“Later on I found out that . . . it was a long time since Matryona Vasilyevna had earned a single ruble,” recounts the narrator of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella Matryona’s Home, referring to the aged kolkhoznik with whom he had lodged. In the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, the story captures the severity of everyday life in the early 1950s. “On the kolkhoz [Matryona] had worked not for money,” the narrator explains, “but for . . . the marks recording labor-days in her well-thumbed workbook.”1 Labor-days entitled her only to a share of the kolkhoz harvest—if any—left over after taxes and other obligations to the state. Personifying the rural heart of Russia, Solzhenitsyn’s protagonist had to toil, despite her infirmity, to secure food and fuel for the long, harsh winter.
Documents corroborate Solzhenitsyn’s sense that Iosif Stalin left his successors an agrarian crisis to when he died in March 1953. The next month, Nikita Khrushchev and his competitors for power, Georgii Malenkov and secret-police chief Lavrenti Beria, received a survey of intercepted statements intended to illustrate popular feeling.2 Resenting the kolkhozes compulsorily established in 1947 and 1948, writers in restive, recently annexed Western Ukraine penned letters complaining of overwork, miserly earnings, and cheating bosses. “Dearest sister,” began one, “I have still not received so much as a single potato from the kolkhoz so long as it has existed.” Sardonically mimicking Stalin’s 1935 statement touting purported prosperity, another correspondent concluded, “Life has become ‘better and more joyous.’ ”3
Facing an agrarian emergency upon assuming power, Stalin’s successors had little choice but to reform because his policies had not transformed the countryside in the manner forecast by Bolshevik visions of rural modernization. The revolutionaries had considered industrialization the herald of large-scale modern farming and of the end of the peasant class whose existence they considered archaic. Hastily collectivizing individual allotments into kolkhozes, Stalin and his followers employed coercion to bring peasants’ grain under state control, but this nationalized agriculture failed to realize the Bolshevik ideal of farming.4 Enforced by threats and violence, this arrangement robbed agriculture of capital and caused social dislocation, imposing constraints that grew only more pronounced under the strain of World War II and during a postwar food crisis. Stalin’s assurances notwithstanding, life had become neither “better” nor “more joyous” for the rural majority of the population. The failings of the agrarian sector meant that after the war, even allegedly favored factory workers struggled to put food on the table. Stalin’s successors concluded that only modern industrial farming could provide the rich and varied foods needed to improve living standards and stabilize society, each essential to contesting the Cold War, which they reimagined as a competition between economic systems. Within months of interring Stalin, his heirs responded to pressures from below, giving Khrushchev an opening to place a bet on a crop he had come to value while in Ukraine: corn.
By the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, modernizing forces had unsettled society and frustrated two agrarian reform programs. Pressure to end serfdom came to a head in the late 1850s, after the Russian Empire had lost the Crimean War on its own soil to technologically advanced rivals. In 1861, emancipation ended the bondage tying the peasant majority to land they did not own. One of the Great Reforms designed to reinforce the tsarist order and strengthen military preparedness, the settlement required peasants to pay for the land and subordinated to the existing village communes their individual allotments and right to migrate. Over subsequent decades, population growth exhausted the communes’ limited supply of land, encouraging the industrious to clamor for more. In the 1880s and 1890s, peasants began to relocate to growing cities and industrial settlements. During the Revolution of 1905, urban strikers responded to economic downturn and the battlefield disasters of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). In the countryside, peasants rebelled against weakened civil authority, protesting the land shortage and legal restrictions. Employing repression tempered by a few concessions, the government launched new reforms that reduced the influence of the commune by empowering individual peasants to separate allotments from it. The final years before World War I saw measurable increases in agrarian productivity and incomes, but pressure continued to build.5
The Bolsheviks seized power amid wartime chaos, faced new crises, and then constructed a market-based agrarian system. In 1917, peasants exploited the collapse of authority to confiscate and reapportion large estates, the farms most oriented to the market. During the savage Russian Civil War (1917–1922), the countryside endured grain seizures, violence, crop failures, famine, and disease. Added to revolutionary egalitarianism, these pressures strengthened communes at the expense of the incipient individualism. Poor peasants received expropriated lands while disorder disproportionately harmed the rich, compressing the socioeconomic scale. Peasants fought requisitioning, causing shortages in the cities. In late 1921, these compelled Vladimir Lenin to propose the New Economic Policy (NEP) to aid reconstruction. Making concessions to the peasants, it replaced confiscation with taxes and legalized markets for after-tax surpluses. Enterprising farmers expanded within legal limits, including by hiring farmhands. To some Bolshevik critics, markets and wage labor heralded rural capitalism. Before Lenin died in 1924, he cautioned that NEP might have to endure for decades while the countryside evolved toward socialism.6 Even a revolutionary workers’ state could not hope to remake overnight a country where the 100 million peasants comprised 80 percent of the population.
