Russian Modernization in the 20th Century: Features, Pace, and Results

Abstract

This article substantiates a new methodological approach that involves identifying transformations in the economic, social, political, demographic, and cultural spheres of the village, as well as their evolution, trajectory, dynamics, and intensity. This approach contributes to the deepening of ideas about the patterns and features of the development of the agrarian sector and rural society in Russia in the 20th century.

It is difficult to unambiguously assess the results of the modernization of the Russian village of the twentieth century. In the Soviet period, it was imposed from above by an iron dictatorship; its pace was forced to the detriment of the quality of the process and the health of the people; and its successes were achieved through violence and cheap forced labor, primarily of peasant collective farmers. The modernization was of a catch-up and obvious military-political character. It did not solve many problems of the classical version (creation of a market for goods, capital, and labor; ensuring the freedom of the individual; and creating a mechanism for self-development). However, it cannot be denied that it took place. Modernization was a global trend of the 20th century and it was a phenomenon of a civilizational scale.¹ Russia entered the 20th century as an agrarian country and left it as an industrial country. Modernization processes determined all spheres of life in the village; however, the form in which they took place, its priorities at various stages, and the results achieved are a different matter.

Agrarian reform in Russia has been actively studied by historians.² In numerous foreign research publications, it is stated that agrarian modernization did take place in Russia. However, the range of opinions, even in the general lack of acknowledgment of agrarian modernization, is quite wide: from statements that in poor and destitute Russia there was no modernization and nor could there be any (P. Gatrell³) to admittance that it took place to varying degrees. E. Kingston-Mann believes that at the beginning of the 20th century Russia and a number of other countries were punished by backwardness and it could lead to their subjugation by industrialized states.⁴ She views the Russian peasantry as agents and victims of transformations within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. K. Leonard studied the development models of Russian agriculture in the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, as well as their effectiveness in the course of institutional transformations.⁵ In her opinion, Stolypin’s reforms could dramatically increase the efficiency of the agricultural sector, but they were only able to continue when Russia’s agriculture returned to market relations; hence, the “road out of slavery.”

The most thorough works are by the German historian S. Merl, in which he examines the reasons for the failed comprehensive mechanization of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev and in the Brezhnev periods.⁶ The adjustment of the Soviet economic system to the new conditions, which took place in the early 1930s and then immediately after Stalin’s death, has not taken place since the 1960s. He was one of the first foreign historians to characterize Soviet and post-Soviet historiography on the collectivization of agriculture.⁷

The thoretical search in the 1990s–early 2000s in the study of the agrarian history of Russia testified to overcoming the conceptual stereotypes of Soviet historiography. This was facilitated by the theoretical seminar “Modern concepts of agrarian development,” organized by T. Shanin and V. Danilov in 1990, the materials of which were published in the journal “Otechestvennaya istoriya” (now “Russian history”) and published as a separate book.⁸

A special place in this process was occupied by the works of Danilov, in which the development of agrarian relations in Russia is presented in a long historical retrospective. The numerous agrarian restructurings in our country, in his opinion, are “the core of the reform and counterreform of the era of the initial accumulation.”⁹ Somewhat later, Danilov concretized this thesis and defined them as “a shock to a peasant country that has embarked on the path of industrial-market modernization.” The reforms and revolutions in Russia occupied a special place in the historical process and “began to determine the nature of not only the agrarian evolution but also the general course of Russian history.”¹⁰ Danilov also highlighted the features of modernization in Russia: “The historical fate of the country of the second or even third ‘echelon’ of transition to capitalism, related to its socioeconomic backwardness, pushed Russia onto the path of ‘catching up’ development, strengthening the role of the hypertrophied state power.” He also identified the factors that hampered the modernization processes: “The strongest influence of extraneous interests (state, ruling classes, etc.) is striking—extraneous to the tasks that were called upon to solve. This was primarily related to their compulsion by various kinds of political events: military defeats, social conflicts, lagging behind in the ‘competition’ of countries, ideological aspirations—autocratically patriarchal, socialist, or, as now, liberal-bourgeois.”¹¹

In the historiography of the agrarian history of Russia in the twentieth century, two trends emerged. M. A. Beznin and T.M. Dimoni tried to imagine that the initial accumulation of capital took place under the conditions of the collective farm system, the process of depeasantization took on the character of the peasantry, and the protobourgeoisie was formed. We are talking about the formation in the Russian countryside of a new socioeconomic structure, which the authors characterize as state capitalism. The key base for the transformation of the rural economy was the capitalization of agriculture, accompanied by the formation of labor markets, capital, and agricultural products. The economic transformation entailed a social reorganization of the village, during which new social classes were formed: the protobourgeoisie, managers, intellectuals, the labor aristocracy, and the proletariat.¹² Dimoni limited the process of modernization of the agrarian economy in the European North of Russia to the framework of the 1930s–the first half of the 1960s, when the share of capital in the cost structure of the agricultural product amounted to more than half.¹³

Another direction of historical and agricultural research is represented by the works of S.A. Esikov, V.A. Ilinykh, V.V. Kondrashin, V.A. Labuzov, O.A. Sukhovoi, L.N. Mazur, V.V. Naukhatsky, and V.V. Filatov.¹⁴ The study of processes in the Russian village of the late 19th–20th centuries was carried out in line with the concept of modernization. Historians explored the transformation of the agrarian sector and agricultural production, as well as its results and consequences; and changes in political and social relations, as well as in the behavior and mentality of the peasantry. V.A. Bondyrev, without denying the modernization of the post-October village, calls it “fragmentary” and defines it as transformations that covered only certain areas of the life of the state and society, but were not aimed (consciously or unwittingly) at their complex change.¹⁵ Ilyinykh developed the concept of changing models and submodels of the agrarian system. He carried out an analytical representation of the basic concepts, conceptual models, and projects for the modernization of agriculture in Siberia in the 20th century. He completed the process of depeasantization, as a result of the modernization of the Siberian village in the 1970s.¹⁶

A significant contribution to the development of historical and agricultural research is made by the multidisciplinary journal Peasant Studies (published since 2016), which informs us about the progress and results of research in the field of history, methodology, and empirical research in the fields of peasant studies, rural sociology, and social geography.

