326 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
had built a rural economy where all these decisions would be made centrally. In
place of a peasantry that was technically independent, it had created a peasantry
that was directly dependent on the state for combines and tractors, fertilizer and
seeds. In place of a peasant economy whose harvests, income and profits were well-
nigh indecipherable, it had created units that were ideal for simple and direct
appropriation. In place of a variety of social units with their own unique histories
and practices, it had created homologous units of accounting that could all be fit-
ted into a national administrative grid. The logic was not unlike the management
scheme at McDonald’s: modular, similarly designed units producing similar prod-
ucts, according to a common formula and work routine. Units can easily be dupli-
cated across the landscape, and the inspectors coming to assess their operations
enter legible domains which they can evaluate with a single checklist.
Any comprehensive assessment of 60 years of collectivization would require
both archival material only now becoming available and abler hands than my own.
What must strike even a casual student of collectivization, however, is how it largely
failed in each of its high-modernist aims, despite huge investments in machinery,
infrastructure and agronomic research. Its successes, paradoxically, were in the
domain of traditional statecraft. The state managed to get its hands on enough grain
to push rapid industrialization, even while contending with staggering inefficiencies,
1 , community centre; 2 , monument; 3 , hotel; 4 , local administration and trade centre; 5 ,
school; 6 , kindergarten; 7–8, museums; 9 , shop; 10 , bathhouse; 11 , old wooden house moved
from new construction area; 12 , old village; 13–15, two- and three-storey houses; 16 , garage
(private); and 17 , agricultural sites (farm, storage, water tower and so on)
Figure 14.1 Plan of the state farm at Verchnyua Troitsa (Upper Trinity) in Tver Oblast