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Kolkhoz Agriculture in the Moscow Oblast’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Extract
The recent pronouncements on Party agricultural policy (September-October, 1953) were accompanied by quite frank admission that all is not well on the Soviet farm. This melancholy story of low yields and stagnant output went far in substantiating what critical students of Soviet agriculture have long indicated—often in the face of rather astounding claims to general success. For example, they have pointed to the wide variations in prosperity and efficiency among kolkhozy (collective farms) in the same area, a fact only now admitted and subject to wide comment in the official press. Unfortunately, however, available materials have been far too scanty to allow a detailed assessment of agriculture in any one area; statistics which do exist purposely omit a great deal. While the fact of low peasant incomes in some areas is admitted (indeed Khrushchev spoke of migration of discontented peasants to the towns), the actual level of these incomes remains a state secret. What is more, the practice generally followed has been one of giving detailed descriptions, in glowing terms, of kolkhozy which are quite atypical of their particular area.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1954
References
1 O gosudarstvennom selskokhozjajstvennom plane na 1938 god (Order of Council of Peoples’ Commissars), hereafter referred to as O plane.
2 Selskoe khozjajstvo SSSR, 1935.
3 From 1933 to 1935, the biological yield was subject to a deduction for “technically inevitable” losses, but thereafter no such deduction was made. The “biological” method of computing yields was extended to all crops in 1930-41, and this must affect some of the comparisons in the present paper.
4 Socialističeskoe selskoe khozjajstvo, No. 8, 1950.
5 See his Survey of Russian Agriculture.
6 Venžer in Voprosy ekonomiki, No. 3, 1951. According to the U. S. census of 1940, the average cropland harvested per agricultural worker in the U.S.A. in 1937 was 27 acres. For a comparative analysis of labor deployment in the two countries, see Nove and Laird in Soviet Studies (Glasgow), April 1953.
7 Abramov in Socialističeskoe selskoe khozjajstvo, No. 8, 1952.
8 O plane …, p. 28.
9 Životnovodstvo v SSSR (reference kindly provided by Dr. N. Jasny).
10 Ibid.
11 The 1948-50 figure is roughly derived from data given earlier in this article: Abramov stated that this was 6 percent more than the 1936-40 average. The 1938 ploughed area (sown area plus fallow) was 946,000 hectares according to O plane…. The figures here used are rough but reasonable approximations.
12 Published by the American Council of Learned Societies. This plan gives (see p. 222) a spring ploughing figure well below that found in the 1938 document. The figures of sowings of feed crops in both documents are inconsistent with the percentages given by Abramov in Table 2 of the present paper, and no way has yet been found of reconciling them.
13 Socialističeskoe zemledelie, December 16, 1952. These yields are of the same order as those which could be calculated from Table 7 of the present paper.
14 Dankov, Sbornik upražnenij po nalogam i sboram.
15 Example taken from Plotnikov, Bjudžet socialističeskogo gosudarstva (1948), p. 273. The incomes from auxiliary enterprises in this example are considerably above the national average for those pre-war years for which information is available.
16 Sučkov: Qosudarstvennye dokhody SSSR (1949), p. 74.
17 No. 7, 1953, p. 125.
18 See instances quoted, for the Moscow oblasf, by Kulagin in Izvestija Akademii Nauk (economic and legal section), No. 6, 1949, and Potapov in Sovetskaja agronomija, No. 12, 1952.
19 See Moscow papers of September 13, 15, 26 and 29, 1953.
20 According to Moiseev, Socialisticeskoe selskoe khozjajstvo compulsory deliveries of potatoes and vegetables in the Moscow oblast’ will be reduced in 1953 to, respectively, 31 percent and 12 percent of the 1952 volume; there is to be a large increase in state purchase at considerably higher prices (goszakupka), and more is to be available for sale in the free market. It is stated that in 1952 the sum of 8.8 million rubles was paid to kolkhozy and collectivized peasants for compulsory deliveries of potatoes and vegetables; a slightly smaller amount is to be bought by the state (partly at compulsory, partly at goszakupka prices) for 45.3 million rubles in 1953. The very big increase doubtless reflects the special measures being taken to stimulate the cultivation of these crops near the big cities.
21 Two examples, still “actual“: the peasants are liable to a number of days' unpaid labor on the roads; and the recent agricultural tax regulations, in providing for a penal tax on households in which one or more members fails to work for a state or cooperative institution, exempt the housewife in the case of state employees but not the wife of a kolkhoz peasant.