Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union

Stefan Hedlund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000682229
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

First published in 1989. Perestroika, it was widely believed, must succeed in agriculture before permanent change could be affected elsewhere in the Soviet economy. But Soviet agriculture had so far remained stubbornly inefficient and resistant to change. In this book Stefan Hedlund investigates the reasons for this state of affairs.

The author gives an account of the emergence, development and performance of private agriculture in the Soviet Union. In particular he describes the essentials of the peculiarly Soviet hybrid of private and socialized agriculture. He places the private sector within the broader framework of Soviet agriculture. He saw Soviet agriculture as a 'Black Hole', ready to absorb any resources that came near, be they private plots, urban gardens, factory workshops or military units.

Hedlund also examines the impact on the peasants as producers of decades of negative ideological pronouncements in Party propaganda, and of discrimination and at times outright harassment by local officials. He points out that this background makes the prospect of any positive response from the peasants to Gorbachev's call for perestroika in agriculture extremely unlikely.

Chapter one

A black hole in the Soviet economy

In Soviet agriculture, small has traditionally been very far from beautiful. The tens of millions of those tiny household plots that have received such fame in the West may have been sturdy, and in a certain limited sense even highly productive, but in the eyes of the Soviet authorities they have definitely not been beautiful. During the past decade, this situation has undergone a considerable change, in the direction of a more open recognition of the important contributions that are being made by the plots towards national food supply. Officially, this change in attitude has been demonstrated by a number of decrees and pronouncements calling for increased support to be given to the private sector. During the last couple of years in particular, there has also been a quite pronounced ideological reorientation in matters concerning private agricultural activities. The contents and possible implications of this change in the course of Soviet agricultural policy will be an important topic for investigation in this book. Before proceeding to that task, however, we should perhaps underline that there is an obvious difference between a change in official policy and a change in the mentality and attitudes of those who are charged with implementing that new policy.

A central task to be undertaken below will thus be to penetrate beyond the official façade, and in so doing we shall have to delve into a partly unknown realm of Soviet agriculture. All those various reasons that – in the past at least – have combined to form a rather hostile official attitude towards the private plots have of course also left a firm imprint on the availability of information – qualitative as well as quantitative. The scattered nature of the available information is clearly manifested in the Soviet writings on the subject, and this problem will unfortunately also accompany us on the following pages.

The reasons behind these difficulties are of several kinds, the most important perhaps being that some of the activities in the private sector take place on or beyond the limits of the law, and can thus not be reflected in official data. Other reasons stem from the fact that we are dealing with many millions of small-scale producers who are operating on a part-time household basis, with make-shift resource inputs, and are often located in remote rural areas. The very nature of the private plot as a producing entity thus creates obstacles to statistical description which would be of considerable magnitude even in a society not marked by the traditional Soviet (i.e. pre-glasnost) attitude towards the creation and dissemination of information.

There are of course many different aspects to the peculiar and rather uneasy coexistence of very small-scale private and very large-scale socialized agricultural production. In this study only certain of these aspects will be dealt with. In order to illustrate which areas will be in focus, the following excerpt from Gregory Grossman’s preface to the English edition of Karl-Eugen Wädekin’s magnum opus on the private sector in Soviet agriculture is quoted:

The private sector is of course an anomaly in the socialized, centralized, planned economy of the USSR. Economically it is backward, ideologically it is alien, politically it is suspect, and morally it stands in the way of the creation of the new socialist and communist man.¹

What is really going on here? Against the background of Grossman’s characterization, it would seem hard indeed to explain the existence of the private plots in terms that are remotely rational. Yet, it will be a main theme of this study that, in addition to the obvious function of providing a substantial share of the country’s food supply, the plots also fill an important function as a form of ‘political stabilizer’. By taking some pressure off the poorly functioning official system of production and distribution of foodstuffs, they serve to dampen a potentially dangerous growth of popular discontent, and by providing a ‘private’ refuge of activities outside the state-controlled sphere, they serve to defuse some latent discontent.

Although perhaps not consciously implemented, in a certain limited sense the policy of allowing such private agricultural activities can thus be considered a success, economically as well as politically. In a broader sense, however, it will be argued that this success has important elements of a ‘Pyrrhic victory’, where the moral and psychological impact on the individuals concerned may be of such a nature that it actually blocks the current attempts at ‘restructuring’ agriculture. In this sense, the ‘support’ that is rendered by the private plots may paradoxically serve to condemn the official, socialized sector of Soviet agriculture to remain in that state of ‘permanent crisis’, which was diagnosed by Roy Laird and Edward Crowley as early as 1965.² The discussion starts by examining the performance of this sector, in order to understand better how the need for private support has emerged.

