Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams 327stagnant yields and ecological devastation.^75 The state also managed, at great human
cost, to eliminate the social basis of organized, public opposition from the rural
population. On the other hand, the state’s capacity for realizing its vision of large,
productive, efficient, scientifically advanced farms growing high-quality products
for market was virtually nil.
The collectives that the state had created manifested in some ways the facade
of modern agriculture without its substance. The farms were highly mechanized
(by world standards), and they were managed by officials with degrees in agronomy
and engineering. Demonstration farms really did achieve large yields, although
often at prohibitive costs.^76 But in the end none of this could disguise the many
failures of Soviet agriculture. Only three sources of these failures are noted here,
because they will concern us later.^77 First, having taken from the peasants both
their (relative) independence and autonomy as well as their land and grain, the
state created a class of essentially unfree labourers who responded with all the
forms of foot-dragging and resistance practised by unfree labourers everywhere.
Second, the unitary administrative structure and imperatives of central planning
created a clumsy machine that was utterly unresponsive to local knowledge or to
local conditions. Finally, the Leninist political structure of the Soviet Union gave
agriculture officials little or no incentive to adapt to, or negotiate with, its rural
subjects. The very capacity of the state to essentially re-enserf rural producers, dis-
mantle their institutions and impose its will, in the crude sense of appropriation,
Figure 14.2 At Verchnyua Troitsa, one of the new village’s two-storey houses, each
containing 16 flats