Modern agrarian and historical research shows that significant steps have been taken towards the development of the concept of ongoing Russian agrarian reforms. Nevertheless, all agrarian reforms in Russia should be considered from the standpoint of continuity. Their continuity in the history of Russia in the 20th century is related to the search for answers to the challenges of the time, with the search for further effective development of the country’s agrarian sector.

The agricultural sector is a basic element of the sustainability of any society. The instability of the agrarian system, the inconsistency of the level of agricultural development with the foreign and domestic political tasks facing the country, and the awareness of the need for its radical transformation became one of the main motivating reasons for the revolutionary events in 1905, 1917, and in 1991. Despite the attempts to transform agrarian relations, the agrarian-peasant issue in Russia turned out to be just as relevant at the beginning of the 21st century as at the beginning of the 20th century. The historical experience of the 20th century shows that the all-Russian model structurally consists of regional components, including the features of the existing historical-geographical, historical-economic, and historical-cultural realities that the authorities did not always take into account, or did not take into account at all.

A transformation in the agrarian sector and rural society within the framework of modernization will be denoted by the term “agrarian transition.”¹⁷ During the agrarian transition there was affirmation of the private ownership of land; the introduction of progressive agricultural technologies, intensive farming systems, rural electrification, внедрение scientific achievements, new tools for labor, and improved agricultural machinery; and development of market relations and cooperatives (economic transformation); change in the type of reproduction of the rural population, breaking the rural patriarchal family (demographic transformation); democratization of social and political life, the participation of the peasantry in political processes, parties, and movements (political transformation); overcoming the conservative economic ideas of the peasantry about the meaning and tasks of agricultural labor, the introduction of literacy among the peasantry, the introduction of urban culture and urban values, the secularization of consciousness and lifestyle (cultural transformation); the formation among the peasantry of personnel of mass professions, especially machine operators and agricultural specialists (social transformation); and change in the rural settlement network (transformation of rural settlement).

It must be taken into account that the directions, rates of development, and forms of manifestation of the components of the agrarian transition were determined and concretized by the specific historical situation and the struggle between constructive and destructive elements.

Modernization processes in the Russian countryside can be divided into three phases: The first phase: the end of the 19th–the middle of the 20th century; the second phase: mid-twentieth century–late 1980s; and the third phase: early 1990s–early 2000s. Periodization is based on a complex of factors that led to qualitative changes in the life of the village. Each phase began in conditions of agrarian and food crises. This approach allows us to consider the agrarian transformation of Russia from the standpoint of continuity and the continuity of the process. The intensity of the process of agrarian modernization is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. The intensity of the agrarian transition in Russia (the end of the 19th century–the beginning of the 20th century)

Agriculture in Russia since the second half of the nineteenth century became the object of repeated government reforms. Their distinguishing feature was that Russian agrarian reforms, unlike similar ones in Western countries, did not have a clear concept of implementation and were not consistent in implementation. During each of their implementations, the state authorities did not formulate the main concept and did not have a clear idea of the consequences to which the transformations should lead. Agrarian reforms in the history of Russia were carried out with the aim of increasing agricultural production. The emphasis has always been on the form of organization of agricultural production. The content of the agrarian reforms carried out in Russia was greatly influenced by the mentality that developed here, associated with values such as catholicity, communality, and collectivity.

Agrarian modernization (or agrarian transition) in Russia stretched out over more than a century-and-a-half. The choice of the path of agricultural development was related to the introduction of a type of land ownership (private or collective, private or state).

The transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one is related to the commercialization of land relations, the growth of social differentiation, and the destruction of the traditional social structure of the countryside. The experience of modernization of foreign countries in the economic field can be reduced to two main ways: the Western model, which was based on private ownership of land and freedom of enterprise; and the eastern model, where the state was the owner of the land and the regulator of social relations.

The question of private ownership of land for peasants in Russia was raised in the Stolypin reform.¹⁸ It was aimed at transferring allotment lands to the ownership of peasants, the gradual abolition of the rural community as a collective owner of land, extensive lending to peasants, buying up landowners' lands for resale to peasants on preferential terms, land management that would allow optimizing peasant farming by eliminating intersettlement land, land management, and resettlement of peasants from the densely populated European regions to free lands beyond the Urals in the Asian part of the empire. The components of the agrarian reform were the change in the forms of land ownership, land management, resettlement, the development of credit relations in the village, the implementation of agricultural improvements, and the support of agricultural production.¹⁹ The property rights of the peasants to the land consisted primarily in the replacement of the collective and limited ownership of the land of rural communities by the full-fledged private property of individual peasant householders. The agrarian question consisted of two independent problems: (1) the fragmentation of peasant allotments, the dispossession of the land of some peasants, the growing (according to estimates of contemporaries) poverty, and the decline of the economy in the countryside; and (2) from the traditional non-recognition by the peasant communities of the right of ownership of the landlords to the land. The opportunities provided by the reform aroused the greatest interest among two groups of peasants: owners of wealthy farms and peasants who were about to abandon their farm (sell their land).