A Permanent Crisis³

Ever since Marx and Engels made their celebrated statement – in the Communist Manifesto – on how capitalist development had freed a large section of humanity from the ‘idiocy of rural life’,⁴ agriculture and what the Soviets refer to as ‘real socialism’ have given a distinct impression of being uneasy bedfellows. Several areas in Eastern Europe that were once surplus producers and large grain exporters -notably Poland and Prussia – have been transformed into net importers. The Soviet Union itself is certainly not an exception in this respect.

Seven decades after the Bolsheviks’ October coup d’état, and more than half a century after Stalin’s mass collectivization of the Soviet peasantry, agriculture remains a major headache to the Soviet economy. It is symptomatic, for example, that one of the few things on which there seems to be a broad consensus among the proponents of Mikhail Gorbachev’s current policy of perestroika is that any attempt at change, if it is to be successful, must start by approaching the problems in agriculture. The process that has placed the Soviet superpower in this rather embarrassing position bears a heavy imprint of those largely ad hoc policy measures that were once deployed by Stalin, in his private war against the peasantry. Political ambitions for power and security produced an agricultural policy that placed extraction before production,⁵ and the consequences are still there to be observed. In 1974, for example, Moshe Lewin pronounced the following verdict:

Soviet agriculture has not yet managed to effect a real technological revolution similar to the one which took place some time ago in other developed countries. Agriculture is still rather primitive and a great problem and there is no doubt that the consequences of the first quarter of a century of kolkhoz history still weigh heavily and are far from having been definitely overcome.⁶

It is perhaps not so hard to understand that such a policy was pursued during the first troublesome decades of Soviet power. The fact, however, that the post-Stalin period has failed to produce any significant structural alterations of the kolkhoz system is perhaps in somewhat greater need of elucidation. It is rather tempting, for example, to wonder whether perhaps there are some important structural features of the overall political and economic system that conflict with the highly specific demands of agriculture’s largely biological mode of production.

To answer that question, we shall invoke the voice of Alexander Yanov, a former Soviet journalist and a prolific writer on the attempts at agricultural reform during the Khrushchev era, who is presently living and working in the United States. Presumably, he has been asked the very same question on numerous occasions, and the following may well have been his answer:

Inevitably the answer to the question ‘Does the system work?’ depends on what one means by ‘work’. If it refers to political control, then the kolkhoz system works very well; if it refers to food production, then the system does not work, for it was not designed to.⁷

Their stubborn refusal to implement any form of important changes in the structure and operation of agriculture has forced Soviet policymakers instead to commit an ever-increasing amount of resources to that sector, simply in order to prevent, or at least postpone, the seemingly inevitable need to decide eventually on a radical change. In this sense, Soviet agriculture has come to assume the image of one of astronomy’s Black Holes, capable of absorbing whatever resources come near whilst allowing very little to trickle out at the other end. It will be the purpose of the following section of this chapter to take a somewhat closer look at the volume of resources that has been thus absorbed.

A Black Hole

In all fairness, we should perhaps start by noting that if no considerations are made of the costs involved, the performance of Soviet agriculture in the post-Stalin era does present a rather impressive picture. Table 1.1 shows that the all-important output of grain, for example, increased by 48.2 per cent over the period as a whole, or by 68.7 per cent if the highly unfavourable years 1981–85 are excluded. With the exception of potatoes, the other products in the table show an even more impressive pattern of development, with the nutritionally vital production of vegetables almost doubling (over the whole period), while output of meat more than doubled, and eggs more than trebled.

It may be added here that the relatively less successful performance of grain production is of particular importance in the light of the rapid expansion of livestock production. It is a rather well-known fact that Soviet feed balances have long included excessive amounts of concentrates, in relation to roughages, and that this lack of balance has resulted in very poor results in terms of both milk yields and animal weight gain. Since, moreover, the bulk of concentrate feed has tended to be grain, an expansion of the livestock sector...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Introduction
• Preface
• Chapter 1. A Black Hole in the Soviet Economy
• Chapter 2. The Emergence of a ‘Support’ Agriculture
• Chapter 3. The Two Fringes of Soviet Agriculture
• Chapter 4. Soviet Attitudes to the Private Sector
• Chapter 5. The Practice of Harassment
• Chapter 6. Response to Decline
• Chapter 7. A Pyrrhic Victory and its Consequences
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index