Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-06T08:21:59.042Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agricultural Involution in the Postwar Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2014

Jenny Leigh Smith
Jenny Leigh Smith*
Affiliation:
Georgia Institute of Technology
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article describes a form of agricultural labor intensification common in the postwar Soviet Union that shares some important similarities to Clifford Geertz's notion of agricultural involution, first devised to describe Javanese wet rice agriculture. Using the examples of hog farming and cotton production, this paper describes the phenomenon of postwar agricultural involution, and explores its limits and possibilities. The most important divergence from Geertz's original model is that in the Soviet cases, agricultural involution did not attain any form of environmental equilibrium; in fact, because of agricultural involution, the Soviet Union was forced to confront the environmental limits of agricultural intensification. The concept of agricultural involution provides a way of thinking about the relative flexibility or rigidity of agroecological health in the face of labor intensification. This quality—how much additional labor and how many extra humans an agricultural ecosystem is able to support—is critical in evaluating how robust or fragile a landscape is.

Type
Environment and Labor
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 85 , Spring 2014 , pp. 59 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. The literature on this process is voluminous and largely focused on the United States. The best works on this topic include Daniel, Pete R., Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Champaign, IL, 1986)Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, Deborah, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Danbom, David, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (lowa City, IA., 1979)Google Scholar. The most comprehensive book on Russian and Soviet agriculture, Nikonov, A. A., Spiral Mnogovekovoi dramy: Agrarnaia nauka i politika Rossii, XVIII–XX vv. (Moscow, 1995)Google Scholar, discusses mechanization but not deskilling.

2. Geertz, Clifford, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley, CA, 1963)Google Scholar.

3. Smith, Jenny Leigh, Works in Progress (New Haven, CT, 2014), Ch. 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the internal passport system, see Kessler, Gijs, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 42 no. 2–4, 477–504 Google Scholar, Shearer, David R., Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT, 2009), 243–85Google Scholar.

4. Geertz, Agricultural Involution, 32–37.

5. On failed industrialization, see Jasny, Noam, Soviet Industrialization (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar; Zaleski, Eugene, Stalinist Planning for Economic Growth (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. On failed agricultural industrialization, see Medvedev, Zhores A., Soviet Agriculture (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. On muddling through, see Ruble, Blair, “Muddling Through,” Wilson Quarterly (winter, 1981): 126–38Google Scholar.

6. Stalin, Jospeph V., Works, vol. 13, 1930–1934 (Moscow, 1954)Google Scholar.

7. Guy L. Bush to Louise G. Bush, letter, August 9, 1931. Private collection of Guy L. Bush, Jr.

8. Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998), 193–222 Google Scholar; Brown, Kate, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place,” The American Historical Review 106 (2001): 17–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Ellman, Michael, “The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines,” Cambridge Journal of Economics (2000): 618–19.Google Scholar On the famine more generally, see Ganson, Nicholas, The Soviet Famine of 1946–1947 in Global and Historical Perspective (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Voznesenskii, Nikolai, trans., Five-Year Plan for the Rehabilitation and Development of the National Economy of the USSR, 1946–1950 (London, 1946).Google Scholar

11. Ibid.

12. Osokina, Elena A., Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927–1941 (New York, 2001), 82–90.Google Scholar

13. Of course, between 1926 and 1940 the Soviet countryside experienced a series of extraordinary events including collectivization and famine. These may have pushed some people out of rural areas, but the slower rate of urbanization between 1950 and 1972 still stands.

14. The rural population decreased five percent between 1926 and 1939, and three percent between 1959 and 1970. Harris, Chauncy, “Urbanization and Population Growth in the Soviet Union 1959–1970,” Geographical Review, vol. LXI no. 1, (1971): 102Google Scholar; Lorimer, Frank, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva, 1946), 168.Google Scholar

15. Kotz, David and Weir, Fred, Revolution from Above, the Demise of the Soviet System (London, 2007), 35.Google Scholar

16. The Situation in Biological Science: Proceedings of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the USSR, Session July 31st–August 7th, 1948, Verbatim Report (Moscow, 1949).

17. For example, see Le Court, Dominique, Proletarian Science: The Case of Lysenko (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Medvedev, Zhores A., The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Soyfer, Valerii, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994)Google Scholar; Zirkle, Conrad, Death of a Science in Russia (Philadelphia, 1949).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Laird, Roy D. and Crowley, Edward L., eds. Soviet Agriculture: The Permanent Crisis (Lawrence, KS, 1965)Google Scholar, 121, 159.

19. I base these assertions on the observations of two groups of Americans: swine experts who lived and worked in the countryside on hog farms from 1930 to 1931, and a group of visiting agricultural specialists, including swine experts, who visited the country in 1955.

20. On gender distribution after the war and gender imbalance in the rural Soviet Union, see Zubkova, Elena, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (New York, 1998), 20–21, 38–39Google Scholar.

21. Of the two hundred workers on seven breeding farms for which I have data, there were no women in positions of leadership on these farms. RGAE, f. 7486, op. 25, d. 44, l. 1–4.