Within a few seasons, NEP returned harvests to the 1913 level, but then fell victim to economic and political pressures. It permitted the state to acquire grain cheaply, sell it abroad, and use the foreign currency to import capital goods required to rebuild ruined factories. This caused a scissors crisis, so named for the appearance of a graph tracking the declining prices for grain and rising ones for industrial manufactures. Responding, peasants withheld and consumed surpluses. By the mid-1920s, policy debates raged within the Communist Party about how to facilitate development in the face of adverse international economic conditions.7 A group headed by Nikolai Bukharin favored a gradual approach premised on stability bought with concessions to the peasants, to whom many communists remained hostile. Those to their left, led by Lev Trotskii, argued for treating the peasants as an internal colony by raising taxes and tilting the balance further toward the state to finance breakneck industrialization.
NEP reached a crossroads in 1927 when Stalin and his followers took a series of fateful decisions. The United Kingdom broke off diplomatic relations and then communist policy in China suffered a sharp reversal, heightening fears of war. Having aligned in 1925 with Bukharin and others to defeat Trotskii, Stalin reversed course, arguing that his erstwhile allies’ cautious path left the country vulnerable. He took up the left faction’s argument for a crash program to build up the heavy industry required for defense. The First Five-Year Plan handed the bill for imported machinery to the peasantry, whose grain would join timber, petroleum, and other raw materials among the exports. Already low in the 1920s, global commodity prices declined as capitalist economies sank into the Great Depression, meaning that each unit exported earned less foreign currency. Stalin responded by exporting more to make up the difference and maintain planned imports.
Needing to export grain and feed the swelling industrial workforce, Stalin turned to authoritarian methods hearkening back to the civil war. After the 1927 harvest, peasants responded to the price scissors by slashing sales of grain just as industrialization began to gather steam. Considering this sabotage, Stalin and his comrades declared war on well-off peasants, labeling them class enemies. Receiving reports of unrest, they sponsored the Ural-Siberian method entailing forced delivery quotas, sparking a multilateral conflict engulfing peasants, local officials, urban party militants dispatched to the scene, and leaders in Moscow. Branding any resisters kulaks, a Russian word meaning “fists” and connoting grasping avarice, zealots marked many for dispossession, internal exile, and even death. By 1930, activists were compelling peasants to sign land, livestock, and tools over to the new kolkhozes. A multiyear series of violent outbursts consolidated most of the 25 million peasant farms into 250,000 kolkhozes.8
Bolshevik modernizers touted economies of scale, mechanization, and agronomy. Stalin extolled the kolkhozes as necessary to secure the marketable surpluses required by industrialization. Celebrating the 1929 procurement campaign in his article proclaiming the Year of the Great Breakthrough, he declared that automobiles and tractors were proof that socialist development was overcoming backwardness and proving superior to capitalism.9 The five-year plan promised tractors providing 9.5 million horsepower by 1933, but actual imports and manufactures totaled only 3.2 million by that year and 8 million by 1936.10
Rejecting market mechanisms and gradual evolution, Stalin prioritized economic and social control. A nationalized system almost colonial in nature, the kolkhozes allowed the government to extract grain, taxes, labor, and military recruits, much as its imperial predecessor had done.11 The farms ensured little more than crude control over the harvest. The five-year plan mandated planting 20 percent more crops and adopting technologies to increase yields by 20 percent. In reality, capital stocks declined by approximately 25 percent as peasants slaughtered livestock rather than sign over property under compulsion, leaving the kolkhozes short on draft animals and organic fertilizer. The country’s tractors, chemical fertilizers, harvesters, and other resources were insufficient to rectify the shortage.12 Milking, cutting hay, and other jobs required much labor, while kolkhozniks sowed and harvested without enthusiasm, dragged their feet, and stole produce. Far from increasing, grain output declined by about 25 percent even as government purchases escalated to cover exports, which soared from 200,000 metric tons to 5 million. In 1932 and 1933, state requisitions caused famine in breadbasket regions across Ukraine and southern Russia. Famine also struck Kazakhstan, where authorities forced nomadic herders into sedentary life. Estimates of total deaths range from 5.5 million to 8 million.13
Even as these conditions pushed peasants from the village, factory jobs pulled them into the industrializing cities. Much of the population seemed to be on the move. By the 1930s, a system of internal passports prohibited relocating to urban areas, but millions did so anyway to avoid kolkhoz membership. Accused kulaks had to chose between exile to remote regions and flight to the cities. The number of factory workers increased from 28.1 million in 1928 to 54.7 million in 1931, while the rural population declined from 121.9 million to 114.8 million.14
By controlling the kolkhozes and their produce, Stalin’s government impeded realization of the potential of industrial farming. Nominally democratic, the kolkhozes faced constant interference from local bosses imposing distant ministries’ decrees, imprudent and ill adapted to local conditions.15 Kolkhozes faced escalating quotas for grain, meat, milk, and raw materials such as cotton, even as they paid the MTS, or machine-tractor station, in kind. Representing government and party power otherwise limited in rural communities, these state-owned enterprises provided few tractors, harvesters, and specialists. Far weaker in rural areas than in urban centers, the new state resembled the Russian Empire, which had undergoverned its vast expanses.16
After collectivization, however, the state intervened in peasant life primarily during annual sowing and procurement campaigns. Urbanites negotiated propaganda barrages, parades, and other relatively benign intrusions. Some individuals sought to live up to the official ideals, seeking to become properly Soviet. Stalin’s rule exposed them to terror and other malevolent sides of the police state. Kolkhozniks, however, primarily interested themselves in work, local bosses’ demands, and the weather. Religions remained strongest in the villages, ensuring that peasants skeptically viewed occasional rural campaigns promoting socialist ideals and state priorities.17
