Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, 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. A number of food taxes (prodrazverstka, prodnalog, and others[which?]) were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution.[citation needed] The forced collectivization and class war against (vaguely defined) "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33 (most especially the Holodomor in Ukraine). A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, 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 ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, 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 to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been.[citation needed] The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money 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 and agrochemical industries, and a large rural workforce, Soviet agriculture was relatively unproductive. Output was hampered in many areas by the climate 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 (black earth) belt stretching from Ukraine through southern Russia into the east, spanning the extreme southern portions of Siberia. In addition to cereals, cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, 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 was traditionally amongst the highest producing in the world, although rural social conditions since the October Revolution were hardly improved. Grains were mostly produced by the sovkhozes and kolkhozes,[citation needed] but vegetables and herbs often came from private plots.
History
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Trotsky and Left Opposition supported an alternative programme to Stalin which proposed a voluntary tax-based approach to collectivization.
Leon Trotsky and the Opposition bloc had advocated a programme of industrialization which also proposed agricultural cooperatives and the formation of collective farms on a voluntary basis.[1] According to Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.[2] Other scholars have argued that the economic programme of Trotsky differed from the forced policy of collectivisation implemented by Stalin after 1928 due to the levels of brutality associated with its enforcement.[3][4][5]
During the Russian Civil War, Joseph Stalin's experience as political chief of various regions, carrying out the dictates of war communism, involved extracting grain from peasants, including extraction at gunpoint from those who were not supportive of the Bolshevik (Red) side of the war (such as Whites 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 (NEP) with collective farming, which grouped peasants into collective farms (kolkhozy) and state farms (sovkhozy). 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. 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.[6]
At the same time, individual farming and khutirs were liquidated through class discrimination identifying such elements as kulaks.[6] In Soviet propaganda, kulaks were portrayed as counter-revolutionaries and organizers of anti-Soviet protests and terrorist acts. In Ukraine the Turkic name "korkulu" was adopted, which meant "dangerous".[7] The word itself is foreign to Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia, struggle with kulaks in Ukraine was taking place more intensely than anywhere else in the Soviet Union.[7][8]
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. 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.[9] Stalin's revolution was one of the factors which led to the severe Soviet famine of 1932–33, better known in Ukraine as the Holodomor. Official Soviet sources blamed the famine on counterrevolutionary efforts by the kulaks, though there is little evidence for this claim.[10][11][12] Another contributing factor to the famine suggested by some historians, was poor weather conditions and poor harvests.[13][14][15] 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.[9] During that time restrictions on rail travel were set by authorities.[9] Only next year in 1932-33 the famine spread outside of Ukraine to agricultural regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, while the "news blackout continued".[9] The famine led to the introduction of the internal passport system, due to the unmanageable flow of migrants to the cities.[9] The famine finally ended in 1933, after a successful harvest.[13] 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.[9] In 1936, due to a poor harvest, fears of another famine led to famously long breadlines.[9] 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, 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'".[9]
Khrushchev Era 1955-1963
Nikita Khrushchev 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 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.[16] 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.[17][18]
Khrushchev became a hyper-enthusiastic crusader to grow corn (maize).[19] 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, who persuaded him to visit Garst's large farm.[20] The Iowan visited the Soviet Union, where he became friends with Khrushchev, and Garst sold the USSR 5,000 short tons (4,500t) 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.[21] 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 crop—and so was I".[22]
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).[23] 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.[24]
In the 1940s Stalin put Trofim Lysenko 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.[25] 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.[26] 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 (Rostov Region), 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 and damaged Khrushchev's reputation in the West.[27]
Drought struck the Soviet Union in 1963; the harvest of 107,500,000 short tons (97,500,000t) of grain was down from a peak of 134,700,000 short tons (122,200,000t) in 1958. The shortages resulted in bread lines, a fact at first kept from Khrushchev. Reluctant to purchase food in the West,[28] 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.[29][30]
Agricultural labour
Soviet Union stamp, the seven-year plan, grain; 1959, 20 kop., used, CPA No. 2345.
