Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930-1963

283 Pages·2014·1.4 MB·English

by  Jenny Leigh Smith

YALE AGRARIAN STUDIES SERIES
James C. Scott, series editor
The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish out-
standing and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society
—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing
paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural peo-
ple are especially encouraged.
James C. Scott,Series Editor
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
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Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite
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James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of
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Parker Shipton, Credit Between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and
Misunderstanding in Africa
Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal,
and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia
Michael R.Dove, The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal
Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo
Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue, eds., American
Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land
Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the
Politics of Sight
Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the
Atlantic World, 1500–1900
Brian Gareau, From Precaution to Profit: Contemporary Challenges to
Environmental Protection in the Montreal Protocol
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta, Dancing with the River: People and
Life on the Chars of South Asia
Alon Tal, All the Trees of the Forest: Israel’s Woodlands from the Bible to the
Present
Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms,
1930–1963
For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit www
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Works
in Progress
Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963
JENNY LEIGH SMITH
New Haven and London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory
of James Wesley Cooper of the Class of 1865, Yale College.
Copyright © 2014 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-0-300-20069-0
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Model Farms and Foreign Experts 21
2 Restoring Control 63
3 Animal Farms 106
4 Substituting Meat 151
5 The Old and the New 188
Epilogue 225
List of Archives and Contemporary Periodicals 233
Notes 235
Glossary of Russian Terms 256
Index 259
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Acknowledgments
There are a great many people and institutions that deserve
my sincerest thanks for help with this project; without them, this
book would have been impossible. I can only thank a fraction of
them here. When this project was in its earliest stages, I received
excellent feedback from colleagues at MIT including Debo-
rah Fitzgerald, Shane Hamilton, Dave Luscko, Sara Pritchard,
Harriet Ritvo, William Turkel, Elizabeth Wood, Christopher
York, and Anya Zilberstein. Having Deborah Fitzgerald as a
mentor in particular was pure pleasure. In Moscow, Larisa
Petrovna Belozerova, Olga Elina, Lada Lekai, Alexander Niku-
lin, and Teodor Shanin were all incredibly generous with their
time, and patient with my Russian. In St. Petersburg, Alexan-
dra Bekasova and Julia Lajus have been wonderful colleagues.
At the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where I
wrote much of the first draft of this work, Maja Fjaestad, Arne
Kaijser, Per Lundin, and Brita Lundstrom made me feel right
at home. At Yale University, Lloyd Ackert, Valentine Cadieux,
Honor Sachs, Jim Scott, and John Varty all offered encourage-
ment, advice, and occasional libation. Dan Kevles in particu-
lar was a fantastic mentor at Yale.At my current institution,
Georgia Tech, Jonathan Schneer read and commented on the
viii Acknowledgments
entire manuscript, and John Krige read it twice. I am indebted
to both of them. Outside of formal institutional affiliations, Wil-
liam DeJong-Lambert, Elizabeth Dunn, Loren Graham, Bar-
bara Hahn, Martha Lampland, Diana Mincyte, and Katherine
Verdery have all helped shape this project, and I am grateful
for their input. What might have been a long, bleak year in
Moscow was made delightful by a number of fellow travelers,
especially Alan Barenberg, Joy Johnston, Timothy Johnston,
Sonja Schmid, and Ben Tromly. Jake Rudnitsky’s decades-long
open door policy has saved me thousands of dollarsand de-
serves its own category of gratitude.
My initial research in Russia was funded by a grant from
the International Research and Exchanges Board. Additional re-
search time in Iowa, Russia, and Ukraine was supported by NSF
Dissertation Improvement Grant #SES-0449767. The George
Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center supported a
summer of research in Washington, and I am grateful to the
many resources the institute made available to me. Later trips
to Russia, as well as time to write and revise this book, were
generously provided first by Yale University and then by Geor-
gia Institute of Technology, and I am grateful for their support.
This project also had significant help from a variety of
librarians and other research professionals. In Moscow, at the
Russian State Archive of the Economy I am most grateful to
the heads of the reading room. In the United States, I worked
at the Library of Congress, especially the Slavic Division of the
European Reading Room. At Harvard University Susan Gar-
dos was incredibly helpful. At Iowa State University, Tanya
Zanish-Belcher was an excellent resource. At the University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Jan Adamczyk was very help-
ful. Finally, Guy Bush Jr., whose father figures prominently in
the first chapter of this book, contacted me two years ago and
Acknowledgments ix
generously transcribed and e-mailed me every letter his father
had sent to his mother while he lived and worked in the Soviet
Union. These personal letters were invaluable to my research,
and I am grateful for his time and care with this project. At
Yale University Press, it has been a privilege to work with Jean
Thomson Black, and I am grateful for thoughtful feedback from
two anonymous reviewers who helped make this book better.
Finally, my family, and in particular my husband, Albert
Wan, showed incredible patience and fortitude during this
whole project for which I am very, very grateful. Thanks, babe.