From 1933 to the eve of World War II, uneasy equilibrium prevailed. Harvests remained at the 1928 level even as the population grew and the government took an increasing share. By 1939, that share reached 189 percent of the 1928 level, while small rises in prices granted some relief to the kolkhozes.18 Offering little benefit to kolkhozniks, labor on the kolkhoz produced commodities supporting continued investment in industry, transportation, and defense. Stalin’s dictums precluded a return to private farming, or even to NEP, but the kolkhozniks remembered better times while toiling under conditions they decried as a second serfdom. Each family devoted intensive labor to its personal plot and the few personal livestock allowed, obtaining the most fruit, vegetables, potatoes, and other produce possible. This provided subsistence and a surplus to sell in urban markets for otherwise scarce money. In the late 1930s, these plots encompassed less than 5 percent of cropland, but yielded at least 25 percent of all produce.19 Most kolkhozniks conserved time by working for the kolkhoz only the minimum required to avoid sanction. In 1940, 8.7 percent of the 42.7 million kolkhozniks did not tally the required number of labor-days, a figure including 500,000 who refused to work at all on the kolkhoz.20
Nikita Khrushchev earned his education in politics and policy in this era under Stalin. Born into a peasant family, Khrushchev was formed by time spent in mine, factory, Red Army detachment, and party committee. He returned to agriculture only in 1938 when Stalin dispatched him to govern Ukraine, where he gained experience that shaped the policies he pursued after 1953. A Stalin supporter, Khrushchev retained a streak of independence from his master. He masked a faculty for political maneuvering by portraying himself as a country bumpkin. A skilled machinist, he received only rudimentary formal schooling. As an adult, he dreamed of further education that might carry him to a factory director’s office, but party duties kept him from both and forced him to become an autodidact in modern farming.21
Khrushchev was born in 1894 into an impoverished peasant family in Kalinovka, a village in Kursk province of the Russian Empire.22 There he earned a few years of primary schooling before moving in 1908 with his father to the Donbas, in today’s Ukraine. Khrushchev later considered himself a worker because from that time, excepting brief returns to Kalinovka, he labored in the region’s factories and mines. A dapper youth with a talent for machine trades, Khrushchev became an activist. In 1912, he came to the attention of the police for collecting aid for victims of an infamous massacre of striking miners in the distant Lena goldfields.23 Engaging in local politics after the February Revolution, he joined the Bolsheviks, whose presence in the Donbas had initially been weak, only in late 1918. During the Civil War, he enlisted in the Red Army and became a commissar responsible for educating soldiers in political matters. Having served dutifully but with no great distinction, he returned to the Donbas to manage a mine. Soon, he entered a technical training program for adult workers, the first of two attempts to further his education and earn a position as an industrial manager. Secretary of the technical-college party cell, Khrushchev soon left to head a nearby district committee.
Thus Khrushchev began a rise that gathered momentum every year and established him as an exemplary Stalinist. Under his patron, Lazar Kaganovich, Khrushchev took administrative positions first in Kharkiv and then Kyiv, each time demonstrating ambition even as he hinted at insecurity about limited formal education.24 When rephrasing Marx and Lenin into plain slogans, Stalin spoke to an initial wave of working-class officials, which included Khrushchev. In 1929, Kaganovich, a stalwart of the Stalin faction, helped Khrushchev secure admission to the Industrial Academy in Moscow. He soon abandoned his studies, however, to plunge into duties as secretary of the academy’s party cell and then of the committee for the Bauman District where it was located. Proving his loyalty in the struggle against opponents of Stalin, he soon moved to the prestigious Krasnopresnensk District committee and then the city committee, where he served as Kaganovich’s deputy. By the mid-1930s, Khrushchev was in charge of the everyday operations of Moscow, a metropolis in the making that swarmed with workers building factories and the first lines of the monumental Metro. Having fought to expel Stalin’s opponents from the party, Khrushchev likely assisted in the Terror by signing death warrants produced by the dreaded secret police.
Yet actions recalled by others suggest that Khrushchev never lost his humanity. Building on self-directed practical learning, he enjoyed the tutelage of his wife, Nina Kukharchuk, an instructor of theory and party history. Maintaining popular connections, Khrushchev conceived of socialism as a promise to provide justice and necessities to the least in society. Between 1938 and 1949, he served as Stalin’s satrap in Ukraine, developing a certain independence from a master who was demanding but distant. Khrushchev seems to have believed in the innocence of General Iona Iakir and other friends who perished between 1936 and 1938 amid unconvincing accusations of treason. Khrushchev even violated the need for silence by expressing misgivings and fears about his own arrest. Once, when speaking to a former comrade from the Donbas, he swore to “settle” with Stalin when he could. Referring to the dictator by combining a Russian obscenity with his Georgian family name, Jughashvili, Khrushchev demonstrated his penchants for stunning indiscretion and vulgarity.25
In Ukraine, Khrushchev helped direct efforts to win the Great Patriotic War, victory in which became the crowning achievement of Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the meantime, however, the war rained blows on the people and farms. From 1941 to 1943, the Germans and their allies occupied Ukraine, whose people and farms endured atrocities and the effects of combat. Even those on the home front stretched themselves to the limit. Wartime triumph came at the price of millions dead, millions more displaced, and devastation in rural areas that combined with the unsoundness of the kolkhozes to cause a postwar famine.
