Collective farm

First Collective Farms

Collective farms in the countryside in Soviet Russia began to emerge from 1918 . Depending on the degree of socialization of the means of production, three forms of households were encountered ^[3] :

• Partnership for joint processing of land ( PSC ), in which land use and labor were socialized. Livestock, machinery, equipment, buildings remained the personal property of the peasants. Incomes were distributed not only by the amount of labor, but also depending on the size of shares and the value of the means of production provided to the partnership for work.
• Agricultural artel ( SHA ) is a production cooperative , land use, labor and basic means of production are socialized - livestock, machinery, equipment, productive livestock, farm buildings, etc. The peasants remained in private ownership of a dwelling house and subsidiary farming (including productive cattle), the size of which was limited by the charter of the cooperative. Revenues were distributed by the quantity and quality of labor (by workdays ).
• The Agricultural Commune ( SCC ) is a unitary enterprise , all means of production (buildings, small equipment, livestock) and land use were combined. Consumption and consumer services of members of the commune were entirely based on the public economy; the distribution was egalitarian: not by labor, but by feeders. Members of the commune did not have their own personal subsidiary plots. Mostly, the communes were organized on the former landowner and monastery lands.

As of June 1929, communes accounted for 6.2% of all collective farms in the country, TOZs - 60.2%, agricultural cooperatives - 33.6% ^[2] .

In parallel with collective farms, since 1918, state farms were created on the basis of specialized farms (for example, stud farms), in which the state acted as the owner of the means of production and land. Workers of state farms were accrued wages in accordance with standards and in cash, they were employees, not co-owners.

Mass collectivization

Since the spring of 1929, measures have been taken in the village to increase the number of collective farms — in particular, Komsomol campaigns “for collectivization”. Basically, by applying administrative measures, a significant growth of collective farms was achieved (mainly in the form of TOZs).

The November (1929) plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution "On the Results and Further Tasks of Collective Farm Construction," in which he noted that a large-scale socialist reconstruction of the village and the construction of large-scale socialist agriculture had begun in the country. The decision indicated the need for a transition to continuous collectivization in certain regions. At the plenum, it was decided to send 25 thousand city workers ( twenty-five thousand people ) to collective farms for permanent work to “manage the created collective farms and state farms” (in fact, their number subsequently almost tripled, amounting to over 73 thousand).

Created on December 7, 1929, the People's Commissar of the USSR under the leadership of Y. A. Yakovlev was instructed "to practically lead the work on the socialist reconstruction of agriculture, supervising the construction of state farms, collective farms and MTS and uniting the work of the republican agricultural commissariats."

The main active actions for conducting collectivization occurred in January - early March 1930, after the publication of the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of January 5, 1930 "On the rate of collectivization and measures to help the state collective farm construction." The resolution set the task to basically complete collectivization by the end of the five-year plan (1932), while in such important grain growing areas as the Lower and Middle Volga and the North Caucasus, by the fall of 1930 or the spring of 1931.

The “collectivization launched” took place, however, in accordance with the way a local official saw it — for example, in Siberia, peasants were massively “organized into communes” with the socialization of all property. The districts competed among themselves in who quickly received a higher percentage of collectivization, etc. Various repressive measures were widely used, which Stalin later criticized in his famous article “ Dizziness from Success ” ^[4] and which received hereinafter referred to as “left bends” (subsequently, the overwhelming majority of such leaders were condemned as “Trotskyist spies.”) Recommendations for collectivization, indicated both in the text of the article and in secret applications in most om not fulfilled, although some - on the contrary, "overfulfilled" (for "percentage" of the kulaks and the timing of collectivization) ^[5] .

This provoked sharp resistance from the peasantry. According to data from various sources cited by O.V. Khlevnyuk , in January 1930 346 mass performances were recorded, in which 125 thousand people took part, in February - 736 (220 thousand), in the first two weeks of March - 595 ( about 230 thousand), excluding Ukraine, where unrest covered 500 settlements. In March 1930, as a whole, 1642 were registered in Belarus in the whole of Belarus, the Central Black Earth Region, the Lower and Middle Volga Region, the North Caucasus, Siberia, the Urals, the Leningrad, Moscow, Western, Ivanovo-Ascension Regions, the Crimea and Central Asia mass peasant uprisings in which not less than 750-800 thousand people took part. In Ukraine, at that time, unrest already swept more than a thousand settlements ^[6] .

Fighting Kinks

March 2, 1930 in the Soviet press published a letter from Stalin, “ Vertigo from success, ” in which the local leaders were blamed for the “excesses” during the collectivization.