It had been the leaders' hope that the peasantry could be made to pay most of the costs of industrialization; the collectivization of peasant agriculture that accompanied the first five-year plan was intended to achieve this effect by forcing peasants to accept low state prices for their goods.
Stalin's campaign of forced collectivization relied on propiska 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", in which the Communist bureaucracy replaced the former landowners.[31] 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.[32] In the collective and state farms, low labor productivity was a consequence for the entire Soviet period.[33] 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 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 fertilizers, not least because Soviet ideology held them to be a higher step on the scale of socialist transition. Machine and tractor stations 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[citation needed] of their farm, based, in part, on the success of the harvest and their individual contribution.
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.[35] The only time when private plots were completely banned was during collectivization, when famine took millions of lives.[36]
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 subversive wrecking need to be ferreted out and violently repressed. In the late 1950s through 1970s, the focus shifted to lack of technocratic 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 belatedly emerged, Georgy Malenkov proposed agricultural reforms. But in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev 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 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, 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 farms that were then commonplace in the Soviet Union with large-scale mechanized farms that would produce food far more efficiently. Lenin 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,[37]collective farms and sovkhozes were inefficient, the agricultural sector being weak throughout the history of the Soviet Union.[38]
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).[39] In the 1980s, 3% of the land was in private plots which produced more than a quarter of the total agricultural output.[40] 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.[41]
This was despite the fact that the Soviet Union had invested enormously to agriculture.[41] Production costs were very high and the USSR 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.[41]
The claims of inefficiency have been criticized by Neo-Marxist Economist Joseph E. Medley.[42] 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.[42] 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.[42] He believes the above criticisms to be ideological and emphasizes "the possibility that socialized agriculture may be able to make valuable contributions to improving human welfare".
Soviet culture 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 Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.) One of its graduates was Nikolai Vavilov, 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.[43]
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (premier) from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with his denunciation of his predecessor Joseph Stalin's crimes and embarked on a policy of de-Stalinization with his key ally Anastas Mikoyan. He sponsored the early Soviet space program and the enactment of moderate reforms in domestic policy. After some false starts, and a narrowly avoided nuclear war over Cuba, he conducted successful negotiations with the United States to reduce Cold War tensions. In 1964, the Kremlin circle stripped him of power, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.
The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 covers the period in Soviet history from the establishment of Stalinism through victory in the Second World War and down to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with central planning, in particular through the forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin consolidated his power within the party and the state and fostered an extensive cult of personality. Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization of the Communist Party served as Stalin's major tools in molding Soviet society. Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, ethnic cleansings, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulag labor camps and during famine.
The Soviet Union introduced forced collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.
A sovkhoz was a form of state-owned farm in the Soviet Union.
Twenty-five-thousanders was a collective name for the frontline workers from the major industrial cities of the Soviet Union who voluntarily left their urban homes for rural areas at the call of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) to improve the performance of kolkhozes during the agricultural collectivisation in the Soviet Union in early 1930.
Stanisław Vikentyevich Kosior, sometimes spelled Kossior, was a Soviet politician who was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He and his wife were both executed during the Great Purge.
The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, implemented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of socialism in one country. Leon Trotsky had delivered a joint report to the April Plenum of the Central Committee in 1926 which proposed a program for national industrialisation and the replacement of annual plans with five-year plans. His proposals were rejected by the Central Committee majority which was controlled by the troika and derided by Stalin at the time. Stalin's version of the five-year plan was implemented in 1928 and took effect until 1932.
Vlas Yakovlevich Chubar was a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. Chubar was arrested during the Great Terror of 1937–38 and executed early in 1939.
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia, including Kazakhstan, Northern Caucasus, Kuban Region, Volga Region, the South Urals, and West Siberia. Major causes include: the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. Estimates conclude that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died of hunger across the Soviet Union.
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.
Collectivization in Ukraine, officially the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was part of the policy of collectivization in the USSR and dekulakization that was pursued between 1928 and 1933 with the purpose to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms called kolkhoz and to eliminate enemies of the working class. The idea of collective farms was seen by peasants as a revival of serfdom.
