Cahiers du monde russe Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États indépendants
57/1 | 2016 Terres, sols et peuples : expertise agricole et pouvoir (xixe - xxe siècles) Land, soil and people : Agricultural expertise and power (19th-20th centuries)
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8322 DOI : 10.4000/monderusse.8322 ISSN : 1777-5388
Éditeur Éditions de l’EHESS
Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 janvier 2016 ISBN : 978-2-7132-2540-6 ISSN : 1252-6576
Référence électronique Cahiers du monde russe, 57/1 | 2016, « Terres, sols et peuples : expertise agricole et pouvoir (xixe - xxe siècles) » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2018, Consulté le 28 septembre 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8322 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.8322
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 septembre 2020.
© École des hautes études en sciences sociales 1
NOTE DE LA RÉDACTION
Ce numéro des Cahiers du Monde russe a bénéficié d’une aide à la traduction de l’Institut historique allemand de Moscou (DHIM).
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SOMMAIRE
Introduction Expertise And The Quest For Rural Modernization In The Russian Empire And The Soviet Union Katja Bruisch et Klaus Gestwa
Réglementer l’utilisation des terres
Blurred Lines Land surveying and the creation of landed property in nineteenth‑century Russia Igor Khristoforov
Agrarian Experts And Social Justice Land allotment norms in revolution and Civil War, 1917‑1920 David Darrow
The Soviet Village Revisited Household farming and the changing image of socialism in the late Soviet period Katja Bruisch
Les intérêts politiques et économiques, facteurs déterminants de l’expertise
Sweet Development The sugar beet industry, agricultural societies and agrarian transformations in the Russian empire 1818‑1913 Susan Smith‑Peter
Engineering Empire Russian and foreign hydraulic experts in Central Asia, 1887‑1917 Maya K. Peterson
Privatiser l’agriculture en URSS Économistes réformistes et pouvoir politique pendant la perestroïka Olessia Kirtchik
Conflits et contraintes
In Single File Russian railroads and the Russian army as environmental protection agencies, 1858‑1917 Stephen Brain
Why did the attempt under stalin to increase agricultural productivity prove to be such a fundamental failure ? On blocking the implementation of progress in agrarian technology (1929‑1941) Stephan Merl
Wildscapes In Ballyhooland Shock construction, Soviet colonization, and Stalinist governance* Christian Teichmann
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Livres reçus
Livres reçus
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Introduction Expertise And The Quest For Rural Modernization In The Russian Empire And The Soviet Union
Katja Bruisch and Klaus Gestwa
EDITOR'S NOTE
Translated from German by Bill Templer
1 The project of modernity is generally associated with industrial and urban contexts.1 Yet the belief that the world can be transformed through knowledge, technology and reason has left clear marks beyond the classic laboratories of modernity. In rural regions, it manifested itself in the implementation of ambitious agricultural programs and gigantic infrastructure projects. Such endeavors brought about both adventure and risk, promising unseen triumphs and foreshadowing ecological disasters and social upheaval.2
2 Within a few generations the intended consequences of rural modernization and its collateral damages radically transformed agricultural production and the rural way of life. Concealed behind our daily bread today lies a wide range of different forms of expertise. In the 20th century, Frank Uekötter writes, “land has become a key resource in agriculture that has left no area of agronomy untouched, and has even been able to relativize land ownership as a classic social determinant in rural society.”3 Multiple instructive questions spring from the insight that in Russia and the Soviet Union in particular, knowledge was seen as a decisive precondition for increases in yield and rural development. The answers to those questions provide new perspectives not only on scientization and modernization within national states but also on transnational interactions and interdependencies—thus contributing to the global history of agriculture, science and environment.
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Rural modernization : Better and bitter harvests
3 The concept of “rural modernization” addressed in this special issue should not be understood in the sense employed by American social scientists such as Walt W. Rostow, who in the decades of the Cold War drew a link between modernization, democracy and capitalism. In this way, Rostow tried to persuade governments in non‑European countries of the validity and value of the Western model of a progressive transition from traditional agrarian society to industrial modernity.4 Rural modernization as used here refers to the attempt to transform the rural economy and natural spaces through science, technology and reason, and thus to make them useful for society.
