Agricultural Policy

Abstract

Agriculture has long been described as the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet system. Throughout Russian history the large and backward rural sector has been a matter of grave concern to the country’s rulers. The Stalin era is, of course, best known for the brutal collectivisation campaign of 1929–32. By the mid 1930s 99 per cent of the Soviet peasantry had been brought under Moscow’s control through the twin systems of collective and state farms. As the pre-war decade developed, so some of the harsher aspects of this system were softened. In 1935 peasants who had been forced into the new large-scale farms were allowed to cultivate in their spare time small private plots of their own land. In 1939 official blessing was given to the establishment of small quasi-independent working units within the collective farms, known as “links” (zven″ya). Nevertheless the prices paid by the state to the collectives for their produce remained pitifully low. Workers on both state and collective farms were very poorly paid. The supply of food to the Soviet citizen was barely adequate and the whole agricultural sector remained starved of labour and other resources that were directed towards the industrialisation campaign. The result by 1940 was a rural sector that still employed more than half the Soviet population but was grossly inefficient and generally neglected.KeywordsAgricultural PolicyAgricultural OutputRural SectorLivestock SectorParty OrganisationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.