipment (too "capitalist") as well as not trusted to know how to use it well without close instruction. Labor productivity (and in turn incomes) tended to be greater on the ''sovkhozy''. Workers in state farms received wages and social benefits, whereas those on the collective farms tended to receive a portion of the net income of their farm, based, in part, on the success of the
harvest and their individual contribution.
Although accounting for a small share of cultivated area,
private plots produced a substantial share of the country's
meat,
milk
Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digest solid food. Immune factors and immune-modula ...
,
egg
An egg is an organic vessel grown by an animal to carry a possibly fertilized egg cell (a zygote) and to incubate from it an embryo within the egg until the embryo has become an animal fetus that can survive on its own, at which point the a ...
s, and
vegetable
Vegetables are parts of plants that are consumed by humans or other animals as food. The original meaning is still commonly used and is applied to plants collectively to refer to all edible plant matter, including the flowers, fruits, stems, ...
s.
The private plots were also an important source of income for rural households. In 1977, families of kolkhoz members obtained 72% of their meat, 76% of their eggs and most of their potatoes from private holdings. Surplus products, as well as surplus livestock, were sold to ''kolkhozy'' and ''sovkhozy'' and also to state consumer cooperatives. Statistics may actually under-represent the total contribution of private plots to Soviet agriculture. The only time when private plots were completely banned was during collectivization, when famine took millions of lives.
Efficiency or inefficiency of collective farming
The theme that the Soviet Union was not getting good enough results out of its farming sector, and that the top leadership needed to take significant actions to correct this, was a theme that permeated Soviet economics for the entire lifespan of the union. In the 1920s through 1940s, the first variation on the subject was that
counter-revolutionary
A counter-revolutionary or an anti-revolutionary is anyone who opposes or resists a revolution, particularly one who acts after a revolution in order to try to overturn it or reverse its course, in full or in part. The adjective "counter-revolut ...
subversive
wrecking need to be ferreted out and violently repressed. In the late 1950s through 1970s, the focus shifted to lack of
technocratic
Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-maker or makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. This system explicitly contrasts wi ...
finesse, with the idea that smarter technocratic management would fix things. By the 1980s, the final variation of the theme was a bifurcation between people who wanted to substantially shake up the
nomenklatura system and those who wanted to double down on its ossification.
After Stalin died and a
troika
Troika or troyka (from Russian тройка, meaning 'a set of three') may refer to:
Cultural tradition
* Troika (driving), a traditional Russian harness driving combination, a cultural icon of Russia
* Troika (dance), a Russian folk dance
Pol ...
belatedly emerged,
Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov ( – 14 January 1988) was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. However, at the insistence of the rest of the Presidium, he relinquished control over the p ...
proposed agricultural reforms. But in 1957,
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...
achieved a purge of that troika and began proposing his reforms, of which the
Virgin Lands Campaign is the most famous. During and after Khrushchev's premiership,
Alexei Kosygin
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin ( rus, Алексе́й Никола́евич Косы́гин, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsʲej nʲɪkɐˈla(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ kɐˈsɨɡʲɪn; – 18 December 1980) was a Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as the Premi ...
wanted to reorganize Soviet agriculture instead of increasing investments. He claimed that the main reason for inefficiency in the sector could be blamed on the sector's
infrastructure. Once he became the
Chairman of the
Council of Ministers
A council is a group of people who come together to consult, deliberate, or make decisions. A council may function as a legislature, especially at a town, city or county/ shire level, but most legislative bodies at the state/provincial or nati ...
, he was able to direct the
1965 Soviet economic reform.
The theory behind collectivization included not only that it would be socialist instead of capitalist but also that it would replace the small-scale unmechanized and inefficient
farm
A farm (also called an agricultural holding) is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production. The name is used ...
s that were then commonplace in the Soviet Union with large-scale mechanized farms that would produce food far more efficiently.
Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1 ...
saw private farming as a source of capitalist mentalities and hoped to replace farms with either ''sovkhozy'' which would make the farmers "proletarian" workers or ''kolkhozy'' which would at least be collective. However, most observers say that despite isolated successes,
collective farms and
sovkhoz
A sovkhoz ( rus, совхо́з, p=sɐfˈxos, a=ru-sovkhoz.ogg, abbreviated from ''советское хозяйство'', "sovetskoye khozyaystvo (sovkhoz)"; ) was a form of state-owned farm in the Soviet Union.
It is usually contrasted wit ...
es were inefficient, the agricultural sector being weak throughout the history of the Soviet Union.
Hedrick Smith wrote in ''The Russians'' (1976) that, according to Soviet statistics, one fourth of the value of agricultural production in 1973 was produced on the private plots peasants were allowed (2% of the whole arable land).
In the 1980s, 3% of the land was in private plots which produced more than a quarter of the total agricultural output.
i.e. private plots produced somewhere around 1600% and 1100% as much as common ownership plots in 1973 and 1980. Soviet figures claimed that the Soviets produced 20–25% as much as the U.S. per farmer in the 1980s.
This was despite the fact that the Soviet Union had invested enormously to agriculture.