Even behind Red Army lines, the war drained the kolkhozes and kolkhozniks. Already short on labor and horsepower, the kolkhozes exhausted capital to feed the war effort. Peasants flooded into the industrial workforce and comprised at least 60 percent of the Red Army. The number of male kolkhozniks fell by nearly 6 million, as 32 percent of the 1941 total left. A million women joined in departing. Destroyed or converted to producing war matériel, factories did not manufacture spare parts for tractors and harvesters, let alone replace those worn out or destroyed. In the 1930s, reaping grain was one of the few processes partially mechanized. By 1942, the kolkhozes carried out 79 percent of the job using horse-drawn machines and even manual labor. Kolkhozniks harnessed cattle to the plow and, in extreme cases, pulled it themselves. Already low fertilizer stocks declined further. Wartime demands disrupted crop rotations. In 1942, yields fell from 0.7 or 0.8 metric tons per hectare to a mere 0.46 tons. Yet the state procured the needed grain, 90 percent of it from the kolkhozes.26
Living and working conditions deteriorated. Each kolkhoznik faced a quota of labor-days that rose during the war. Juveniles and the aged received smaller assignments. Local authorities had at their disposal harsh punishments for any who failed to fulfill the quota, although they enforced them only to flagrant or repeat violators.27 Kolkhozniks earned few material rewards. In 1940, kolkhozes in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had allocated 58 million rubles of their 10.3 billion in earnings, as well as 9.15 million tons of grain, for distribution in proportion to the number of labor-days each kolkhoznik earned. By 1946, those figures had fallen to 15 million rubles of 9.8 billion in earnings, and a mere 1.98 million tons of grain.28 More than 75 percent of kolkhozes distributed less than 1 kilogram per labor-day, and 7.7 percent paid nothing at all.29
Kolkhozniks went to work anyway. Setting aside talk of socialism, the authorities gave out medals and appealed to concern about husbands and sons at the front.30 Local bosses looked the other way when kolkhozniks enlarged their personal plots beyond the legal maximum, permitting them to feed themselves, pay taxes, and sell produce in legal markets.31 These markets augmented the government supply system, which fully fed the army while providing workers with a bread ration and facilitating their efforts to produce or purchase other necessities.32
Life was worse in occupied areas. Millions of noncombatants perished from Nazi starvation policies and other atrocities, joining the millions of military casualties in the Soviet Union’s total of at least 27 million war dead. Millions more found themselves maimed, homeless, displaced, or forced to labor. The invasion destroyed machines, livestock, buildings, and other capital. An official survey reckoned the ruin of 98,000 kolkhozes, 1,875 sovkhozes, and 2,890 MTSs, as well as the loss of 20 million horses, cattle, and other livestock. In 1945, a special commission calculated the damage to the whole country at 679 billion rubles, some 30 percent of which had been inflicted on the kolkhozes.33
In 1943 and 1944, the advancing Red Army brought Ukraine back under control, relieving Khrushchev of his army post and restoring him to duties in the republic. He became responsible for imposing control and jumpstarting production in the face of a deepening humanitarian crisis. Although exhibiting considerable continuity with the prewar years, postwar life reflected wartime experiences, forming a phase distinct from both eras.34 As the front passed westward toward Berlin, life behind the lines saw little relief. Official accounts credited the party with guiding everyone through a short phase of so-called reconstruction. “Having victoriously concluded the Great Patriotic War,” a later history of rural development triumphantly declared, “the Soviet people embarked on completing the tasks and realizing the plans for peaceful construction established by the party before the war.”35 This tale fabricates a sense of unity by suggesting that postwar challenges required the Soviet Union to simply restore that prewar system.36 Instead, circumstances continued to evolve.
