A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khruschev

656 Pages·1970·16.962 MB·English

by  Lazar Volin

A Century of Russian Agriculture:
From Alexander II to Khrushchev
Russian Research Center Studies 63
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A Century
by Lazar Volin
of Russian
Agriculture
From Alexander II
to Khrushchev
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970
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© Copyright 1970 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
The Russian Research Center of Harvard University is supported by a grant
from the Ford Foundation. The Center carries out interdisciplinary study of
Russian institutions and behavior and related subjects.
Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 72-119075
SBN 674-10621-0
Printed in the United States of America
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Foreword by Abram Bergson
Lazar Volin (1896-1966) was born in the Minsk province of Russia. His
childhood was spent in Berlin and in Poland near Warsaw. Finally, the
family moved to Harbin, where he completed the course of studies at the
Russian gymnasium. After his immigration to the United States in 1915,
he earned first his A.B. and then his Ph.D. in economics at the University
of Michigan, and in 1926 joined the staff of the United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture. He thus began to devote himself to what was to
become a lifelong pursuit: the study of Russian agriculture. To that
pursuit Volin would bring the advantages not only of a firm grasp of
the Russian language and culture and advanced Western training in
economics, but an ever deepening knowledge of Russian history. With
a humanist's compassion for the Russian peasant under tsarist autocracy
and Soviet dictatorship he combined an unwavering concern for schol-
arly objectivity.
That a remarkable career resulted goes without saying. In due time,
Volin became chief of the East European Branch of the Department of
Agriculture, a post he retained until his retirement in 1965. Universally
recognized as one of the foremost Western authorities on Russian agri-
culture, he was the author of, or contributor to, hundreds of reports,
essays, and other writings in the field. Many of these publications, includ-
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Foreword
ing a monograph, were issued by the Department of Agriculture; others
appeared in professional journals. If in respect to agriculture Russia is
by now far from the Churchillian enigma, that is in no small part because
of the pioneering efforts of Lazar Volin.
In undertaking this volume, Volin clearly was seeking to set down
summarily a lifetime's researches and reflections. The result is an out-
standing achievement. In one volume a distinguished scholar recounts
the story of Russian agriculture over the century extending from the eve
of the Emancipation to the post-Stalinian USSR, from Alexander II to
Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Kosygin; a distinguished scholar, further-
more, who properly sees Russia's "agrarian problem" in the perspective
of the historical relations between agriculture and the whole economy,
and is able to bring to bear on its study an immense learning, extending
from the thought of the narodniks of the last century to the misfortunes
of Soviet agronomy under Stalin's Lysenko.
When he died on December 6, 1966, Volin had nearly completed a
final revision of the draft of his manuscript which had previously been
accepted by Harvard University Press. As far as possible, the revised
manuscript has been subjected to only the usual press editing for style
and clarity of exposition, though here and there the deletion of a dated
passage was unavoidable. In a few cases, a clearly inadvertent factual
or other lapse had also to be repaired.
The editing of so large a manuscript without the author's collaboration
was a formidable task. Warmest thanks are due to Mrs. Joyce Lebowitz
and Mrs. Margaretta Fulton, of the Harvard University Press, for the
skill and diligence that they exercised in carrying it out. We must be
deeply grateful also to Harry Walters, a former associate of Dr. Volin's,
for reviewing the editing and counseling on the innumerable queries
that were inevitably encountered. Dr. Edward L. Keenan was kind
enough to check the transliteration of Russian words throughout.
In preparing a final revision, Dr. Volin apparently intended to bring
up all strands of his story to the advent of Brezhnev and Kosygin. This
he did not always succeed in doing and, as might be expected, the short-
fall is to be noted especially in the final chapters, that is, from Chapter 19
on. Volin himself wrote elsewhere, however, of later developments in
respect to the matters discussed there, and the reader seeking his views
on them may wish to refer to his "Khrushchev and the Soviet Agricul-
tural Scene" in Soviet and East European Agriculture, edited by Jerzy F.
Karcz, University of California Press, 1967. Also useful are two reports
of the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, to
which Dr. Volin contributed: Soviet Grain Imports, ERS-Foreign-135,
September 1965, and The USSR and Eastern Europe: Agricultural Situa-
tion, ERS-Foreign-151, March, 1966.
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Contents
Introduction 1
Part One. Peasant and Landlord
1 Serfdom: Origins and Development 5
2 Emancipation 40
3 Land Hunger and the Agrarian Crisis 57
4 The Mir 77
5 The First Agrarian Revolution and Stolypin's Reforms 94
6 World War I and the Revolution of 1917 117
Part Two. The Peasant under Communism
7 War Communism 143
8 The New Economic Policy 161
9 Decline of the NEP and a New Offensive 189
10 Collectivization and the Ordeal of the Peasants 203
11 Collectivized Agriculture in the Prewar Period 235
12 Collectivized Agriculture and the War 274
13 Postwar Recovery 301
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Contents
Part Three. Collectivized Agriculture under Khrushchev
14 Khrushchev: The Agrarian Leader and Reformer 327
15 Capital Investment and Land 346
16 Incentives and Procurements 377
17 Income and Consumer Goods 405
18 Mechanization and Electrification 444
19 Expansion of Production 481
20 State Farms 516
21 Administrative Control and Planning 536
Summary and Outlook 557
Note on Abbreviations 575
Notes 577
Index 637
viii
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A Century of Russian Agriculture:
From Alexander II to Khrushchev
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