The peasantry did not accept the fact that the land belonged to the landowners, which led to frequent unrest. For this, according to P. A. Stolypin, the peasants had to transfer the land to private ownership.²⁰ The Stolypin reform was not destined to be fully realized. The modernization of the village did not leave the agenda of all political and social movements, the power elites of the late Russian Empire.

A group of intellectuals (representatives of the organizational-production school, the author of the Moral Economy A.V. Chayanov, economist N.D. Kondratiev, et al.) offered an alternative version of rural modernity, the core of which was to stop the destruction of traditional rural communities as a result of accelerated industrialization and urbanization, as well as the integration of the peasant masses into the modern economy, society, and politics through the development of the cooperative movement.²¹ In their opinion, “the village became the core of the future,” as the German researcher K. Bruisch wrote.²²

By 1917, the land fund of Russia included the following categories of lands: privately owned and other lands; state lands; lands of specific departments; church and monastery lands; lands for household use; urban lands; peasant lands of household-district use; peasant communal (secular) lands (field and manor lands); peasant privately owned plots on former communal lands; peasant privately owned plots on the former landowner’s land, bought through a bank individually or by partnerships; lands allocated from the communal lands to brigades and collective farms according to the Law of November 6, 1906. The Bolsheviks, who came to power in a revolutionary way, adopted the Decree on Land on October 26, 1917, which immediately abolished private ownership of land for everyone without providing any conditions.²³ The capitalist modernization of agriculture was unconditionally rejected. According to the Bolsheviks and their political allies, the Left SRs, the peasants themselves had to decide the issues of land management and land use, the Russian village needed a stable state and sustainable development.

The Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February 19, 1918 “On the socialization of land” specified the main provisions of the Decree on Land. It consisted of 13 sections and was enshrined forever: the abolition of ownership of land, subsoil, water, forests and living forces of nature within the RSFSR; the transfer of land without any redemption for the use of the working people; preference for working agricultural partnerships over individual farms; establishment of land use norms for the allotment of land for various purposes; and grounds for termination of land rights.²⁴ The socialization of land was enshrined in the Constitution of the RSFSR of July 10, 1918, which announced the abolition of private ownership of land, and the entire land fund was recognized as public property and transferred to workers without any redemption based on the equalization of land use.²⁵

Having fulfilled the age-old dream of the peasants, the Bolsheviks sought from the very beginning to form collectivist forms of peasant labor as quickly as possible in the countryside. However, within the framework of the status of land as state property, the issue of land use was rather difficult to resolve, given that before the revolution various forms of land use were used, among which the common form was common in combination with individual peasant farming.

The peasants put up quite active resistance to the attempts of the Bolsheviks to socialize peasant labor. Moreover, in 1921, due to the extremely difficult economic situation, the Soviet government was forced to switch to a new economic policy that implied a certain liberalization of the economy. The fourth session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on October 30, 1922 approved the Land Code of the RSFSR. The socialization of the land was replaced by nationalization and the peasants were provided with the right to permanent use of the land. The code clearly outlined the status of land in the country: it could only be in state ownership. With its adoption, a new stage in the development of the organization of peasant land use began in the country and rural societies were transformed into land societies. The economic component came to the fore; in rural society, the first place was taken by the municipal, that is, the self-governing component in the land use system. At that time, 80 to 95% of peasant lands were used by the peasant community.²⁶ Most of the peasant farms were in various cooperatives. Supporters of the non-capitalist path of agriculture, including representatives of the Bolsheviks (N. I. Bukharin), they expected a modernizing effect from the cooperatives, which, in their opinion, was based on the individual and was not focused on making a profit.²⁷

However, later, by the end of the 1920s, when the course was taken to curtail the new economic policy, amendments began to be made to the Land Code of the RSFSR, which were aimed at the socialization of peasant labor. By the decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union of February 1, 1930 “On measures to strengthen the socialist reorganization of agriculture in areas of complete collectivization and to combat the kulaks,” the lease of agricultural land was canceled and the use of hired labor in individual peasant farms was prohibited. The peasants who were most efficient in farming were classified as kulaks and, based on this, were deprived of the right to use the land. Some of them were sent into exile. The Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR of July 30, 1930 “On the liquidation of land societies in areas of complete collectivization” and the Model charter of an agricultural artel, approved by the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR on March 1, 1930, provided for the unification of all field plots into a single land mass, which was in collective use. Members of the collective farm could have a personal plot in use.

The approximate charter of an agricultural artel, approved by the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on February 17, 1935, fixed the transfer of land occupied by collective farms for unlimited use and determined the size of household plots provided to members of the collective farm for personal subsidiary farming.²⁸

The USSR Constitution of December 5, 1936 established that the land, its bowels, waters, and forests in the Soviet Union are state property, that is, the property of all the its people. The land occupied by collective farms was assigned to them for free and indefinite use, that is, forever. The collective farm yard was given the right to have a small plot of land for personal use and a subsidiary farm in personal ownership in accordance with the charter of the collective farm.²⁹ Fixed and working assets of collective farms and manufactured products were collectively owned by their members, but in practice the state was the owner, user, and manager of collective farm property. In 1937, a ban was introduced on the lease of collective farm land and household plots. Thus, by the mid-1930s, state ownership was formed as the base of the economic system of the USSR, and the line of evolution of Russia towards the development of capitalism, including private ownership of land, was finally cut off.

