Merl S. Agricultural reforms in Russia from 1856 to the present: Successes and failures in the international comparative perspective // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2020. V.5. №2. P. 56-87.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2020-5-2-56-87
Annotation
Despite its initial backwardness, the agricultural sector played a decisive role in the Russian/Soviet history. Until the 1950s, it was the main sector of occupation; it had contributed greatly to the gross domestic product and gross value added until forced collectivization destroyed huge agricultural resources. The article argues that emancipation paved the way for agricultural modernization by promoting a new agricultural structure based on the market and the skills of the heads of large-scale and family farms. The author identifies three Russian/Soviet approaches to the agrarian reform (1856–1928, 1929–1987, from 1987) in terms of contribution to the modernization of agriculture and of catching up with the developed countries. The article argues that until 1928 and (after the agricultural depression of the 1990s) from 2000, Russia was successful in both modernization and catching up, while Stalin’s forced collectivization at first led to stagnation. After the World War II, forced collectivization prevented any “green revolution” (i.e. application of the agricultural scientific research findings). Under the state command system in agriculture, poor mechanization did not increase the labor productivity. Although Russia was known for agricultural surpluses before collectivization, the late Soviet Union became a major grain importer. Only the reform that started in 1987 removed the state command system to make the agricultural producers masters of their fields again, which led to a considerable increase in agricultural productivity since 2005. Basing the reappraisal of the agrarian reforms on the recent successes, the article likes to encourage further discussion. It proposes to regard the use of the available rural labor force, the quality of the industrial inputs in agriculture and the extent to which the producers were allowed to be masters of their agricultural production as the most appropriate criteria for assessing the agrarian reforms’ results.
Keywords
agrarian reform, efficiency of agricultural production, emancipation, forced collectivization, green revolution, mechanization of agriculture, modernization, peasant farms, rural underemployment, socialist industrialized agriculture, Alexander II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Putin
About the author
Stephan Merl, DSc (History), Professor, Bielefeld University; Universitätsstr., 25, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany.
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Merl S. Reassessment of the Soviet agrarian policy in the light of today’s achievements // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2019. V.4. №1. P. 45-69.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2019-4-1-45-69
Annotation
Obvious successes of Putin’s policy require a reassessment of the Soviet agrarian policy. The article addresses the question of whether the Bolsheviks’ approach was appropriate for the Russian peasantry and considers limitations of the concept “socialist industrialized agriculture’. To assess achievements of the Soviet agriculture the author uses qualitative instead of quantitative criteria: per hectare yields and milk per cow since 1913. They kept to be extremely low which is striking for the agriculture based on large-scale and partly mechanized production. The gap in yields as compared to the neighboring capitalist countries even widened from 1930 to 1991. The strong and steady growth in yields since 2000 does not allow to explain failures of the Soviet agriculture by bad soils, specific climate or natural limitations—the Soviet agrarian policy is to blame. Instead of “revolutionizing”, socialist agriculture did not take part in any significant productivity rise as elsewhere in the world during the “green revolution”. The author argues that the main reason for such a failure was “infantilization” of agricultural producers—peasants, heads of state and collective farms—by a combination of mistrust and scrupulous control. During the Soviet period agricultural producers never were the masters of their fields. The situation became even worse after the planned economy provided agriculture with insufficient and ineffective machinery below Western standards. Although necessary machinery and knowledge of organizing the production were available in the West, in the Soviet Union the mechanization of crop production and animal husbandry was not completed. The article starts with the description of peasants’ interests, behavior und expectations in the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917– 1918; then the author focuses on the foundations of the Soviet agrarian policy suggested by Lenin and Stalin, continues with a short review of different approaches to agriculture developed by Khrushchev, Brezhnev und Gorbachev, and finishes with a summary of the reasons for Putin’s successes paying special attention to the short periods of yields growth—1924–1930, 1953–1958, 1965–1970, and 1986–1991.
Keywords
Socialist agriculture, agrarian policy, industrialized agriculture, infantilization of peasants, class differentiation, V.I. Lenin, J.V. Stalin, N.S. Khrushchev, L.I. Brezhnev, M.S. Gorbachev, V.V. Putin.
