agriculture of the soviet union

Agriculture in the Soviet Union was organized into a system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively. Organized on a large scale and highly mechanized, the Soviet Union was 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. Cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, and flax were also major crops. With immense land resources, extensive machinery and chemical industries, and a large rural work force, Soviet agriculture was relatively productive despite being hampered in many areas by the climate (only 10 percent of the Soviet Union's land was arable). From 1929 until 1965, many resources were wasted on unproductive and unscientific programs under the direction of Trofim Lysenko. Conditions were best in the temperate black earth belt stretching from Ukraine through southern Russia into the west, spanning the extreme southern portions of Siberia.

History

The Decree on Land, written by Vladimir Lenin, was passed by the Second Congress of the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies on 26 October, 1917, following the success of the October Revolution. The Decree on Land of 26 October, 1917 abolished all forms of land ownership: "land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated. All land, whether state, crown, monastery, church, factory, entailed, private, public, peasant, etc., shall be confiscated without compensation and become the property of the whole people, and pass into the use of all those who cultivate it." This was followed on February 19, 1918, by a decree of the Central Executive Committee, "The Fundamental Law of Land Socialization" http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/russ/land.html. These decrees were codified in the 1922 Land Code. During the revolution the peasants had seized the lands of the nobility and those of rich peasants and incorporated them in communes. The Land Code of 1922 ratified this peasant revolution from below. Joseph Stalin established the USSR's system of state and collective farms when he moved to replace the NEP with collective farming in 1928, which grouped peasants into collective farms (kolkhozes) generally created from consolidated smallholdings. State farms (sovkhozes) usually had their origin in lands confiscated from the estates of the aristocracy and other large holdings. For a detailed article on the topic see Collectivisation in the USSR.

Agricultural labor

Stalin's campaign of forced collectivization was a major factor explaining the sector's poor performance. In the new state and collective farms, outside directives failed to take local growing conditions into account. Also, interference in the day-to-day affairs of peasant life often bred resentment and worker alienation across the countryside (although some landless or poor peasants benefited from the process). The human toll was very large. In the collective farms, low labor productivity was a consequence for decades to come. The sovkhozy tended to focus on 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 fertilizers. Labor productivity (and in turn incomes) tended to be higher 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, eggs, and vegetables. Private plots were among many attempts made to restructure Soviet farming. However, the weak worker incentives and managerial autonomy were not addressed. Although the Soviet Union was the world's second leading agricultural producer and ranked first in the production of numerous commodities, agriculture was a net drain on the economy.

Efficiency of collective farming

The theory behind collectivisation was that it would replace the small-scale unmechanised and inefficient farms that were then commonplace in the Soviet Union with large-scale mechanised farms that would produce food far more efficiently. However, some observers say that despite isolated successes, collective farms and sovkhozes were inefficient, the agricultural sector being weak thoughout 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). The private plots produced 40% of the total amount of vegetables and fruits. These claims of "inefficiency" have, however, been criticised. Statistics based on value rather than volume of production give a particularly distorted view of reality, as public-sector food was heavily subsidised and sold at much lower prices than private-sector produce. In addition, 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 pasturage and the private plots total almost 20% of all Soviet farmland. http://www.usm.maine.edu/eco/joe/works/Soviet.html Private farming also turns out to be relatively inefficient, taking roughly 40% of all agricultural labour to produce only 25% of all output by value. Finally, such claims 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 hectare. Economist Joseph E. Medley of the University of Southern Maine, US, while admitting to some inefficiency in Soviet agriculture, refers to allegations that Soviet agriculture was a failure as "myths" constructed by Western critics. He believes them to be ideological in nature and emphasises "the possibility that socialized agriculture may be able to make valuable contributions to improving human welfare". He points out that comparisons with Agriculture in the United States are especially misleading because of the massive subsidies provided to farmers there and that they fail to take into consideration the displaced rural population which has resulted from increasing "efficiency". http://www.usm.maine.edu/eco/joe/works/Soviet.html

Information about Soviet agriculture

In the later years of the Soviet Union accurate detailed information regarding conditions in Soviet agriculture was considered a state secret when not censored outright. A major breach in security occurred in 1983 when the details of a classified paper, "for internal use only", by Soviet sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya at the closed Novosibirsk conference, regarding the crisis in Soviet agriculture were published in the Washington Post. Later it became known as the Novosibirsk Report in the West. Although expressed in terms of Marxist theory, this paper, an outline of a proposed research project to study the social mechanisms of economic development as exemplifed in Siberian agriculture, was sharply critical of current conditions. Zaslavskaya was the author of a number of works in Russian which deal with economics and social conditions in Soviet agriculture although some of her work was suppressed by Soviet censors, for example, The Methodology of Comparing Labour Productivity in Agriculture in the USSR and the USA, written together with M.I. Sidorova, suppressed due to its pessimistic results. Another window into Soviet agriculture was offered by the work of Maurice Hindus, an American author whose family had emigrated from Belarus to the United States. Hindus returned to the Soviet Union as an adult and wrote a series of books from the 1930s to 1960s about conditions in the Soviet Union. Of rural origins himself, he continued to monitor social and economic conditions in agriculture over his career. His early books such as Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village are supportive of the Soviet line, but over the years he became more and more critical as the early promise of the Soviet experiment failed to materialize in his opinion. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, much more information has become available.

External links

"Soviet Agriculture: A critique of the myths constructed by Western critics", by Joseph E. Medley, Department of Economics, University of Southern Maine (US).

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