Only in March 1989, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU actually determined the economic failure of the state-farm-collective-farm system, the existing mechanism of strict administrative planning, the legal redistribution of land, and the gratuitousness of its use. The party officially recognized the pluralism of forms of agriculture. On April 25, 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, as part of the ongoing economic reform, adopted the third Land Code of the RSFSR.³⁰ Starting from 1991, land plots could be obtained based on the right of ownership, lifetime inheritable possession, permanent (unlimited) use, lease, or fixed-term (temporary) use. The Constitution of the Russian Federation of December 12, 1993 established the right of private ownership of land as a natural inalienable right, but did not fully contain the mechanism for detailing and implementing this right.³¹ The concepts of socialist, nationwide, and collective-farm-cooperative property were removed from the text of the Constitution. On October 25, 2001, the fourth Land Code of the Russian Federation was adopted.³² It focused not on issues of land ownership (unlike the Land Code of 1922), but on numerous issues of land use, land protection, rights and obligations of land owners, protection of land rights, consideration of land disputes, land management and state land cadastre, and characteristics of various categories of land. The new code also determined that the provision of land plots in state and municipal ownership, as well as in the ownership of citizens and legal entities, is carried out for a fee. The Land Code of 2001 reflected the market and legal status of land ownership.

At the same time, the main direction of regulation of land relations concerned agricultural land, since it was in agriculture that the problem of land was most acute. Thus, the final choice was made on the capitalist path of development of Russia’s agriculture. This is indicated by the data of Rosreestr as of January 1, 2018: 33.3% of agricultural land was in private ownership and 66.7% in state ownership.³³

The initial capital accumulation in agriculture in the 1990s was carried out through the privatization of state property and the property of the dissolved collective farms and state farms. Fears that agriculture was unable to produce sufficient food and ensure food security turned out to be unfounded. Market reforms were seen as absolutely inevitable and hopes were pinned on them for a quick exit from the crisis, since there was a sharp decline in agricultural production (almost by 50%), the collapse of collective farms and state farms, a drop in the level of labor mechanization (by 33%), a significant reduction in arable and sowing areas in the country (25–33%), and the collapse of public animal husbandry. The formal indicators of agricultural production in modern Russia in the 2010s were significantly higher than in the previous decade. At the same time, the introduction of private ownership of land led to the economic polarization of space into rich and poor rural areas and enterprises.³⁴ Since the early 2000s in Russia there has been an increase in agricultural production. However, Merl believes that “the state is very exposed, relying primarily on the speculative production of large agricultural holdings that dependend on state subsidies, since there is a high risk of losses and failures for owners of capital, especially given the scale of production of agricultural holdings; many of them cultivate more than 200 000 hectares.³⁵ Many experts believe that without private ownership of land and competition, there can be no incentives for the development and modernization of the agricultural sector.

The constituent elements of the agrarian transition throughout the 20th century manifested themselves differently in different periods, but never together. This indicates that the authorities, defining the strategy of agrarian development at one time or another saw its implementation in different ways. The agrarian transition was carried out for a century-and-a-half, and it was intermittent and spasmodic. It was contradictory and generated new contradictions and even conflicts.

At all phases, the content of the agrarian transition was largely determined by the system of agriculture, or rather, the transition from extensive to intensive systems. Land is the main and invariable means of production in agriculture. The first phase of the agrarian transition was dominated by the extensive development of agriculture. Up to the middle of the twentieth century, due to the huge undeveloped land masses in Russia, the peasantry did not have the task of increasing soil fertility; the problem was only in their restoration. The areas under grain crops in Russia increased from 62.9 million hectares in 1913 to 68.2 million hectares in 1953. In the second phase, up to 1964, they increased to 81.6 million hectares. This was followed by a steady decrease in crops. In the third phase, there was a constant reduction in grain crops: in 1991 they amounted to 61.8 million hectares, and by 2000 they fell to 45.6 million hectares. The growth of crops was mainly due to the planting of potatoes, vegetables, and fodder crops. The yield of leguminous crops decreased slightly: in 1913, it averaged 8.0 centners per hectare in the country; in the early 1950s, 7.0–7.6 centners per hectare; and it increased significantly in 1990, to 19.5 centners per hectare.³⁶

By the beginning of the agrarian transition, most of the peasant farms remained at a level that barely provided for their own consumption. Under unfavorable weather and climatic conditions, despite the introduction of a system for providing people’s food, hunger strikes often broke out (1901, 1906, 1911). This factor in 1921 and 1922, aggravated by the devastation after the Civil War and the food policy of the Bolsheviks, caused a terrible famine. The implementation of the Stalinist “revolution from above”—the collectivization of agriculture—caused a crisis in agriculture and led to a terrible hunger strike in 1932 and 1933. The devastation as a result of the war of 1941–1945 and the drought of 1946 led to a hunger strike in 1946 and 1947; and the unification of collective farms in the early 1950s, to a food crisis in the countryside. In the first phase of the agrarian transition did not eradicate a feature inherent in traditional society: periodic hunger strikes, especially if the crops failed for two years in a row.

The sociopolitical cataclysms affected the agrarian transition, but they could not stop it, and they gave it specific features. Due to the fact that agricultural production periodically recovered to the level of 1913, then 1928, then 1940, and then 1990, its development took place largely on an extensive basis. The specificity of the agrarian transition, especially in the first phase, was manifested in its protracted nature, which was related to wars and revolutions. Peasant farms were forced to constantly return to archaic and extensive farming systems. There was practically no growth in labor productivity or real income per capita of the peasant population. In the collective farm era, there were no incentives for the economic activity of collective farmers; it was necessary to survive rather than accumulate. The peasantry in the twentieth century remained the poorest part of the population.

