In the quarter of a century between the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars – normally a brief period in agricultural history – the agricultural economy of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union suffered a series of shocks and convulsive changes.

During the agrarian revolution of 1917–18 the peasants seized the estates of the landowners, for centuries masters of the Russian land; nearly all private land and agricultural property were distributed among the peasants. Until the end of the 1920s almost all agriculture on Soviet territory was carried on by over twenty million peasant households, largely organised in traditional village communes. But in the early 1930s the collectivisation of agriculture was imposed from above. Better-off or recalcitrant peasants were expelled from their farms, and collective or state farms, controlled by the state, were everywhere established. The collective-farm system still dominates in most former Soviet territory today.

Agriculture experienced two periods of crisis (1916–21 and 1930–3) and two periods of recovery and growth (1921–8 and 1934–40). During the first crisis, world war, revolution and civil war were accompanied by the huge population movements described in chapter 4. During the civil war food requisitioning was imposed on the countryside by both Bolshevik and anti- Communist governments. By 1920 grain production had fallen to a mere two-thirds of the 1909–13 level. Following the introduction of the New Economic Policy, the restoration of a market relation between the state and the peasants enabled rapid recovery, and by 1928 production exceeded the pre-war level.