Victory fostered hopes founded on wartime latitude that Stalin had allowed the party, government, and military. Some were optimistic that, having triumphed on the battlefield, the people had earned rewards.37 Predictably, the kolkhozniks favored changes, albeit in forms incompatible with Stalin’s plans. Rumors abounded that Moscow was soon to dissolve the kolkhozes, perhaps under pressure from the Allies. Others supposed that Stalin had already given the order, but that corrupt local officials concealed the concession to benefit themselves.38
Amid anxieties about the Cold War, Stalin responded to optimism by ending wartime expedients and redoubling repression. Innovation in culture, policy, and economic management waned. Already visible in the 1930s, a conservative trend made Russian nationalism acceptable, a reversal the policy of the 1920s. Waves of antiforeign sentiment culminated in campaigns against disloyal “cosmopolitanism” used to defame scientific and cultural figures with ties abroad, especially those of Jewish extraction. Courting elite loyalty by offering benefits unavailable to most, Stalin reinforced hierarchy and enhanced enterprise managers’ authority.39 The atmosphere in Stalin’s inner circle duplicated the mood darkening society. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled returning to Moscow from Kyiv in 1949. He found that the aging dictator humiliated even loyal aides by “behaving . . . as though he were God and had created them. His attitude was at once patronizing and contemptuous.”40 Persevering against declining health, a suspicious Stalin manipulated his underlings. Isolated by his cult of personality, as it was later labeled, the nocturnal dictator required their attendance at tense, alcohol-fueled soirées lasting into the early morning hours. For the political elite as for society as a whole, these were grim years.41
The narrative of reconstruction also minimizes the agrarian crisis that reached its tragic peak in the famine of 1946 and 1947. Compounding the chronic inadequacy of the kolkhozes, the weather depressed harvests. Typically, in one year out of every three, one of the Soviet Union’s grain-producing regions experienced extreme weather. During the war, the weather had been uncharacteristically favorable. Exacerbating the exhaustion of farmworkers and capital, a rainless spell began in 1945 and culminated in a 1946 drought, which drove the harvest toward its nadir.42 As many as 2 million starved or succumbed to accompanying epidemic diseases. Many more suffered from malnutrition, especially in the rich farming regions of Ukraine and Moldova facing Stalin’s demands for grain. In letters, inhabitants despaired at the “nightmarish conditions” and feared that they would “die of hunger.” While authorities euphemistically informed superiors about “provisioning difficulties,” peasants experienced the reality: “There is no bread and we know not how we’ll live through the hunger.”43 Indifferent to the weather and the effects of war, Stalin expected farms to provide grain to feed the cities and support clients abroad, exacerbating the calamity and ensuring that those who suffered most were kolkhozniks forced to relinquish their grain. In 1940, the government had procured 36.3 million tons from a harvest of 95.5 million.44 In 1945, the harvest hit rock bottom, registering only 39.6 million tons.
In charge of Ukraine, Khrushchev faced intense pressure and bore some responsibility for the famine. Receiving rosy reports about the expected harvest in the spring and early summer of 1946, Stalin raised his demands in July, disregarding new word of looming harvest failure. As always, quotas reflected the government’s requirements, rather than the kolkhozes’ capacity to sell. To Khrushchev’s credit, when evidence of crop failure and human suffering streamed in, he took the considerable risk of appealing for aid. Citing reports of death and even cannibalism, Khrushchev wrote to Stalin at least three times during the autumn. The latter countered that his subordinate had been fooled by local officials and Ukrainian nationalists, who hoped to keep hidden grain for themselves. In time, Ukraine received limited aid, which prevented the calamity from becoming still worse.
The political consequences took shape only in early 1947, when Stalin ordered Khrushchev removed from his post as secretary of the republic’s central committee, leaving him only to head the government. Sent from Moscow to head the party, Kaganovich seemed poised to exchange his role as Khrushchev’s patron for that of hangman. Khrushchev suddenly fell ill with a case of pneumonia, one likely exacerbated by chronic stress and the acute danger of repression. Just as swiftly, he recovered and his political fortunes followed. Late the same year, Stalin recalled Kaganovich and reinstalled Khrushchev.45
The famine exacerbated average citizens’ already poor diet, a condition Khrushchev had to address once he came to power. Even outside the drought zone, shortages diminished workers’ and peasants’ calorie intake, compounding chronic malnourishment brought on by war. Beginning in September 1946, workers, clerical personnel, and their dependents faced stricter rationing and rising prices. During the war and for several years afterward, most subsisted on a poor diet based on bread and potatoes. Demanding workplace conditions, pitiable healthcare, and failing sanitation infrastructure contributed to rising mortality.46
Even after the famine passed, grain supplies remained at best sufficient. Dry years followed in 1948, 1950, 1951, and 1954. After bottoming out, grain procurements rose to 30.1 million metric tons in 1948, but that quantity did not satisfy rising demand. Subsequent annual growth measured 5.6 percent in 1949, only 0.6 percent in 1950, 4 percent in 1951, and 3.3 percent in 1952, a year that gave way to a 12.7 percent decline in 1953. Even the successful harvests did not satisfy increased requirements. At 91.4 million tons, the 1952 harvest was short of the 1940 total, giving the lie to Malenkov’s declaration that it met needs, which he made with Stalin’s approval to the October 1952 Nineteenth Party Congress. Procurements of 34.6 million tons failed to keep pace with a 6.7 percent increase in demands on government stocks that year alone. As Khrushchev phrased it eighteen months later when disparaging Malenkov’s claim, “In terms of staples, we scarcely make ends meet.”47
The problem shaped the average diet even after the famine relented by the end of 1948, when workers’ food intake began to rebound. At the end of 1947, the government made a political statement by ending wartime rationing, a bid by Stalin for social stability and a propaganda victory. In the long run, the kolkhozes and kolkhozniks could not shoulder the burden of exploitive pricing policies, which paid them less than production costs for meat, milk, eggs, and other foodstuffs. Predictably, output of these foods stagnated. By 1950, household surveys showed that basic food security had returned, but nutrition remained poor, as it would well into the 1950s. Calorie consumption rose, but the carbohydrate-heavy diet had little of the officially cheap but actually rare meat, milk, eggs, and animal fats.48 In 1953, average citizens consumed less meat and milk than they had before collectivization, or even before 1914.49 A 1949 policy to remedy the shortfall by expanding livestock herds and growing more of traditional fodder crops achieved little because the prices kolkhozes received continued to make those endeavors financially ruinous.