On March 14, 1930, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution On Combating the Curvatures of the Party in the Collective Farm Movement. A government directive aimed at easing the course in connection with the threat of a "wide wave of insurgent peasant uprisings" and the destruction of "half of the grassroots workers" was sent to the field ^[6] . After a sharp article by Stalin and holding individual leaders accountable, the rate of collectivization slowed, and artificially created collective farms and communes began to fall apart.

After the XVI Congress of the CPSU (b) (1930), however, there was a return to the pace of continuous collectivization established at the end of 1929. The December (1930) joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the CPSU (B.) Decided in 1931 to complete collectivization mainly (at least 80% of households) in the North Caucasus, Lower and Middle Volga, and in the steppe regions of the Ukrainian SSR . In other grain districts, collective farms should cover 50% of farms, in the consuming strip of grain farms - 20-25%; in cotton and beet districts, as well as the national average for all agricultural sectors - at least 50% of households.

Collectivization was carried out mainly by forced-administrative methods. Excessively centralized management and at the same time a predominantly low qualification level of local managers, egalitarianism, and the race to “overfulfill plans” negatively affected the collective farm system as a whole. Despite the excellent harvest of 1930, a number of collective farms by the spring of next year were left without seed, while in the fall some of the grain was not harvested until the end. Low wage rates on “collective farm commodity farms” (KTF) against the background of the collective farm’s general lack of readiness for large-scale livestock production (lack of necessary premises for farms, a supply of feed, regulatory documents and qualified personnel (veterinarians, livestock breeders, etc.)) led to the mass death of cattle.

An attempt to improve the situation by adopting on July 30, 1931 a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On the development of socialist animal husbandry” in practice led to the forced socialization of cows and small cattle on the ground. A similar practice was condemned by the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 26, 1932.

The severe drought of 1931 that struck the country and mismanagement during the harvest led to a significant decrease in gross grain harvest (694.8 million centners in 1931 against 835.4 million centners in 1930).

Despite this, locally they sought to meet and overfulfill the planned norms for collecting agricultural products - the same was true for the plan for the export of grain, despite a significant drop in prices on the world market. This, like a number of other factors, eventually led to a difficult situation with food and famine in villages and small towns in the east of the country in the winter of 1931-1932. Freezing of winter crops in 1932 and the fact that a significant number of collective farms approached the sowing campaign of 1932 without sowing material and working cattle (which fell or was not suitable for work due to poor care and lack of feed, which were handed over to the general grain procurement plan ), led to a significant deterioration in the prospects for the 1932 crop. The country’s plans were reduced for export deliveries (about three times), planned grain procurement (by 22%) and cattle delivery (2 times), but this didn’t save the general situation - repeated crop failure (winter crops loss, insufficient crops, partial drought, reduced yields, large losses during harvesting, and a number of other reasons) led to severe hunger in the winter of 1932 - in the spring of 1933 .

Collective farm charter

Most communes and TOZs in the early 1930s switched to the Charter of the Agricultural Artel . Artel became the main, and then the only form of collective farms in agriculture ^[1] . In the future, the name "agricultural artel" lost its meaning, and in the current legislation, party and government documents the name "collective farm" was used ^[2] .

An approximate charter of the agricultural cooperative was adopted in 1930 , its new edition was adopted in 1935 , at the All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers-Drummers. The land was assigned to the artel for indefinite use; it was not subject to either sale or lease. The charters determined the size of personal land that was in private use of the collective farm yard - from 1/4 to 1/2 ha (in some areas up to 1 ha). The quantity of cattle that could be kept on the collective farm of the collective farmer was also determined. For areas of the 1st group of the West Siberian Territory, for example, the cattle norms were as follows: 1 cow, up to 2 young animals, 1 sow, up to 10 sheep and goats.

Members of the artel could be all workers who have reached the age of 16, except for former kulaks and deprived people (that is, deprived of suffrage). The highest organ of the collective farm is the general assembly. The head of the holding, the chairman , was elected by general vote . To help the chairman, the board of the collective farm was elected. In addition, public bodies could operate at the collective farm level — collective control posts of the collective farm, comradely collective farm courts, and voluntary collective farm squads elected.

The collective farms undertook to conduct a planned economy, to expand the sown area, to increase productivity, etc. To serve the collective farms with machinery, machine-tractor stations were created.