The result of the transformation of the agrarian sector was depeasantization. This process is related to a reduction in the number of the peasantry and the change in the lifestyle of rural residents. The peasantry gradually lost its social characteristics and properties. Peasantization had two sides: internal and external. External depeasantization manifested itself in a physical reduction in the number of peasants. A feature of this process was the predominance of political and ideological factors that significantly accelerated it. In 1897 rural residents accounted for 85% of the population of Russia; their share declined to 48% by the late 1950s; and to 26%, by 1990.³⁷

The most dynamic and clearly manifested process of external depeasantization was complemented by an internal one: by the change in the forms of life of the peasantry and the destruction of the traditional way of life. Internal depeasantization gradually covered the cultural traditions, leisure, and worldview of rural residents. The specific features and characteristics of the peasantry as a social group were gradually lost. Depeasantization is a very lengthy process and the result of an agrarian transition. It was challenged by a number of factors: remoteness from large urban centers, underdeveloped infrastructure of the village, and the preservation of the traditions of work, leisure, life, and the cultural and psychological way of village life.

The Russian village has changed significantly in the 20th century. In the course of the agrarian transition, the way of rural life was rapidly breaking down: the spheres of work and life, which had been united for centuries, were separating; the measured rhythm of village life, largely determined by the rhythms of nature and the seasonality of agricultural work, consecrated and spiritualized by the church, was disappearing and becoming more dependent on the orders of the authorities; and the local isolation of the world of the village, which reduced the possibility of contacts, was gradually disappearing. However, the transition to a predominantly industrial development did not lead to a harmonious relationship between the city and the countryside, or to industrial agrarian development. The one-sidedness of this process led to further depeasantization. The modernization of the agrarian sector turned out to be strange, since there was no qualitative improvement in the life of the villagers.

In the first phase of the agrarian transition, two stages are clearly distinguished: until the 1930s and the 1930s–1950s. At the first stage, the total land fund in Russia barely changed; at the second stage, due to intensive industrial development and the growth of urban settlements, as well as the expansion of agricultural crops, it increased significantly. In the 1930s, when a complex of agricultural engineering enterprises was formed, the era of mechanization and mechanization of agricultural labor began. The process of transition from horse-hand traction to the mechanization of basic agricultural operations emerged. Externally, the agrarian transition proceeded at this stage under the slogan of socialist transformations, but its focus and tasks were related to a radical change in the forms of ownership, the introduction of large forms of organization of agricultural production, and the intensification of agricultural production as a whole. Collective farms and state farms began to determine the production of agricultural products (about 90% of the gross crop production). Under the conditions of the collective-farm-state-farm system, a great deal of attention began to be paid to increase the yield of fields based on improving agrotechnical methods: the introduction of crop rotations, the introduction of organic fertilizers in the soil, the sowing of varietal seeds, and the reduction in the duration of agricultural operations. These elements of intensification made it possible to raise crop yields and livestock productivity.

In the 1930s, under the conditions of the dominance of large forms of organization of agricultural production, the grass-field system of agriculture developed by V.R. Williams was introduced. It was a complex modification of extensive farming systems (fallow, grain, and multifield grass). They tried to restore and increase soil fertility biologically, with the help of perennial grasses or through a crop rotation system. At the same time, in a number of regions, grain three-field cultivation is planned to be replaced by an intensive crop farming system. A purely grain economy gave way to agricultural production with developed animal husbandry, as well as cultivation of technical and grain crops. This is indicated by the changes in the structure of crops. Experimental work was carried out everywhere on the zoning of varieties of seeds of agricultural crops and the grading of livestock.

During the Great Patriotic War, almost all elements of intensification were lost. The village was the main reservoir of reserves and resources for the development of industry. The rural population during the war years was the main source of replenishment of the active army, as well as recruitment for industry, transport, and construction, which led to a significant outflow of human resources from the countryside.

In the agrarian policy of the postwar period, the following directions can be distinguished: expansion of the acreage of collective farms, an increase in the number of livestock and machinery, the introduction of new forms of organization and wages, rural electrification, and finally, the consolidation of farms. The last event can be considered the pivotal direction of agrarian policy, since the idea of the superiority of large-scale production over small-scale production, by analogy with industry, remained basic in the concept of agricultural development. The growth of the army and the urban population was a heavy burden on the agrarian economy. Multifield (6–8-field) crop rotations were broken and not restored until the late 1940s–1950s. There was no progress in improving agricultural machinery: the restored tractor and other agricultural engineering plants were oriented towards the production of prewar models. A significant blow to the introduction of intensive agricultural technologies was dealt by Lysenkoism, which declared war on new methods of selection and seed production. Due to objective and subjective factors, the first phase of the agrarian transition was generally dominated by the extensive development of agriculture, which was accompanied by an increase in the problem of the food supply for the population.

The progressive tendencies of agrarian development in the postwar years were manifested in the practice of shelter plantations and the expansion of the use of organic and mineral fertilizers. In the second half of the 1940s, the electrification of the village began through the construction of small hydroelectric power stations; and as of 1953, collective farms began to be connected to state power networks.³⁸ However, it became clear that the extensive farming systems had exhausted their potential, and the agrarian sector could no longer cope with the food supply for the growing urban population. It required the introduction of intensive agricultural production technologies, which did not take place in the first phase of the agrarian transition. Collective farmers were the most materially disadvantaged group of the Soviet population. The factors hindering the improvement of the material condition of collective farmers were the strict tax policy, low wages in collective farm production, and the restriction of personal farms. Collective farmers had no interest in expanding community production. They did not become supporters of modernization changes. In the second phase of the agrarian transition (1950s–1980s), together with machine operators, they were supported by agricultural specialists and their share among those employed in the agrarian sector was steadily growing; however, the rural bureaucracy began to play an increasingly important role (including farm managers, rural party functionaries, and Soviet leaders).

