Hale-Dorrell , Aaron Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 583 seen in the family that underfed one child or an elderly relative so that others would survive, or the hospital administrators who chose which emaciated people to treat and which to ignore. Yarovacknowledgesthatmemoirsanddiariesofferdifferingviewsofblockade morality: ‘feelings of compassion are more evident in later writing about the siege than in the diaries’ (p. 25). Alexis Peri in her excellent study of diaries from the Leningrad blockade, The War Within (Cambridge, MA, 2017), came to the same conclusion. Yarov also contends that ‘sometimes acts of charity […] shone through the widespread callousness and calculating self-interest’. Ultimately, he identifies glimmers of hope for the human condition. Even in the worst of times, he asserts, ‘the charitable urge proved so indestructible’ (pp. 194–95), as evidenced by the ‘hundreds of people who sought out orphans, or took a glass of hot water to a helpless neighbor’ (p. 324). Scholars and non-specialists alike are deeply in debt to translator Arch Tait and Polity Press for making this outstanding study of the Leningrad blockade available in English. Anyone with an interest in history, ethics, or psychology will find it well worth reading. Department of History Richard Bidlack Washington and Lee University Hale-Dorrell, Aaron. Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. xii + 328 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.£47.99: $75.00. This book provides a detailed analysis and rehabilitation of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign to increase corn production in order to provide more animal food products in the USSR. It is based on extensive archival research in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, as well as on recent document collections and memoirs. Corn Crusade discusses the historical background of Stalinist agriculture, the development of Khrushchev’s commitment to corn production and industrial farming, his political machinations to win support for his campaign and its popularization, and the mobilization of farm workers, including the shift from labour days to wages for kolkhoz workers. The last two chapters examine how authorities from republic party secretaries to kolkhoz chairmen responded to the policies and pressures of the corn campaign. Hale-Dorrell discusses how Soviet planners and specialists addressed the environmental, agricultural and technical problems of growing corn, especially by borrowing and emulating American practices. Khrushchev SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 584 enforced American hybrid breeding and suppressed attempts by the pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko to interfere with them. Officials’ resistance, which included both overt opposition to policies and covert evasion and fraud, often frustrated the campaign. The previous literature mentioned the published case of Riazan´ oblast´ leader Alexei Larionov, who committed suicide when his fraud was exposed. Hale-Dorrell cites other cases and writes that similar frauds were perpetrated ‘everywhere’ (p. 204), because Khrushchev weakened central ministries so that regional authorities could have more autonomy (pp. 191ff, 203ff, 208ff), leaving Soviet authorities less power over localities than scholars assumed (pp. 57, 108, 225). In Lithuania, party chief Antanas Sniečkus outwardly acquiesced in Khrushchev’s demands to replace grasslands with corn, but in practice followed local scientists and allowed Lithuania’s farms to evade those demands (pp. 216–24). Yet Hale-Dorrell also questions the significance of this resistance. His main source for these reports were central government inspectors who, HaleDorrell admits, only went to 3 per cent of the kolkhozy, a share which he calls ‘inconsequential’ (pp. 168–69). Some accusations were found to be false (pp. 205–06), and ‘not every farm’ committed fraud (p. 225). He repeatedly refers to the successes of farms, regions and Khrushchev’s policies generally (e.g. pp. 84, 194, 230), such as the peak of corn sowings, 37 million hectares, in 1962 (p. 225), and continued growing of millions of hectares of corn after Khrushchev (pp. 228–29). The cases of resistance illuminate the character of Soviet rule, but they may have been exceptional rather than representative. They may also have been less opposition than a response to unrealistic demands from Moscow. Hale-Dorrell provides numerous examples of peasants’ responses to policies, with similar inconsistencies. He writes, for example, that kolkhozniki worked primarily ‘to the benefit of state and society and not for themselves’ (p...