The distribution of products was carried out in the following sequence: selling products to the state at solid, extremely low purchase prices, repaying seed and other loans to the state, paying MTS for the work of machine operators, then filling up seeds and fodder for collective farm livestock, creating an insurance seed and feed fund. Everything else could be divided among the collective farmers in accordance with the number of workdays they worked. One day worked on the collective farm could be counted as two or half a day with different severity and importance of the work performed and the qualifications of the collective farmers. Most of the workdays were earned by blacksmiths, machine operators, the leadership of the collective farm administration . The collective farmers earned the least on auxiliary work.

To stimulate collective farm labor in 1939, an obligatory minimum of workdays was established (from 60 to 100 for each able-bodied collective farmer). Those who did not produce it dropped out of the collective farm and lost all rights, including the right to a personal plot.

The state constantly monitored the use by the collective farms of the land fund allocated to them and the observance of livestock standards. Periodic inspections of the size of personal plots were arranged and surpluses of land were seized. Only in 1939, 2.5 million hectares of land were cut off from the peasants, after which all the remnants of farm households settled in collective farm settlements were liquidated.

Since 1940, livestock products have been supplied not by the number of livestock, but by the amount of land occupied by collective farms. Soon, this order spread to all other agricultural products. This stimulated the use by collective farms of all the arable land assigned to them.

On February 21, 1948, on the initiative of N. Khrushchev , a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the eviction from the Ukrainian SSR of persons who maliciously shy away from labor in agriculture and lead an antisocial, parasitic lifestyle” was issued. By this decree, collective farmers for non-production of the obligatory minimum of workdays were to be exiled to remote areas of the USSR according to the sentences of general meetings of collective farmers. Then they decided to extend the practice of applying evictions by public sentences to most other republics of the USSR. The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR “On the eviction of persons who maliciously shy away from working in agriculture and leading an antisocial, parasitic lifestyle” to remote areas of June 2, 1948, set the deadline for the eviction of those sentenced to eight years. Until March 20, 1953, a total of 33,266 people were exiled by these decrees, for which 13,598 members of their families went into exile. ^[7]

Collective farms after the death of Stalin

After the death of Stalin , state policy towards collective farms changed. Exclusion from collective farms was prohibited, payments on workdays were exempted from tax, tax on personal plots of collective farmers was reduced (it became twice lower than that of workers and employees).

The new charter of the agricultural cartel of 1956 allowed the collective farmers to determine the size of the personal plot, the number of livestock owned by them, a minimum of workdays, and replaced the obligatory deliveries and payment in kind with a purchase. The principles of remuneration on collective farms have also changed: a monthly advance payment and a form of cash payment at differentiated labor rates were introduced ^[8] . In 1966, pay for workdays was replaced by guaranteed pay ^[2] .

Another characteristic tendency of the post-Stalin period was the tendency to transform collective farms into state farms . First of all, collective farms were transformed, owing large sums of money to the state for machinery purchased by them during the reorganization of machine and tractor stations, as well as simply economically weak farms. A large number of suburban collective farms, including economically strong ones, were also transformed in order to increase the production of vegetables, potatoes, dairy products and improve their supply to the urban population, whose share in the country was steadily increasing. Often, the collective farmers themselves actively advocated such a transformation that would guarantee them stable wages, pensions and other social benefits typical of workers in the Soviet public sector. The transformation procedure was regulated by the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU of May 3, 1957 No. 495 "On the procedure for transfer of collective farm property when converting collective farms into state farms" ^[9] . In the period from 1954 to 1981, 27 859 collective farms were transformed into state farms, which amounted to 30.6% of their total number as of January 1, 1954 ^[10] .

Collective farms after the collapse of the USSR

Most collective farms in the 1990s ceased to exist or were transformed into business companies , production cooperatives , partnerships or peasant (farmer) households (an analogue of a private unitary enterprise).

In the current Russian legislation (Federal Law No. 193-ФЗ “On Agricultural Cooperation” ^[11] ), the term “collective farm” is used as a synonym for the term “agricultural (fishing) cooperative ” - a type of agricultural production cooperative that combines property contributions with transferring them to the cooperative’s mutual fund and personal labor participation. Moreover, in everyday life the word "collective farm" is often still used to refer to any agricultural commodity producers - legal entities, regardless of their organizational and legal form, and often even to refer to rural areas in general.

The project on the revival of collective farms as a tool to eliminate unemployment and raise the countryside was discussed back in 2008 as part of the global program of Self-sufficient Russia, but the initiative in connection with the economic crisis of 2008 was postponed until “better times”.