During the postwar years in Ukraine, Khrushchev affirmed his convictions about agriculture. In some instances, he modified his approach after trials achieved little. In the case of corn, experience confirmed his opinions, strengthening his enthusiasm for the crop. In his memoirs, he recalled that his grandmother and other Kalinovka peasants had served ears of corn grown in kitchen gardens as a summertime treat.50 Of the Donbas years, he noted only that corn had grown near a metallurgy plant where he had worked.51 While Khrushchev was away in Moscow in the 1930s, the chaos of collectivization and famine cut short halting propaganda campaigns and research programs designed to encourage corngrowing in southern regions. The Soviet Union did not annex the former imperial province of Bessarabia—renamed Moldova—until World War II. Western Georgia and southwestern Ukraine, other locales where the crop was common, accounted for only a small percentage of total cropland. Then, in the late 1930s, Anastas Mikoyan relayed to Khrushchev his observation that American farmers used corn as animal feed, encouraging the latter to spread knowledge garnered from foreign sources.52
In 1949, Ukraine averted a renewed famine by planting corn, strengthening Khrushchev’s faith in the crop. When frost killed nearly 2 million hectares of winter wheat, kolkhozes and sovkhozes replanted them with corn, permitting the republic to fill Stalin’s crushing grain quota.53 The crop served its traditional role as Ukrainian farmers’ last resort. Its life cycle poorly suited crop rotations based on winter wheat and barley, which were sown in fall and left to take root, lie dormant during winter, and ripen the following summer. When an exceptionally hard winter or dry spring ruined these crops, however, peasants planted corn in late spring. Becoming edible sooner than other spring grains, the cobs allowed them to feed themselves and their animals.54
In late 1949, Khrushchev returned to Moscow as a devoted advocate for corn. He badgered the oblast’s kolkhozes to plant the crop, previously unfamiliar to the area, and to apply the knowledge he had gained in Ukraine. After he left that republic, corn plantings there declined toward their postwar nadir in 1953. During Stalin’s final years, farms planted less corn than was economical and lacked technologies developed in the United States.55
During his tenure in Ukraine, Khrushchev absorbed information about corn—and much else—by observing researchers and farmworkers in the fields, a style of hands-on leadership increasingly rare in the 1940s. Limited in competence with the written word, Khrushchev refused to retreat behind a desk and loved visiting the fields, factories, and mines, getting his hands dirty and seeing for himself. Short on formal training, he peppered experts with questions, and often took the advice of the self-taught and the formally educated in equal measure. In some cases, this had disastrous results. At key moments, he supported Trofim Lysenko, whose pseudoscientific ideas about breeding plants and animals so often promised Stalin and then Khrushchev exactly what each wanted. Although never unquestioning, Khrushchev’s support earned condemnations from contemporaries and historians alike.56 To his credit, Khrushchev also backed experts who introduced valuable innovations in fields such as metalworking.57
In Ukraine, Khrushchev attempted to reform the vital agrarian sector. Amalgamating small kolkhozes into larger units, he began a process that soon spread across the country and continued after 1953. During collectivization, kolkhozes often included the residents of one village, resulting in many very small units. By merging several kolkhozes, Khrushchev hoped to save on administrative costs, ensure economies of scale, and strengthen farms’ ability to invest in their own production. Having begun in 1950, this policy, later combined with limited conversions of kolkhozes into sovkhozes, reduced the number of the former to only 17,900 by 1963.58
Ukrainian experiences also spurred Khrushchev’s 1951 proposal to modernize village life. To remedy wartime destruction, the leader thought to transform amalgamated kolkhozes into town-like settlements. In Ukraine, he had a model village built with apartment blocks and social services demonstrating care for living conditions. He sustained these concerns after returning to Moscow to combine duties as a Central Committee secretary and as chief of the city and oblast party organizations. Amalgamating the local kolkhozes, he called for creating agrotowns similar to the model village. In March 1951, Pravda published the text of a speech advocating demolishing ramshackle houses to make way for multifamily apartment buildings outfitted with modern conveniences. Promising the smart physical appearance and cultural resources of urban life, Khrushchev did not account for the enormous prospective cost or the ideological implications of privileging consumption over production, especially in rural areas viewed so suspiciously under Stalin. The speech summoned swift attacks from Malenkov and others. Because these criticisms had Stalin’s blessing, they threatened Khrushchev’s political fortunes and forced him to write a groveling letter to the leader. The danger soon passed, but the experience stung.59
After the war as much as before it, the government compelled the kolkhozes to sell grain and other produce cheaply while paying dearly for MTS services. As harvests rose after 1946, Stalin continued to extract disproportionate financial and material contributions to rebuilding, much as during the initial industrialization drive. Kolkhozes’ payments for MTS services were high, even as machines and trained specialists remained in short supply. By 1950, the numbers of tractors, harvesters, and other machines had reached only the insufficient prewar levels. Tax and procurement policies shifted part of the financial burden of the Cold War military buildup onto the agrarian sector. As wartime official policy intended, kolkhozniks had amassed considerable savings by selling produce at market. The 1947 currency reform wiped out these savings by converting old banknotes to new ones at low rates.60 The government further alienated the fruits of peasant labor by exacting obligatory deliveries and high taxes.