As a result, the increase in the land funds of agricultural cartels, taxes, state supplies, and in-kind payments to MTSs increased, while the costs of internal communications and, consequently, the cost of production, as well as the losses of collective farm production, also increased.³⁹ Consolidation of collective farms was not economically justified.

The main directions of agrarian policy were revised in September 1953 at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU.⁴⁰ Khrushchev was determined to quickly make a powerful breakthrough in the field of agriculture, to raise the well-being of the people to a new level. This factor and a set of measures to transfer agriculture to an industrial base make it possible to single out a special period of the second phase of the agrarian transition.

The shortage of grain products and the complexity of the international situation again forced the government to begin expanding the sown area through the development of virgin and fallow lands. For their development, 37.4 billion rubles were invested in 1954–1959, about 45 million hectares of land were developed, and average grain production per annum increased by 50% from 8.1 million to 12 million tons.⁴¹ Numerous mistakes were made during this campaign; the high price paid for bread, and perhaps the prematureness of such large-scale actions did not allow solving the grain problem. It became clear that the extensive forms of agricultural development had exhausted their potential. In 1963, the Soviet Union for the first time began to import grain from abroad.

In the 1950s, the technical equipment of collective farms and state farms increased. The tractor fleet increased by a factor of 1.9. The electrification of the countryside continued actively by connecting the collective farms to the state’s electric networks. The imposition by the government of the structure of crops, which often did not correspond to local natural and climatic conditions, continued, tasks for plowing for crops of perennial grasses and clean fallows were sent down to farms in a directive order, the targets set continued to be changed often, and various additional tasks were issued. Partial attempts to implement the adopted resolutions in practice ran into opposition from the administrative system. Planning remained centralized, nullifying the economic incentives for agriculture. At this stage of the agrarian transition, the administrative apparatus acted as a brake on modernization.

Attempts to achieve a rise in the agrarian sector relied on organizational measures that were supposed to compensate to some extent for the lack of economic incentives. In relation to this, we note the major actions that had ambiguous consequences for the countryside. They include the reorganization of the MTSs and the transfer of equipment to the collective farms; a new wave of consolidation of farms and the transformation of collective farms into state farms; and government reform.

The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s were filled with constant attempts to use a “magical tool” to achieve crops that were supposed to demonstrate to the world all the advantages of a socialist economy. This happened against the background of the “green revolution” unfolding in the world. The famous corn and the fight against grass-field crop rotations were such a magical remedy. The thoughtless introduction of all these innovations was rebuffed by people who were supporting the fate of the village. The famous Kurgan farmer, T.S. Maltsev, having carefully studied the centuries-old traditions of the peasant culture, developed agrotechnical methods for growing high yields in the conditions of the Urals. He argued that the gross harvest of wheat every 5 to 6 years would be higher if the land was left fallow for one year.⁴² The results of the discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of grass-field crop rotations and pure fallows were disappointing, as the issue was decided by officials rather than scientists. One-fifth of the arable land was occupied by corn, legumes, and beets. The grass-field system was declared to be a barrier on the development of agriculture. Pure pairs were eliminated. As a result of the introduction of such a crop rotation, the yield decreased, the weediness of the fields grew, and soil erosion intensified.⁴³

Khrushchev began a fight against private subsidiary plots (PSPs) of the peasants, which were seen as a barrier to the development of the socialist economy. In his opinion, PSPs diverted attention and energy away from collective farm production and contributed to the growth of private property sentiment. The attack on household plots was manifested in the reduction of land plots and the reduction in the number of livestock. This attitude towards the peasant economy led to the agrarian crisis of the early 1960s.⁴⁴

Despite all the changes that collectivization brought with it to the village, the peasant economy was preserved and performed the most important function: providing the peasant family with the necessary products. In the middle of the century, the personal farmstead remained the main source of budgeting and consumption of collective farmers. The peasant household as a whole retained the features of a traditional family economy: a diversified structure, a seminatural character, and the use of the family’s labor potential. The household included the family, land, livestock, and inventory, as well as residential and outbuildings. The government’s pressure on individual farms exacerbated the food situation. The card system was avoided thanks to the massive purchases of grain abroad that had been initiated.

The desire to correct the situation and transfer the agrarian economy to a qualitatively new level was reflected in the set of measures taken in the second half of the 1960s. The March Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1965 was significant, at which the transition to firm long-term plans for the procurement of agricultural products, an increase in procurement prices, a change in the principles of taxation of collective farms and state farms (taxes began to be calculated not from gross but from net income) was announced.⁴⁵ It was proposed to evaluate the activity of enterprises by the level of their profitability. A course was proclaimed for the intensification and specialization of agricultural production, land reclamation, and the development of new lands. The attitude towards household plots also changed, local authorities were instructed to assist the population in acquiring livestock, providing fodder, and cultivating the land.

At the second stage of the second phase of the agrarian transition, a complex of various intensive farming systems began to be implemented: grain-fallow, grain-rowed, grain-grass, crop-ameliorative, and reclamation, soil-protective, tilled, improved grain, etc. Zonal farming systems started being introduced in the 1980s, in which all the stages—crop rotations, methods of tillage and sowing, fertilizers, and weed control, as well as pest and disease control of agricultural plants—had to take into account the soil and climatic conditions and the material and technical base of the farms.

The development of a program to develop a scientifically based farming system in 1981 was an important moment in the transition to intensive farming systems. It included agronomic characterization of the natural conditions, soil-climatic and erosional zoning; direction, scale, rate of specialization, and concentration of agricultural production; and crop rotations, as well as the structure of sown areas and their improvement.