On May 27, 2016, the Governor of the Irkutsk Region, Sergey Levchenko, announced plans to revive collective farms in the remote northern territories of the region. Farms will be created in remote northern regions to unite local farmers and entrepreneurs ^[12] .

The establishment of the passport system in 1932 did not provide for the issuance of passports to citizens permanently living in rural areas, with the exception of residents of the strip around Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov. Passports were also issued at state farms, in the settlements where the MTS are located, and in settlements within the 100-kilometer west-western border zone of the USSR.

In those cases when people living in rural areas left for a long or permanent residence in the area where the passport system was introduced, they received passports in the district or city departments of the workers 'and peasants' militia at the place of their previous residence for a period of 1 year. At the end of the one-year period, persons who arrived for permanent residence received passports at the new place of residence on a common basis ^[13] .

As a rule, collective farmers did not need a passport for registration. Moreover, peasants had the right to live without registration in cases where other categories of citizens were required to register. For example, Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of September 10, 1940 No. 1667 “On the Approval of the Regulation on Passports” ^[14] established that collective farmers, individual employees and other persons living in rural areas where a passport system has not been introduced, arriving in the cities of their region for up to 5 days, live without a residence permit (the remaining citizens, except for military personnel who also did not have passports, were required to register within 24 hours). The same decree exempted collective farmers and individual farmers temporarily working during the sowing or harvesting campaign on state farms and MTS within their area, even if a passport system had been introduced, from the obligation to live with a passport.

According to the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 2193 dated September 19, 1934 "On the registration of passports of collective farmers who leave for work at enterprises without contracts with state agencies," in the areas provided for by the Instruction for the issuance of passports to citizens of the USSR: in Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov as well as in the 100-kilometer strip around Moscow and Leningrad and in the 50-kilometer strip around Kharkov, the collective farmer is a farmer (a peasant who went to work at industrial enterprises, construction sites, etc., but retaining membership on the collective farm) He could not have been hired without a contract with the state agency registered on the board of the collective farm, except in the presence of a passport (it was noted above that passports were issued to collective farmers in these areas) and a certificate from the collective farm board confirming his consent to the collective farmer’s departure ^[15] . In this case, registration was made for a period of three months.

It should be noted that the Decree of the CEC and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of March 17, 1933, “On the Order of Departure from Collective Farms” established that the collective farmer, without permission, registered with the collective farm’s board with a contract with a public health agency, the enterprise where he got a job after leaving the collective farm, is subject exclusion from the collective farm ^[16] .

Thus, the peasant could leave the collective farm, retaining the status of collective farmer, only by notifying the board of the collective farm.

At the same time, an obstacle on the part of local authorities and collective farm organizations to the departure of peasants entailed criminal liability for the respective leaders ^[17] .

The "Instructions on the procedure for registering and extracting citizens by the executive committees of rural and village councils of workers' deputies," approved by Order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, adopted in 1970, stated that "the issuance of passports to residents of rural areas working in enterprises and institutions is permitted as an exception, and also to citizens who, due to the nature of the work being done, need identity documents ” ^[18] .

Finally, in 1974, a new “Regulation on the Passport System in the USSR” was adopted (approved by Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of 08.28.1974 N 677), according to which passports were issued to all citizens of the USSR from the age of 16, for the first time including village residents, collective farmers. Full certification began on January 1, 1976 and ended on December 31, 1981 . Over six years, 50 million passports were issued in rural areas ^[19] .

In the 1930s and 1960s, life on collective farms was promoted in many songs, films, and books, and the good and friendly work of collective farmers was described, where the characters were pleased with their life and work.

In the cinema

• Earth (1930)
• The Rich Bride (1938)
• Tractor Drivers (1939)
• Kuban Cossacks (1949)
• Dowry Wedding (1953)
• Guest from the Kuban (1955)
• Ivan Brovkin on the virgin lands (1958)
• Virgin Soil Upturned (1959)
• Quarrel in Lukashi (1959)
• A simple story (1960)
• Chairman (1964)
• Viburnum red (1973)
• Farewell to the Gulsars! (2008)

In literature

• “ Virgin Soil Upturned ” (1932/1959) - a novel by M. A. Sholokhov
• “ Prokhor XVII and others ” (1954) - a collection of satirical stories by G. Troepolsky

In painting

• “ Bread ” (1949) - painting by Tatyana Yablonskaya, awarded the Stalin Prize of the II degree

• Agro-industrial plants
• All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers
• Indivisible funds of collective farms
• State farm colony
• Ejido (agricultural community)

• 90 photos of collective farmers of different years