Mass migration denuded the kolkhozes of farmworkers who might have helped the farms meet Stalin’s demands. Millions of discharged Red Army soldiers left to escape famine, taxes, harsh working conditions, poverty, and hopelessness.61 Between 1948 and 1950, a further 7.6 million kolkhozniks and veterans followed, approximately 40 percent from Russia and the remainder from the other union republics.62 In 1950, rural residents remained 60 percent of the population, a proportion that continued to shrink thereafter as the rural population declined only slightly in absolute terms, but urban areas expanded rapidly.63 The war had killed more men than women, while military service opened more opportunities for male veterans to leave the village. This imbalance meant that in rural Russia the ratio of women to men rose to an average of two to one. In some locales, it reached three to one.64
Authorities demanded more intense manual labor from the kolkhozniks, who responded by demonstrating their dissatisfaction. Because the kolkhozes paid little or even nothing, kolkhozniks refused to work. Pay reached rock bottom in 1946, causing nearly 20 percent of kolkhozniks to not tally the obligatory minimum number of labor-days. Variations between regions show that lower pay provoked greater reticence to work on the kolkhoz. As a result, the kolkhozniks struggled to make a living.65 One lamented, “So beautiful a spring has come. But what can be done if there is nothing to live on?” Explaining things to his daughter, the letter writer continued, “Whatever [the kolkhoz] has is not ours. What’s more, there is no way to earn anything in the village. People work the whole summer and gather in the harvest. Then the bosses divide it among themselves, leaving nothing [for the kolkhozniks].”66 Conditions caused kolkhozniks to write 92,795 complaints to a central commission between 1947 and 1950.67
Stalin’s government replied with coercion. In 1948, new policies increased annual labor-day quotas, norms defining the amount of work constituting a labor-day, and taxes on personal plot production. Kolkhozniks replied by slaughtering livestock and chopping down orchards to avoid the extortionate taxes.68 Earnings from work in the kolkhoz fields declined and had no relation to the size of the harvest. In 1950, at least 70 percent of kolkhozes—in some locales more than 90 percent—paid less than 1 kilogram of grain for a labor-day. Between 4 and 8 percent of kolkhozes in each administrative region paid nothing at all.69 When kolkhozniks refused to work, authorities imposed sterner punishments. The law mandated sentences to a labor camp for lateness, petty theft, or other violations of industrial workplace discipline. On kolkhozes, taking a potato from the field to feed a family, if prosecuted, could lead to time behind barbed wire. By 1953, the Gulag held the largest number of prisoners in all its years in existence. Some 17 million violators of the labor code were tried and convicted, although most faced docked wages and other limits on rights. Only 3.9 million received custodial sentences, comprising the largest single group of those sentenced between 1940 and 1953.70
An edict sanctioning stricter punishments for kolkhozniks originated with Khrushchev, marking a contrast with his later reformist policies. Proposed and adopted in early 1948, a directive granted kolkhozes power to expel members who habitually failed to meet the annual labor-day norm, stripping them of their right to a personal plot and subjecting them to higher taxes. Flagrant violators faced internal exile to remote corners of the Soviet Union. Launched on a trial basis in Ukraine, this arch-Stalinist law to combat what the text termed “antisocial and parasitical ways of life” later went into effect across the country, but ultimately failed. After authorities mounted a brief press campaign and made examples of a few violators, it lapsed.71 By 1953, more than 4 million kolkhozniks, or 15.9 percent, failed to meet the labor-day minimum, and 600,000 did not work for the kolkhoz at all.72
With few incentives other than coercion, the kolkhozniks worked without enthusiasm. The state procured insufficient grain, meat, milk, wool, cotton, and other needed commodities. The agrarian sector slowed economic advance. By 1953, perceptive party members wrote to the Central Committee to describe the repressive policies’ effect—or lack thereof. Some accepted the system as it was, complaining about kolkhozniks who made no effort “to engage in socially beneficial work” and “adhered to a parasitic way of life.”73 Blaming “private property–based psychology,” local party authorities bemoaned how kolkhozniks expanded their personal plots beyond the legal size, cut hay from kolkhoz fields, and raided kolkhoz stocks of grain.74 Taking a more critical stance, a journalist and party member identified only as F. N. Kirikov wrote to denounce the 1948 law. He explained that the severity of punishments dissuaded the rest of the kolkhozniks from voting to confirm them, as the formally democratic kolkhoz charter required. Violators did not care to remain kolkhozniks, moreover, making expulsion not a threat but an opportunity to work for Vologda Oblast’s nearby lumber mills. “Such measures have no effect here,” Kirikov reported. “Those who were expelled left the kolkhoz happily. . . . How could kolkhozniks consider it a punishment to leave a farm where they earned nothing?” With a little maneuvering, they might even keep a valued personal plot anyway. Even those who remained members flouted calls to the kolkhoz fields, preferring religious holidays and mushroom hunting. Flawed incentives, Kirikov concluded, were the primary reason the oblast failed to meet its quotas.75
A 1953 update to the law eliminated the threat of expulsion and exile, but kolkhozniks sometimes refused to vote even to confirm the higher tax on personal-plot produce. Every family had at least one member who failed to meet the minimum. “For that reason,” one letter concludes, “the loafers go unpunished.”76 In one district of Stavropol Krai, between 20 and 30 percent of kolkhozniks failed to reach the minimum. Yet the chiefs of the kolkhozes declined to report violators for enforcement of the higher tax rate. Admonishing the kolkhoz bosses, tax officials implored local party authorities to intervene. On one kolkhoz, the chairman’s “negligence” had allowed the kolkhoz assembly to reject the entire list of those subject to the tax penalty “on the grounds that each kolkhoznik had legitimate reasons for not fulfilling the labor-day minimum,” such as caring for a dependent. This circumstance, the tax officials’ petition to the krai party committee sardonically concluded, was “extremely unlikely.”77
Central Committee personnel filed letters such as Kirikov’s in the archive because they spoke to the concerns of Stalin’s successors. In August 1953, Khrushchev commented specifically on the journalist’s letter.78 The leader soon denounced policies causing “low labor discipline” and “violations of the principle of material incentives,” meaning failure to pay kolkhozniks.79 Malenkov announced reforms easing the taxes paid on the output of kolkhozniks’ personal plots and reducing compulsory deliveries of goods for which the kolkhozes received payment lower than production costs. As part of the personal rivalry with Malenkov then growing into a struggle for power, Khrushchev responded. Considering himself more attuned to the peasants because of his origins and tenure in Ukraine, he set out his evaluation of the predicament at the Central Committee plenum in September 1953.
