316 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
(collective farms) failed to deliver on any of the specifically socialist goals envi-
sioned by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and most Bolsheviks. They were an evident failure
in raising the level of grain production or of producing cheap and abundant food-
stuffs for an urban, industrializing workforce. They failed to become the techni-
cally efficient and innovative farms that Lenin had anticipated. Even in the realm
of electrification, Lenin’s touchstone of modernization, only 1 in 25 collective
farms had electricity by the eve of World War II. By no measure had the collec-
tivization of agriculture created ‘new men and women’ in the countryside or abol-
ished the cultural difference between the country and the city. For the next
half-century, the yields per hectare of many crops were stagnant or actually inferior
to the levels recorded in the 1920s or the levels reached before the Revolution.^35
At another level, collectivization was, in a curious state-centric way, a qualified
success. Collectivization proved a rough-and-ready instrument for the twin goals
of traditional statecraft: appropriation and political control. Though the Soviet
kolkhoz may have failed badly at generating huge surpluses of foodstuffs, it served
well enough as a means whereby the state could determine cropping patterns, fix
real rural wages, appropriate a large share of whatever grain was produced, and
politically emasculate the countryside.^36
The great achievement, if one can call it that, of the Soviet state in the agricul-
tural sector was to take a social and economic terrain singularly unfavourable to
appropriation and control and to create institutional forms and production units
far better adapted to monitoring, managing, appropriating and controlling from
above. The rural society that the Soviet state inherited (and for a time encouraged)
was one in which the allies of the czarist state, the great landlords and the aristo-
cratic officeholders, had been swept away and been replaced by smallholding and
middle peasants, artisans, private traders and all sorts of mobile labourers and
lumpen elements.^37 Confronting a tumultuous, footloose and ‘headless’ (acephal-
ous) rural society which was hard to control and which had few political assets, the
Bolsheviks, like the scientific foresters, set about redesigning their environment
with a few simple goals in mind. They created, in place of what they had inherited,
a new landscape of large, hierarchical, state-managed farms whose cropping pat-
terns and procurement quotas were centrally mandated and whose population
was, by law, immobile. The system thus devised served for nearly 60 years as a
mechanism for procurement and control at a massive cost in stagnation, waste,
demoralization and ecological failure.
That collectivized agriculture persisted for 60 years was a tribute less to the
plan of the state than to the improvisations, grey markets, bartering and ingenuity
that partly compensated for its failures. Just as an ‘informal Brasília’, which had no
legitimate place in official plans, arose to make the city viable, so did a set of infor-
mal practices lying outside the formal command economy – and often outside
Soviet law as well – arise to circumvent some of the colossal waste and inefficien-
cies built into the system. Collectivized agriculture, in other words, never quite
operated according to the hierarchical grid of its production plans and procure-
ments.