Suchergebnisse

'Litsom k derevne' ('turning to the village') was a short and unjustly neglected episode of the Soviet history. This program of development combined socialist construction and industrialization with the further growth of peasant agriculture. It was adopted by the Party's CC-Plenum in April 1925 (although only for a short time), and designed by such agricultural experts as Chelintsev, Kondratiev and Makarov, i.e., it was close to Chayanov's vision. Some peasants reacted positively to this program: following the call of the Party, a group of kulturniki started to improve and rationalize farming 'in a cultural way' - with the agricultural research knowledge. The article aims to question the feasibility of the Litsom k derevne program in regard to two decisive changes in 1925-1927: the nearly total stop of the state financial support for agriculture, and the Party's return to the 'class war' in the countryside - against the imagined kulaks. The argument on the political alternatives mentions Chayanov's and his colleagues' statements to Molotov in October 1927. The author describes the state's first attention to agriculture and its basic problems in the early 1920s; how and why the New Economic Policy led to a different program of agricultural development - 'Litsom k derevne' - which strongly revised the Bolsheviks' previous positions. The author identifies reasons for the failure of this program, and how changes in the industrialization strategy affected the political action in the countryside. For the feasibility of the 'Litsom k derevne' program, the peasants active participation was decisive. The article considers the state measures for agricultural development, the desperate fight of the 'kulturniki' against their discrimination, and the position of Chayanov and his school on this program and the chances of the 'working peasants'. In the conclusion, the author presents his findings: 1) The agricultural program 'Litsom k derevne' did not have any alternatives after the political decision to support primarily industrialization; only the kulturniki as rather well-to-do peasants could increase agricultural production in such conditions due to their higher profitability and lower costs. Only political discrimination and the threat of expropriation could stop their efforts to dynamically develop their farms. Thus, there was no way to combine the Party's return to the 'class war' against the well-to-do peasants as 'kulaks' with the Litsom k derevne program. The Party's internal fight for power had disastrous consequences not only for the kulturniki but also for the agricultural production and exports. 2) The author suggests to stop the fruitless debates on the 'class differentiation' of the peasantry and to focus on the real mid-1920s controversy: whether the growth of agricultural production and efficiency required agricultural expertise (by capable peasants and researchers) and the state financial support (for the needed institutions like cooperatives). Both points were the basic requests of Chayanov to Molotov in 1927. The Party leaders from Stalin to Brezhnev never understood that not only industry but also agriculture could be successful only with expertise and not just by command.

The author focuses on internal aspects to answer the question why the complex mechanization of agriculture under Khrushchev and Brezhnev failed. The author argues that the command economy did not solve the basic task of ensuring animal production by large farms, because the high-quality equipment to reduce labor input and costs was not provided. Behind the facade of impressing reforms - from the virgin-land program and liquidation of the machine-tractor stations (MTS) to Brezhnev's 1966 promise to speed up mechanization and the Non-Black-Earth program of 1974 - nothing really changed. The basic deficiencies named in 1955 still existed in 1969 and after the establishment of the Gosagroprom in 1986: nearly all Soviet machinery was not reliable and was badly done. Thus, the increase in the production of such machinery under Brezhnev was only a waste of resources. Less than 10% of Soviet machines met the world standards. Instead of increasing labor productivity, this machinery caused the farms (and the state) enormous losses. Due to the gaps in mechanization (primarily in transportation and collecting feed) the majority of the agricultural workforce (70% in 1982) was still engaged in manual work. In the late 1960s, the Ministry of Agriculture made alarming reports on the state of the USSR's agriculture to the CC and CM and demanded - again in vain - urgent action and investment to modernize the agricultural machinery industry in order to ensure the world-standard inputs by 1975. The article considers challenges of developing animal husbandry, consequences of such campaigns as the virgin-land program, conversion of collective farms into state farms and liquidation of the MTS, successes and failures of the mass production of highly efficient machinery, proposed alternatives of organizing agricultural work and payment, and the state of agriculture in 1955, 1969 and 1986.

