Obsessed by Efficiency and Productivity in Agriculture?

Over the past 30 years, the agrarian history of the Soviet Union has been a recurrent focus in historical research. In most cases, such inquiry was conducted looking at stages, selective points, limited in temporal terms and in regard to topical focus. Most attention was always centered on the forced collectivization after 1928. The fundamental questions, spanning the entire Soviet epoch, were discussed in that context, such as the specific nature of the Soviet mode of production in the countryside, the obstacles to building up an industrialized agriculture, the disappearance of village culture or environmentalism. Afterward it proved difficult to keep interest alive in what was occurring out beyond the urban centers, the zones of heavy industry, and the large-scale technological projects. The forward developmental direction had ostensibly been set irreversibly in favor of the urban centers, while the agricultural sector was reduced to a servicing function, tending to be subject to a rapid process of mounting contraction.

In the meantime, the exceptions to this fixation on the “second revolution” under Stalin have multiplied. On the one hand, that revolution was designed to make up for what Red October had only postulated—an alignment between urban and rural forms and ways of living by means of technological adaptation. Yet on the other, it served only to postpone elementary problems of agriculture, shifting them into the future. Researchers of a younger generation take into consideration both the earlier and the later periods of the history of Soviet agriculture. In part, they search for alternative paths of development of a modern rural economy in the later tsarist empire that were partially altered by World War I, but in particular by the revolutions of 1917 and subsequent Civil War.¹ Nonetheless, the early 1920s offered once more the possibility to direct the transformations onto evolutionary pathways.² However, research most recently has examined in particular how the agricultural sector was able to survive the renewed emergency situation during World War II after the upheavals precipitated by forced collectivization, and then more or less successively negotiated the transition to the “peace economy” after 1945.³ The reforms of the 1960s and 1970s were accorded some scattered attention, albeit devoid of any systematic analysis of the cyclical crises in the agricultural sector during the period of “late socialism,” which bedeviled the Soviet Union until its collapse.⁴

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Seen against the backdrop of this rudimentary research landscape, the study by Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell might easily be misunderstood as another set piece reminding us of the lack of a comprehensive total perspective on the history of Soviet agriculture in the 20th century. But quite to the contrary, the author not only pluckily seizes the opportunity to examine the history of agriculture in the 1953–63 decade but also provides approaches to an objective, innovative, and lively confrontation with the collectivized village after Stalin’s death. It is not perchance that in this drama subsequent to the tragedies of the 1930s and ’40s, Nikita Khrushchev played the principal role, because the first secretary of the CPSU and head of the Soviet government indeed chose to initiate a “revolution” in the countryside, breaking with various dogmas and ignoring the supposedly impermeable system boundary in the Cold War. Nonetheless, the main goal of industrializing the kolkhoz was not infringed upon. In this respect, what had been promised since 1917 was finally to be fulfilled. However, Khrushchev clearly chose methods different from those of his mentor Stalin. The renouncing of violence toward the peasants belonged among the features of a policy that seriously sought to include the...