Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963 by Jenny Leigh Smith
Many histories of Soviet agriculture argue for a straight line from Stalin’s collectivization drive in 1930 to Khrushchev’s humiliating decision in 1963 to import grain from the United States, the country that the Soviet leader had vowed to catch and surpass. In her thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of Soviet farming and food production over the intervening period, usually portrayed as abject failures, Jenny Leigh Smith presents a rather startling argument: “In fact … the Soviet approach to modernizing agriculture was, by most measures, surprisingly successful” (p. 19). She does not deny that there were problems and that plans did not always turn out as intended, but argues that the same could be said of agriculture in capitalist countries. The main obstacle to Soviet agriculture was not the system itself, but the extreme environmental conditions Soviet farmers had to contend with.
The book does not claim to be a comprehensive history during the period between 1930 and 1963, but it does offer a series of well-researched case studies that together convey the diversity of Soviet agriculture. (One result of this approach is that pigs feature more prominently than grain.) The first chapter analyzes the experiences of two Americans hired in 1930 as advisers on specialist pig farms. The author’s sources indicate the cultural problems the Americans faced in trying to apply their expertise. Yet she concludes it was natural barriers—cold and disease—that were more insurmountable. Attention then shifts to potato cultivation in Ukraine in the difficult postwar years. Smith shows how quarantine stations, introduced to check the spread of disease, were used also to restore control over farms. The third chapter of a book with many unexpected conclusions contains perhaps the most surprising of all: Trofim Lysenko—widely derided as a “pseudo-scientist” who did great harm to Soviet science and agriculture—made a positive contribution to animal husbandry with [End Page 689] “commonsense” instructions on the care and feeding of livestock, including pigs, and record keeping as part of acclimatization and breeding programs. Lysenkoism, the author argues, “made bad experimental science but good practical science” (p. 148).
The next case study considers the new processed food industries of the postwar period that converted the produce of the livestock and dairy farms into foods, for example, canned tushonka (a culinary cousin of Spam) and ice cream, that could be stored for distribution. The success of the latter, in another unexpected conclusion, “reveals some of the flexibility and creativity in the Soviet food system” (p. 164). The final case study takes us to the Irkutsk region in Siberia, where the harsh environment and vast distances hindered plans to develop agriculture, leading to a reversion to hunting fur-bearing animals. The case studies contain more wealth of detail than can be summarized in a short review, thus readers wishing to know about the fate of the Ukrainian White Steppe pig, laws on gun ownership in Siberia, and much more will need to read the book.
In locating her argument in the historiography, the author suggests that “many of the best books” on Soviet agriculture were written by “Soviet dissidents and refugees, Cold-War historians, and social scientists whose anti-Soviet biases are evident” (p. 4). The writings listed, however, do not include those by scholars who do not fit into these categories, such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, whose work gives due place to environmental factors. Smith’s argument for the significance of the environment is important, and she avoids unhelpful environmental-determinist assertions, but much more has been written on this than she suggests. For example, in their analysis of post-Soviet agriculture, geographers Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova, and Ilya Zaslavsky argued that “geography is destiny” in explaining the “disintegration of rural Russia” (The End of Peasantry? [2006]).
The argument that the performance of Soviet agriculture was comparable with that of capitalist countries needs further evidence. It could be...