The intensification of agriculture required large investments, comprehensive mechanization of agricultural work, and a number of other measures that were supposed to ensure the growth of labor productivity. The volume of investment in the agricultural sector in the second half of the 1960s almost doubled. As a result, the machine and tractor fleet of collective farms and state farms expanded. New brands of equipment appeared in the fields: the T-100M and T-130 tractors; and the Niva, Kolos, and Sibiryak combines. They made it possible to increase labor productivity by 1.5–2.5 times. However, the technology was not enough. In order to fully meet the needs of farms, part of the work, especially in vegetable growing and animal husbandry, was carried out manually. Difficulties arose with the repair base of the farms, since the equipment and spare parts supplied by centralized order often did not meet the needs of collective farms and state farms, and the uncoordinated activities of the agricultural machinery departments minimized all the advantages of mechanization.

The electrification of the village continued actively. The vast majority of villages were provided with electricity by the 1980s. Increasingly, electricity was used in production, especially in the most labor-intensive industry: in animal husbandry. The gasification of villages had begun.

The ongoing reclamation measures led to mixed results. The most serious problem was the violation of the ecological water balance.

Large systemic measures in agriculture led to noticeable positive shifts. A.A. Nikonov cites the following data on the expansion of the scale of capital investments and the increase in agricultural production: the application of mineral fertilizers increased from 2.2 kg per hectare in 1960 to 97.5 kg in 1990; the area of irrigated land during this time increased by 2.3 times; the area of drained lands, by 2.2 times; the power-to-weight ratio of labor increased from 5.7 h.p. per person to 28.8 h.p.; the electric power of labor grew impressively by a factor of 30.3 from 160 kW hours per person to 4855 kW hours.⁴⁶

The progress in the field of agriculture was the result of a set of measures to modernize the agricultural sector: the intensification of a number of industries, increased investment, and specialization of farms, as well as due to the expansion of the economic independence of enterprises and the economic incentives that were incorporated in the procurement policy, planning, and taxation. In the 1970s, however, the processes related to centralization and administration again intensified, economic leverage was again replaced by the system’s usual methods of for increased labor productivity, which affected the state of agriculture.

There was a deformation of the sex and age structure of the rural population. The increase in the proportion and absolute number of elderly people was very noticeable. The proportion of young people and children was declining. This was due both to a decrease in the birth rate and the increase in life expectancy, and to the migration of the population, as a result of which, primarily, young people left the village. In the 1950s–1960s, the main problems in the countryside were considered low wages, while in the 1970s–1980s, the main problems were the increasingly difficult working conditions and lower standard of living in rural areas compared to the city. This testified to the spread of urban living standards among the rural population. The depopulation of the villages led to the fact that since the 1950s, in some areas, townspeople began to be attracted to agricultural work. In the 1970s–1980s, it became a ubiquitous phenomenon, turning into a kind of duty of the city to the countryside. Enterprises and organizations patronizing collective and state farms were required to send workers for weeding, harvesting, haymaking, and other agricultural work.

Budget surveys of peasant families show that in the Middle Urals, about 12% of rural families adhered to the traditional peasant way of life, and they were focused mainly on private households, which were the main source of their livelihood. This category included mainly elderly families, single old people, and partially incomplete families.⁴⁷ The bulk of rural families (about 70%) led a way of life that could be called a collective-farm peasant way of life. In these families, incomes from private households and from social production in the budget were approximately equivalent and equally contributed in its formation. The household plot of these families was diversified with the obligatory maintenance of cattle, pigs, and sheep on their farmstead. In the 1960s, in the countryside, another category of family, whose lifestyle is defined as rural-urban (their share was about 20%), stands out. These included families of highly paid workers of collective farms and state farms: specialists, administrative and managerial staff, machine operators, and partly livestock breeders. Receiving a high cash income from work in social production, they no longer depended to the same extent as the rest of the peasants on their personal household plots and therefore it acquired for them the character of auxiliary production. First of all, these families abandoned the most labor-intensive industry: cattle breeding. It was in this environment that the standards of urban culture and urban lifestyle were instilled faster. This stratum of rural residents was the bearer of transformational changes at this stage of the agrarian transition. The transformation was hindered by the underdeveloped infrastructure of the village; the preservation of the traditions of work, leisure, and life; and the cultural and psychological structure of village life.

The problem of the intensification of agricultural production remained relevant, and only in this way was it possible to solve the food problem. The intensification of agriculture was understood as a set of measures: mechanization, reclamation, chemicalization, cooperation and integration of production, and increased capital investment, which were supposed to qualitatively change agricultural production and raise it to a new level. However, these activities were put into practice through “the more the better” campaigns. Thus, with land reclamation, the thoughtless use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, widespread cooperation and integration of farms, which led to the creation of a huge administrative bureaucracy, which required much more income to maintain than the income received by farms from cooperatives.

A significant part of large capital investments was directed to the construction, reconstruction, and expansion of livestock complexes, farms, machinery, and equipment. The number of tractors on farms increased by a third. Despite the increase in technology, the farms were neither technically nor technologically ready to switch to intensive technologies or intensive methods of production. The level of use of the available equipment was extremely low. The intensification of agricultural production developed according to the cost principle. The introduction of intensive technologies in agriculture was most often accompanied by the depletion of soil fertility and the destruction of its structure. The introduction of intensive technologies was hampered by the inadequate qualifications of personnel, the imperfection of the system of agrochemical and technical maintenance, and the lack of the necessary equipment.

