DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2024-9-3-185-203
The article considers the labor behavior of collective farmers in Siberia under the agrarian measures of the supreme power during Khrushchev’s thaw. The author identifies factors that influenced the labor behavior of collective farmers, its forms and role in the state agrarian policy, emphasizing contradictory tendencies in the functioning of collective farms. Thus, financial incentives were used more widely, but the state did not abandon mobilization methods for solving economic problems. Therefore, the production and technological discipline in collective farms remained at a low level; many villagers avoided working in the public economy. Personal subsidiary farms had a significant impact on the labor behavior of collective farmers, since the public economy provided main resources for their personal subsidiary plots. Increased wages at the collective farm allowed peasants to strengthen the feed base for their livestock. Collective farmers acquired means for personal subsidiary farming through petty thefts at the collective farm. The peasantry retained many of its past features manifested primarily in the labor behavior of women, who tended to pay more attention to their household than to the collective farm. To reduce the villagers’ labor costs in the private sector of the agrarian economy, the state periodically conducted campaigns to limit the size of personal subsidiary plots.
Labor behavior, collective farms, collective farmers, machine-tractor stations, machine operators, personal subsidiary farms, state agrarian policy, agriculture.
Andreenkov Sergey N., PhD (History), Senior Researcher, Sector of Agrarian and Demographic History, Institute of History, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Akademika Nikolaeva St., 8, Novosibirsk, 630090.
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DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2022-7-1-52-68
The article considers the impact of the Soviet state agrarian policy on the agricultural production in the Novosibirsk Region. In 1930s, the government was not far-sighted: for short-term gains (growth of production volumes) the long-term prospects were sacrificed. The ever-growing state plans for sowing and harvesting prevented the development of the rational agricultural system in Siberia. By the early 1940s, in most collective farms of the Novosibirsk Region, elementary agrotechnical rules were broken: fallow lands were reduced, deadlines for agricultural work were not kept, rules for crop rotation and seed production were ignored. Therefore, the long-term clogging and depletion of soils, among other factors, determined extremely low grain yields during the Great Patriotic War. In the prewar period, the state agrarian policy led to the rapid depletion of the agricultural production in the Novosibirsk Region. By 1941, the region was in a critical situation of an acute shortage of seeds, food, and livestock feed. In 1942, the Soviet government continued its blind sowing policy and obviously underestimated the negative impact of such a policy on production under the reduction in labor and inputs. Planning errors led to a sharp reduction in gross grain harvests from 1942. Until the end of the war, the Soviet agriculture was negatively affected by the short-sighted state policies that significantly reduced possibilities for the productive use of the local agricultural potential.
Agriculture, state agrarian policy, agricultural technology, Great Patriotic War, peasantry.
Sharapov Sergey V., PhD (History), Researcher, Institute of History, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 630090, Novosibirsk, Nikolaeva St., 8.
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