About the author
Stephan Merl, DSc (History), Professor, Bielefeld University; 25 Universitätsstr., 33615, Bielefeld, Germany.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Merl S. Agrarian transformations in the former GDR in 1989–2017: A success story? // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2017. V.2. №4. P. 130-147.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2017-2-4-130-147
Annotation
The transformations of agriculture in the direction of privatization and adaptation to the market started in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Looking back from today, this was a difficult process for the economic transition was strongly influenced by changing prices and demand for agricultural goods. Today in most countries, agricultural productivity is higher though problems and uncertainties are still evident especially considering the structural changes of agricultural enterprises and their consequences for rural life. The article focuses on the country in which agrarian transformations seem to be a success story: in the GDR, the agricultural productivity grew significantly, and the new structures of the agricultural enterprises allowed competing at the world market. The author does not directly compare the former GDR and Russia though the article contributes to understanding the reasons of the problematic outcomes of the transition in Russia. The article highlights general problems of agrarian transformations such as the uncertainty of their structural aims, and puts forward the following questions: can the GDR be considered a success story transferable to other countries as the political approach in Germany was more sophisticated or is there another explanation of its success? Was the success a result of the political course, or was it, on the contrary, an unexpected result of the lack of control? Another question is the criteria for considering the transition in the GDR a success in the economic sense (increase in productivity), social (keeping up the rural community), ecological or agricultural (increase in sustainability of production). To answer these questions the author relies on the statistical data for more than two decades, monitoring data on the still ongoing transition and partly privatization and registration of new enterprises, his own studies of agricultural enterprises in different new countries together with the Russian colleagues (1992, 1997, 2002 and 2016), which allowed to understand the estimates and reactions of people to different challenges of the transition.
Keywords
agrarian transformations, the former GDR (German New Countries), economic transition, agricultural production, rural communities
About the author
Stephan Merl, DSc (History), Professor, Bielefeld University; 25 Universitätsstr., 33615, Bielefeld, Germany.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Merl S. The pre-1941 local administration in the Soviet countryside: How effectively it worked, and what rules of political communication followed to prevent peasant rebellions // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2017. V.2. №2. P. 53-76.
DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2017-2-2-53-76
Annotation
When it comes to the local administration in the Soviet countryside, we see a surprisingly uniform picture in the historical research—the so-called “rural undergovernment”. In the article, the author questions this perception and shows how strongly it was influenced by the official discourse, i.e. of the 1930s Stalin’s interpretation. The author believes that rural administration, on the contrary, functioned as it was designed to, and that its obvious incompetence was the most important part of Stalin’s strategy of governance. To understand the functioning of rural administration on the eve of the German occupation, we have to consider the decisive changes in the local management that took place under the collectivization in the 1930s, and the real aims of the state, i.e. Stalin’s dictatorship. The local administration was not limited to purely bureaucratic tasks but had to solve specific economic and political problems to keep up political stability. To evaluate the efficiency of rural administration we have to consider first the political priorities of the regime for even economic inefficiency and the abuse of office could be inevitable by-products of a highly efficient system of keeping up the regime. After the German occupation, it became evident that rural administration was not suitable to deliver what the new rulers expected: to deliver just grain. The author starts with a chronology focusing on the significant ruptures affecting the local rural administration between the mid-1920s and the German occupation in 1941. The second part of the article discusses what the state under Stalin really wanted the local administration to achieve. The third part of the article considers the bases of the rural management in the second half of the 1930s to reveal the intersection of the Party, the state and state security apparatus interests in the countryside. In the conclusion, the author presents his general findings, pointing out as well why the German Occupational Regime failed to take as much grain as Stalin’s administration before.
Keywords
local administration, Soviet countryside, incompetence, “rural undergovernment”, German occupation, Stalin’s dictatorship, political and economic aims, efficiency
About the author
Stephan Merl, DSc (History), Professor, Bielefeld University. 25 Universitätsstr., 33615, Bielefeld, Germany.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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Aims and scope
Russian Peasant Studies
Peer-reviewed interdisciplinary academic journal in the field of theoretical and empirical peasant studies, rural sociology, economics and social geography. The journal publishes original works on the issues of socio-economic development of agricultural regions of Russia and the world, the history of the peasantry, including its formation and evolution, particularly from philosophical and cultural studies viewpoints. The journal aims at exploring the paths of Russian and international rural development and supporting cooperation of agrarian researchers representing different scientific disciplines. Read more>
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