Despite its initial backwardness, the agricultural sector played a decisive role in the Russian/Soviet history. Until the 1950s, it was the main sector of occupation; it had contributed greatly to the gross domestic product and gross value added until forced collectivization destroyed huge agricultural resources. The article argues that emancipation paved the way for agricultural modernization by promoting a new agricultural structure based on the market and the skills of the heads of large-scale and family farms. The author identifies three Russian/Soviet approaches to the agrarian reform (1856-1928, 1929-1987, from 1987) in terms of contribution to the modernization of agriculture and of catching up with the developed countries. The article argues that until 1928 and (after the agricultural depression of the 1990s) from 2000, Russia was successful in both modernization and catching up, while Stalin's forced collectivization at first led to stagnation. After the World War II, forced collectivization prevented any "green revolution" (i.e. application of the agricultural scientific research findings). Under the state command system in agriculture, poor mechanization did not increase the labor productivity. Although Russia was known for agricultural surpluses before collectivization, the late Soviet Union became a major grain importer. Only the reform that started in 1987 removed the state command system to make the agricultural producers masters of their fields again, which led to a considerable increase in agricultural productivity since 2005. Basing the reappraisal of the agrarian reforms on the recent successes, the article likes to encourage further discussion. It proposes to regard the use of the available rural labor force, the quality of the industrial inputs in agriculture and the extent to which the producers were allowed to be masters of their agricultural production as the most appropriate criteria for assessing the agrarian reforms' results.

Obvious successes of Putin's policy require a reassessment of the Soviet agrarian policy. The article addresses the question of whether the Bolsheviks' approach was appropriate for the Russian peasantry and considers limitations of the concept "socialist industrialized agriculture". To assess achievements of the Soviet agriculture the author uses qualitative instead of quantitative criteria: per hectare yields and milk per cow since 1913. They kept to be extremely low which is striking for the agriculture based on large-scale and partly mechanized production. The gap in yields as compared to the neighboring capitalist countries even widened from 1930 to 1991. The strong and steady growth in yields since 2000 does not allow to explain failures of the Soviet agriculture by bad soils, specific climate or natural limitations-the Soviet agrarian policy is to blame. Instead of "revolutionizing", socialist agriculture did not take part in any significant productivity rise as elsewhere in the world during the "green revolution". The author argues that the main reason for such a failure was "!infantilization" of agricultural producers-peasants, heads of state and collective farms-by a combination of mistrust and scrupulous control. During the Soviet period agricultural producers never were the masters of their fields. The situation became even worse after the planned economy provided agriculture with insufficient and ineffective machinery below Western standards. Although necessary machinery and knowledge of organizing the production were available in the West, in the Soviet Union the mechanization of crop production and animal husbandry was not completed. The article starts with the description of peasants' interests, behavior und expectations in the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917-1918; then the author focuses on the foundations of the Soviet agrarian policy suggested by Lenin and Stalin, continues with a short review of different approaches to agriculture developed by Khrushchev, Brezhnev und Gorbachev, and finishes with a summary of the reasons for Putin's successes paying special attention to the short periods of yields growth-1924-1930, 1953-1958, 1965-1970, and 1986-1991.

When it comes to the local administration in the Soviet countryside, we see a surprisingly uniform picture in the historical research-the so-called "rural undergovernment". In the article, the author questions this perception and shows how strongly it was influenced by the official discourse, i.e. of the 1930s Stalin's interpretation. The author believes that rural administration, on the contrary, functioned as it was designed to, and that its obvious incompetence was the most important part of Stalin's strategy of governance. To understand the functioning of rural administration on the eve of the German occupation, we have to consider the decisive changes in the local management that took place under the collectivization in the 1930s, and the real aims of the state, i.e. Stalin's dictatorship. The local administration was not limited to purely bureaucratic tasks but had to solve specific economic and political problems to keep up political stability. To evaluate the efficiency of rural administration we have to consider first the political priorities of the regime for even economic inefficiency and the abuse of office could be inevitable by-products of a highly efficient system of keeping up the regime. After the German occupation, it became evident that rural administration was not suitable to deliver what the new rulers expected: to deliver just grain. The author starts with a chronology focusing on the significant ruptures affecting the local rural administration between the mid-1920s and the German occupation in 1941. The second part of the article discusses what the state under Stalin really wanted the local administration to achieve. The third part of the article considers the bases of the rural management in the second half of the 1930s to reveal the intersection of the Party, the state and state security apparatus interests in the countryside. In the conclusion, the author presents his general findings, pointing out as well why the German Occupational Regime failed to take as much grain as Stalin's administration before.