Merl S. Collectivization and socialist agriculture (1917–1992): Revised comparison of the Soviet and East-European experience. Part III. Stabilization of collective farms, industrialization and collapse of socialist agriculture (1960–1992) // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2025. V.10. №4. P. 6-39.

EDN: ARKNVZ 

Annotation

To reassess collectivization and socialist agricultural policy, it is necessary to keep the whole period in view, distinguishing the following phases with basically different political approaches: (1) collectivization under Stalin as based on class war and peasant subjugation to transfer capital from agriculture to industry; (2) collectivization under Khrushchev, striving to complete it, although this policy was basically put in question (in 1953 in the Soviet Union and in 1957 in the GDR and Hungary); (3) efforts to stabilize the economically weak collective farms in the 1960s after finishing collectivization and replacing Khrushchev; (4) the final turn to modernization of agriculture expecting economies of scale through different concepts of industrialization in the 1970s; (5) the failure of these concepts causing a cost trap and enforcing the rehabilitation of small-scale private agriculture in the 1980s. The two first parts considered collectivization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe under Stalin and Khrushchev; the third part focuses on the attempts to stabilize collective farms and to finally begin modernization to create industrial agriculture. Due to the myth of agricultural mechanization under Stalin, modernization in socialist countries started only in the 1970s, two decades later than in the West. However, modernization was carried out in the same way as collectivization before — “on the cheap” (agricultural machinery and equipment were below the Western standard). Moreover, by order from above, huge investment was wasted on changes in the size of production units despite economic necessity. Although since the 1970s, most heads of large farms were highly qualified, the command economy did not allow them to manage farms based on their competence. Ruling parties kept control over agriculture and set prices. In the 1980s, when fighting against the cost trap of socialist agriculture, they paradoxically returned to the support of cost-efficient small agricultural production that Stalin and Khrushchev had tried to liquidate. Although the bulk of the workforce was satisfied with working conditions and payment on large farms, agricultural enterprises suffered economically from extreme inefficiency. Only after the fall of socialist regimes did agricultural enterprises manage to prove their competitiveness in the market by f inally gaining access to high-quality inputs.

Keywords

Collective farms, socialist agriculture, industrialization of agriculture, modernization, Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Kadar, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Grüneberg, mechanization, private plots, economies of scale.  

About the author

Stephan Merl, DSc (History), Professor, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstr., 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany.
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