Production costs were very high, the Soviet Union had to import food, and it had widespread food shortages even though the country had a large share of the best agricultural soil in the world and a high land/population ratio.
[
The claims of inefficiency have been criticized by ]Neo-Marxist
Neo-Marxism is a Marxist school of thought encompassing 20th-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or exi ...
Economist Joseph E. Medley. Statistics based on value rather than volume of production may give one view of reality, as public-sector food was heavily subsidized and sold at much lower prices than private-sector produce. Also, the 2–3% of arable land allotted as private plots does not include the large area allocated to the peasants as pasturage for their private livestock; combined with land used to produce grain for fodder, the pasture and the individual plots total almost 20% of all Soviet farmland. Private farming may also be relatively inefficient, taking roughly 40% of all agricultural labor to produce only 26% of all output by value. Another problem is these criticisms tend to discuss only a small number of consumer products and do not take into account the fact that the ''kolkhozy'' and ''sovkhozy'' produced mainly grain, cotton, flax, forage, seed, and other non-consumer goods with a relatively low value per unit area. This economist admits to some inefficiency in Soviet agriculture, but claims that the failure reported by most Western experts was a myth. He believes the above criticisms to be ideological and emphasizes " e possibility that socialized agriculture may be able to make valuable contributions to improving human welfare".
In popular culture
Soviet culture
The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the country's 69-year existence. It was contributed to by people of various nationalities from every one of fifteen union republics, although a majority of the influence was made ...
presented an agro- Romantic view of country life.
After the fall of Soviet Union, it has been recreated tongue-in-cheek in the albums and videos of the Moldovan group '' Zdob şi Zdub''.
Research
The Tsar's Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy was taken over during the Revolution and renamed the Moscow Agricultural Institute. (Today known as the .) One of its graduates was Nikolai Vavilov
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov ( rus, Никола́й Ива́нович Вави́лов, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ vɐˈvʲiləf, a=Ru-Nikolay_Ivanovich_Vavilov.ogg; – 26 January 1943) was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist ...
, who would go on to contribute greatly - albeit controversially during Stalin's rule. Vavilov was greatly disliked by Lysenko but after his death was recognised as a hero to Soviet agricultural research and indeed to agricultural science worldwide.
Under Supreme Soviet legislation the experimental plots/fields of agricultural research
Agricultural science (or agriscience for short) is a broad multidisciplinary field of biology that encompasses the parts of exact, natural, economic and social sciences that are used in the practice and understanding of agriculture. Profession ...
and agricultural education
Agricultural education is the teaching of agriculture, natural resources, and land management. At higher levels, agricultural education is primarily undertaken to prepare students for employment in the agricultural sector. Classes taught in an ...
al institutions were inviolable, not to be seized and repurposed even by state agencies. Exceptions could be made rarely and only by the USSR or Republic governments themselves.
See also
* Agriculture in Russia
*Agriculture in the Russian Empire
Agriculture in the Russian Empire throughout the 19th-20th centuries Russia represented a major world force, yet it lagged technologically behind other developed countries. Imperial Russia (officially founded in 1721 and abolished in 1917) was am ...
*
*
*
* Famines in Russia and USSR
*Passport system in the Soviet Union
The passport system of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an organisational framework of the single national civil registration system based upon identification documents, and managed in accordance with the laws by ministries and other gov ...
*Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (russian: Трофим Денисович Лысенко, uk, Трохи́м Дени́сович Лисе́нко, ; 20 November 1976) was a Soviet agronomist and pseudo-scientist.''An ill-educated agronomist with hu ...
References
Citations
Cited sources
*
*
Further reading
* Davies, Robert, and Stephen Wheatcroft. ''The years of hunger: Soviet agriculture, 1931–1933'' (Springer, 2016).
* Davies, Robert William, and Richard W. Davies. ''The socialist offensive: the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, 1929-1930'' (London: Macmillan, 1980).
* Figes, Orlando.
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
'. " Macmillan". 2008
* Frese, Stephen J. "Comrade Khrushchev and Farmer Garst: East-West Encounters Foster Agricultural Exchange." ''The History Teacher'' 38#1 (2004), pp. 37–65. online.
* Hale-Dorrell, Aaron. "The Soviet Union, the United States, and Industrial Agriculture" ''Journal of World History'' (2015) 26#2 pp 295–324.
* Hale-Dorrell, Aaron. ''Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union'' (2019) PhD dissertation version.
* Hedlund, Stefan. ''Crisis in Soviet agriculture'' (1983).
* Hunter, Holland. "Soviet Agriculture with and without Collectivization, 1928-1940." ''Slavic Review'' 47.2 (1988): 203-216
online
* Karcz, Jerzy, ed. ''Soviet and East European Agriculture'' (1967)
* McCauley, Martin. ''Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: Virgin Land Program, 1953-64'' (Springer, 2016).
* Volin, Lazar. "Soviet agriculture under Khrushchev." ''American Economic Review'' 49.2 (1959): 15-32 online.
* Volin, Lazar/ ''Khrushchev and the Soviet agricultural scene'' (U of California Press, 2020).
{{DEFAULTSORT:Agriculture In The Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...