Household plot is a legally defined farm type in all former socialist countries in CIS and CEE. This is a small plot of land attached to a rural residence. The household plot is primarily cultivated for subsistence and its traditional purpose since the Soviet times has been to provide the family with food. Surplus products from the household plot are sold to neighbors, relatives, and often also in farmer markets in nearby towns. The household plot was the only form of private or family farming allowed during the Soviet era, when household plots of rural people coexisted in a symbiotic relationship with large collective and state farms. Since 1990, the household plots are classified as one of the two components of the individual farm sector, the other being peasant farms – independent family farms established for commercial production on much larger areas of agricultural land, typically 10 to 50 ha. In terms of legal organization, household plots are natural (physical) persons, whereas peasant farms generally are legal (juridical) persons.
The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933, resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people. The factors and causes of the famine are the subject of scholarly and political debate, which include the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians, Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which were designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The Great Turn or Great Break was the radical change in the economic policy of the USSR from 1928 to 1929, primarily consisting of the process by which the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 was abandoned in favor of the acceleration of collectivization and industrialization and also a cultural revolution. The term came from the title of Joseph Stalin's article "Year of the Great Turn" published on November 7, 1929, the 12th anniversary of the October Revolution. David R. Marples argues that the era of the Great Break lasted until 1934.
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-owners jointly engage in farming activities as a collective; and state farms, which are owned and directly run by a centralized government. The process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been both state-run and cooperative-run variants. For example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy.
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, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".
Kulak, also kurkul or golchomag, was the term which was used to describe peasants who owned over 8 acres of land towards the end of the Russian Empire. In the early Soviet Union, particularly in Soviet Russia and Azerbaijan, kulak became a vague reference to property ownership among peasants who were considered hesitant allies of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Ukraine during 1930–1931, there also existed a term of podkulachnik ; these were considered "sub-kulaks".
A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz. These were the two components of the socialized farm sector that began to emerge in Soviet agriculture after the October Revolution of 1917, as an antithesis both to the feudal structure of impoverished serfdom and aristocratic landlords and to individual or family farming.
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 characterized by state control of investment, prices, a dependence on natural resources, lack of consumer goods, little foreign trade, public ownership of industrial assets, macroeconomic stability, low unemployment and high job security.
Gigant is a sovkhoz located in the rural locality of Gigant in Salsky District of Rostov Oblast, Russia. The Gigant was the first grain sovkhoz.
↑ According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931... it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine, while continuing to export grain; he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response. Bullock, Alan (1962). Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Penguin Books. ISBN0-14-013564-2.
↑ "[T]he drought of 1931 was particularly severe, and drought conditions continued in 1932. This certainly helped to worsen the conditions for obtaining the harvest in 1932." Davies, R. W.; Wheatcroft, S. G. (2002). "The Soviet Famine of 1932-33 and the Crisis in Agriculture". In Wheatcroft, S. G. (ed.). Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History(PDF). Palgrave Macmillan. pp.69–91.
↑ Tauger, Mark B. (2001). "Natural Disasters and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933." The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (University of Pittsburgh) (1506). Page 46. "This famine therefore resembled the Irish famine of 1845–1848, but resulted from a litany of natural disasters that combined to the same effect as the potato blight had ninety years before, and in a similar context of substantial food exports."
↑ Aaron Hale-Dorrell, "The Soviet Union, the United States, and Industrial Agriculture" Journal of World History (2015) 26#2 pp 295–324.
↑ Lazar Volin, "Soviet agriculture under Khrushchev." American Economic Review 49.2 (1959): 15-32 online.
↑ Lazar Volin, Khrushchev and the Soviet agricultural scene (U of California Press, 2020).
↑ Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (2019) PhD dissertation version.
↑ Stephen J. Frese, "Comrade Khrushchev and Farmer Garst: East-West Encounters Foster Agricultural Exchange." The History Teacher 38#1 (2004), pp. 37–65. online.
↑ William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003), p 373.
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).
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).
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