22. Lysenko, “New Developments in the Science of Biological Species,” (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1951).

23. GARF, f. 616, op. 1, d. 5638, l. 49 (verso). Khrushchev reduced but did not eliminate mixed-use kolkhozes in the Soviet Union. The numbers for this oblast (Irkutsk) are likely higher because it was in Siberia, but the general pattern of animals being labor-intensive is true throughout the Soviet Union.

24. RGAE, f. 7486, op., 25, d. 71. This document, which chronicles the progress of the Urzhumskaia breed of pig between 1954 and 1956, is based entirely on the daily records of weight gain, feed intake, and health for the pigs in Urzhumskaia raion. Such records were almost certainly kept for every purebred hog breeding facility, of which there were hundreds.

25. RGAE, f. 8390, op. 12, d. 1558.

26. GAKhO, f. 4672, op. 7, d. 4004.

27. RGAE, f. 7468, op. 25, d. 44, l. 165.

28. RGAE, f. 7803, op. 4, d. 1349, l. 56.

29. For Ministry of Agriculture press releases, see RGAE, f. 7486, op. 25, d. 46, ll. 10–35. In magazines, see Kolkhoznoe Proizvodstvo, Kolkhoznoe Selo and and Pishchevaia Promyshlennost' (Miasnaia). For example, “From Each Sow: 27 Piglets,” Kolzhoznoe Proizvodstvo, June 1949, 36–37.

30. “Visits to Soviet Agricultural Installations: November 15, 1961,” report, Folder: Agriculture, Record Group 166, NARA Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service Narrative Reports 1955–1961.

31. Johnson, D. Gale, “Eye Witness Appraisal of Soviet Farming: 1955,” Journal of Farm Economics 38 (1956): 291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. On postwar hog industry, see Anderson, Joseph, Industrializing the Cornbelt: Agriculture, Technology and Environment (Chicago, 2009), 94–102.Google Scholar

33. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, 180–82. See also Nove, Alec, “Soviet Agriculture under Brezhnev,” Slavic Review Vol. 29, No. 3, (1970): 186–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Dovring, Folke, “Soviet Farm Mechanization in Perspective,” Slavic Review Vol. XXV, No. 2, June 1966, 292.Google Scholar

35. Nove, “Soviet Agriculture under Brezhnev,” 187.

36. Morgan, Dan, Merchants of Grain (New York, 1979), 161–79.Google Scholar

37. On imperial plans, see Joffe, Muriel, “Autocracy, Capitalism and Empire: The Politics of Irrigation,” Russian Review 54 (1995): 365–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Soviet plans, see Zonn, Igor, “The Impact of Political Ideology on Creeping Environmental Changes in the Aral Sea Basin,” in Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin, ed. Glantz, Michael (Cambridge, 1999), 157–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38. Taaffe, Robert N., “Transportation and Regional Specialization: The Example of Soviet Central Asia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 52 (1962): 80–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Pryde, Philip R., “The Areal Deconcentration of the Soviet Cotton-Textile Industry,” Geographical Review 58 (1968): 577.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. See Michael Glantz, Creeping Environmental Problems; Breckle, Siegmar, Wucherer, Walter, Dimeyeva, Liliya A., Ogar, Nathalia P., eds., Aralkum—A Man-Made Desert: The Desiccated Floor of the Aral Sea (Springer, 2011).Google Scholar

41. Geografii, Institut, Problema Aral'skogo Morya, ed. Geller, S. Yu (Moscow, 1969), 5–16.Google Scholar

42. Pomfret, Richard, “State-Directed Diffusion of Technology: The Mechanization of Cotton Harvesting in Soviet Central Asia,” The Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 170–88.Google Scholar

43. Naseleniye SSSR, 1973 (Moscow, 1975)Google Scholar, 138.

44. Patnaik, Ajay, “Agriculture and Rural Out-Migration in Central Asia, 1960–1991,” Europe-Asia Studies 47 (1995): 147–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979, “TashSelMash,” online at http://slovari.yandex.ru//~книги/БСЭ/Ташкентский%20завод%20сельскохозяйственных%20машин/

46. Quoted from the 1960 “Sel'skoe Khoziastvoe” annual report, in Jasny, Naum, “A Note on Rationality and Efficiency in the Soviet Economy. II,” Soviet Studies (1961): 66.Google Scholar

47. Kvasha, A. Ia., translated by and cited in Heer, David, “Three Issues in Soviet Population Policy,” Population and Development Review 3 (1977): 241.Google Scholar

48. Towards the Contemporary Period: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the End of the Twentieth Century History of Civilizations of Central Asia, ed. Adle, Chahryar, Palat, Madhavan, and Tabysalieva, Anara (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar, 536.

49. Patnaik, “Agriculture and Rural Out-Migration in Central Asia,” 148–49.

50. Dovring, “Soviet Farm Mechanization in Perspective,” 292.

51. Ibid.

52. Lubin, Nancy, “Uzbekistan: the Challenges Ahead,” Middle East Journal, vol. 43, Number 4, Autumn 1989, 629.Google Scholar