With these actions, Stalin’s successors first acknowledged the desperate conditions facing rural residents. Khrushchev’s September speech was necessary because the leaders lacked knowledge about agriculture and rural life, hampering any attempt to remedy the crisis. Subordinates had obfuscated when reporting to Stalin, ensuring that he had known little about agriculture and kolkhozniks’ lives. Khrushchev later derided Stalin for never leaving his office and therefore believing in socialist-realist films portraying singing peasants feasting at tables heavy with food and drink.80 On other occasions, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for never questioning the deceptive statistics received from officials who likely sought to protect themselves from the dictator’s displeasure.81
In the summer of 1953, Stalin’s successors confronted the lack of data about income, labor productivity, consumption, yields, and more, all of which hindered efforts to diagnose afflictions of rural society and the agrarian economy. Preparing Khrushchev’s speech, his aide Andrei Shevchenko confronted Vladimir Starovskii, head of the USSR Central Statistical Administration, who repeatedly altered data previously reported. When Shevchenko rebuked Starovskii for revising a figure for the fourth time, the statistician protested that each new one had been an improvement: that is, it had made the situation appear less dire. Shevchenko countered that he cared little for appearances and wanted only a clearer understanding. His riposte apparently had little effect because Starovskii returned the following day with new figures.82
Carrying out collectivization, Stalin and his supporters subjected agrarian production to control. Gaining greater power than they had possessed under NEP, authorities sought primarily to extract grain and produce. Even when kolkhozniks relinquished their produce, they resisted coercive measures and, unknowingly, the high modernist ambitions of political masters in Moscow. Lacking passports, kolkhozniks did not enjoy the right to work outside the village or other benefits of citizenship, even though they were subject to taxes, military service, and other duties of a citizen. For more than twenty years, the government suppressed their capacity to consume while alienating the produce it used to feed urbanites, provision the army, and finance industrialization.
In 1953, the new authorities recognized the need to reform Stalin’s agrarian system, which did little to embody the ideals of modern socialist farming. They sought doctrinally acceptable means to reshape the way kolkhozniks lived, worked, and related to the kolkhoz and the government. In time, the kolkhozniks gained status and some room to maneuver in economic spheres. Signs of rural modernization strengthened as industrial farming moved from an ideal limited in actual use down on the farm, as it had been since the 1920s, to the principle underpinning practices across a range of production activities. Treating kolkhozniks better, these new approaches quietly superseded the coercive practices of the past. To realize their vision of modern socialist agriculture, leaders had to fully incorporate rural residents as industrious producers, active consumers, and fully fledged citizens.
On a piecemeal basis, Khrushchev and his supporters began to react to conditions down on the farm. They embarked on reforms that addressed these problems by integrating the countryside into the industrial economy. They had to act because the chronically ailing system had reached a crisis point in the years up to 1953. Yet there was no past equilibrium to which they could return. The consequences of war, famine, inadequate investment, and low output plagued the kolkhozes. Doctrine closed off a return to NEP or any move to disband the kolkhozes.
Stalin’s successors, however, did have alternatives at hand. Khrushchev’s bet on industrial agriculture was only one of many mutually compatible options. The modest tax and price reforms announced by Malenkov in August 1953 demarcated one course, which many of Khrushchev’s policies maintained in subsequent years. Other possible strategies included Khrushchev’s 1951 village modernization scheme, the 1949 livestock development plan, a proposal to grant kolkhozes authority to own machinery independent from the MTS, the idea to permit kolkhozes to plan for themselves how to meet government orders, schemes to inexpensively manage soil fertility, and the grandiose but abortive Stalinist Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Each in its own way shone light on the crisis facing the Soviet Union and the makers of agrarian policy, yet also the avenues open to reform. Of these, the high-modernism and preoccupation with America ingrained in Bolshevism in the 1920s made corn, coupled with industrial agriculture, the solution favored by Khrushchev.