The failure of the policy of intensifying agricultural production can be seen most clearly in the analysis of labor productivity indicators on collective farms and state farms. In 1961–1982 the average annual growth rate for the country’s farms amounted to 3.4%. In the late 1970s–early 1980s, labor productivity did not rise. Such growth rates could not ensure sustainable progress in agricultural production.⁴⁸

The ongoing agrarian policy did not give visible results. In 1982, the Food Program was adopted, which can be seen as the open recognition of the crisis that had developed in the field of food production.⁴⁹ Great hopes were pinned on the agroindustrial complex, which was designed to accelerate the intensification of agricultural production, reduce crop losses, and improve product processing. By 1986, as a result of organizational changes, a huge administrative apparatus was created, which not only was unable to balance and coordinate the development of agriculture and industrial sectors and ensure the introduction of new technologies, but became an additional obstacle, absorbing huge funds. The uneven position of agricultural and industrial enterprises was reflected in the relationship between partners in the the agroindustrial complex. While the collective farms and state farms suffered losses, the Agricultural enterprises and associations of the dairy and meat industries made a profit.⁵⁰

In the context of food shortages, measures were again taken to create more favorable conditions for the development of household plots. Their provision with building materials, mineral fertilizers, and small-scale mechanization had improved. Collective and state farms could enter into agreements with peasant farms for the cultivation and purchase of livestock and poultry. The adoption of the Food Program helped ensure that every family living in the countryside could have a garden, livestock, and poultry. In order to stimulate the delivery of meat and milk, consumer cooperatives practiced the counter-sale of the most scarce goods: cars, motorcycles, and carpets. In suburban areas, the horticultural movement became popular.

The downward trend in agricultural production continued in 1985–1990, and then throughout the 1990s. Internal contradictions were growing in the country’s economy, the resources of the administrative-command system were depleted, and the flow of petrodollars could no longer compensate the costly nature of production. The need for radical change became increasingly obvious.

Thus, from the mid-1950s, a new agrarian model was being implemented in the Soviet Union. This did not mean a sharp break with the previous agrarian model, since the new features of agrarian policy were combined with the preservation of its fundamental theoretical and political foundations. At the same time, it represented an alternative to Stalin’s policy of depeasantizing the countryside and experimenting in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At this phase of the agrarian transition, ways to adapt the Soviet economic system to the conditions and requirements of the scientific and technological revolution were sought. In relation to this, the agrarian policy of 1965 was an attempt to reform the Soviet agrarian sector, designed not only to increase the pace of development of agricultural production but also to develop a competitive socialist alternative to the bourgeois-farmer way of agrarian evolution.

At this phase of the agrarian transition, some trends in the development of modern productive forces were taken into account (increasing the process of the concentration of production and capital, the growing role of state regulation, the intensification of production, the integration of industries within the agroindustrial complex, etc.). However, some features of this stage of the scientific and technological revolution were underestimated or completely ignored (the sharp increase in the social and environmental factors in the development of agriculture, the accelerated formation of the industrial infrastructure of the agroindustrial complex, the widespread use of computer technology and biotechnology, etc.); and the specifics of agrarian relations and the principles of economic activity widely recognized in the world in the agricultural sector (development of market mechanisms, functioning of the agrarian economy as a set of enterprises of various levels of concentration and forms of ownership, and broad development of cooperation).

At this phase of the agrarian transition, the agrarian model evolved from attempts to introduce elements of commodity-money relations into the planned system in the second half of the 1960s through the strengthening of administration, centralism, and directives to a complete disregard for the market regulators of the agrarian economy. The evolution of the economic mechanism in the agrarian sector until the second half of the 1980s had an antimarket character. During the agrarian modernization of the 1960s–1980s, mistakes, dramatic collisions, and deformations could not be avoided.⁵¹

On the whole, the agrarian development of the 1950s and 1980s was distinguished, on the one hand, by the delay in carrying out long overdue reforms, and on the other hand, by forced leaps and the desire to quickly introduce innovations everywhere. The result of such a policy was the growth of crisis phenomena in agriculture.

Agriculture, being one of the painful points of the economy, found itself at the center of socioeconomic transformations. The main achievement of this period is the awareness of the catastrophic situation in which the country found itself and the understanding of the need to use market principles of regulation to create an effective model of the economy.

The economic crisis of the 1990s manifested itself primarily in a sharp decline in agricultural production. The sown area in Russia decreased from 1990 to 1998 by 22.5%, the gross grain harvest in farms of all categories decreased by a factor of 2.4, and the grain yield fell to 12.9 centners per hectare.⁵² Such a sharp decline in agricultural production was not observed in times of peace in the twentieth century was not observed. The decline in production was accompanied by a violation of agricultural technologies, weeding, and depletion of land.

The emphasis in agrarian policy only on obtaining agricultural products ultimately led to a natural phase decline in the agricultural sector. In those sectors of the agricultural sector where efforts were made to preserve intensive technologies, it was possible to quickly stop the decline. The development of intensive farming systems in the context of the ongoing agrarian crisis had been halted. Some farmers had returned to traditional and archaic farming systems. The transition to intensive farming systems had once again been delayed.

In the 1990s, the third phase of the agrarian transition, in the context of the transition to market relations, the problem of the food security of individual regions and the country as a whole had become strategically important. It became especially acute in the context of the crisis in agricultural production, which led to a high level of dependence on food supplies from abroad. Thus, neither in the first nor in the second phases of the agrarian transition, nor in the 1990s was it possible to completely solve the problem of the complete provision of the population with food. The historical experience of the 20th century shows that the all-Russian model structurally consists of regional components, including the features of the existing historical-geographical, historical-economic, and historical-cultural realities that the authorities did not always take into account or did not take into account at all. The regional agrarian communities entered the 21st century with a number of unresolved problems, but the prospect of agrarian development remained the completion of the agrarian transition and the completion of the agrarian modernization of Russia.