4 The diverse programs for implementing modernity in rural contexts ranged broadly from ideas about an agrarian order based on small farms, where education and science constituted the decisive forces driving rural development, to cooperative models of economy and society, extending on to dreams of agriculture organized by the principles of Taylorism and Fordism.5 During the interwar period, industrial agriculture served as a benchmark for modernization that transcended economic systems and ideologies.6 With a robust faith in the power of progressive technology and efficient management, American agronomists traveled to the Soviet Union in the belief that collectivization had put the country on the threshold of a modern rural economy.7 5 In the decades after World War II, the success of the Green Revolution appeared to confirm the superiority of industrial agriculture.8 Following record harvests in Southeast Asia, genetically modified grain varieties and chemical fertilizers were introduced globally to raise yields. Enthusiasm for scientifically grounded and highly technologized farming nurtured the fervent hope among many in the East and West, as well as in the North and South, that it would now be possible to overcome global hunger and social barriers to growth in their own countries. However, it soon became apparent that shifting “food’s frontier”9 brought substantial ecological implications and went hand in hand with violent interventions in existing agrarian systems. Consequently, ever more attention was paid during the final decades of the 20th century to the “broken promise of agricultural progress.”10 This gave rise to dismay and lasting disillusionment.11 6 The rural dimension of the project of modernity shaped the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in particular. The continental climate, with its sometimes extremely cold and long winter periods and regular droughts, made agriculture vulnerable and harvest yields extremely volatile. At the same time, agriculture was central to developing the national economy as a whole. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the exports of agricultural products (flax, hemp and, later, grain) stimulated the expansion of trade, industry and market relations.12 Agriculture remained a dominant sector in the Russian Empire, still accounting for 51 % of the national income in 1913. Russia played a leading role on the emerging world grain market until Stalinist collectivization.13 In the Soviet Union, urban populations did not exceed rural populations until 1962.14 In many cases, rural development programs accompanied the consolidation of imperial rule beyond the political and economic centers. Within the largely agrarian peripheries the implementation and strengthening of central state authority often required far‑reaching settlement and colonization.15 For that reason,
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rural regions became a regular focus of state activity in the late 19th century.16 After the 1917 Revolution, Russian policymakers grew more convinced that the social order could be designed and transformed by subjugating nature. Large‑scale construction sites became significant arenas of modernity, even in scarcely developed villages and remote natural spaces. Those cases exemplified the state’s imperative of rigorous expansion and growth and its striving for political dominance, economic power and cultural hegemony.17
Land : The economic resource
7 Since the Neolithic Revolution, human community has simply been unthinkable without agriculture and animal husbandry for the production of food, energy and materials. The pivotal role of land often triggered social confrontations.18 Oral agreements, written rules and visible markers such as fences served to defuse one of the oldest social causes for conflict. The precise regulation of land access—and in many cases water access—led to comprehensive bodies of law whose aim was to provide a legal foundation for using this scare and contested resource. While being both a creative and destructive cultural force, land laws are so basic a phenomenon that they arise even where there is no state to enforce them.19
8 Land enclosure was central to rural development in England during the early modern period. In the mid 18th-century, the government intensified support for the removal of common property rights and the consolidation of fields to make the land more profitable. Contemporaries and historians alike have regarded enclosure, which was often enforced against the will of the rural population, as a precondition for England’s agricultural and industrial “revolutions.” However, it has been shown that in the end productivity and yields were not necessarily higher on enclosed lands.20 9 The close relationship between property and power had a technological dimension as well. To better demarcate and secure the land, the Americans Lucien B. Smith and Joseph F. Gidden independently from each other invented barbed wire in the second half of the 19th century. Its technical simplicity, low production costs and multiple uses contributed to the triumph of the “devil’s rope” in prairie fences, battlefield trenches and all manner of detention camps. In the case of agriculture, barbed wire proved to be not only an effective means of border demarcation but also functioned as a political dispositif of separation, driving the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, conquest and subjugation. As modernity’s veritable crown of thorns, barbed wire has remained a simple yet effective means of power in the control of space and land, livestock and people.21 10 All attempts at regulation notwithstanding, land has repeatedly been an object of social confrontation and dispute. Russian and Soviet history highlight these dynamics most notably. From the abolition of serfdom under Alexander II to the Stolypin Reform and the Revolution of 1917, the search for an expedient apportionment of land was a topic of intense debate, affecting legislation, politics, philosophy, and even literature.22 In his short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need ?” (1886), Lev Tolstoi sought to determine how much land was actually appropriate for a farmer.23 The Stolypin Reforms, which aimed at overcoming communal practices of land use in open fields, pursued an “administrative utopia” of a rationally ordered rural economy. The peasants’ fields were to be clearly separated from one another and agriculture was to
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be optimally adapted to the demands of the market.24 After the February Revolution, when peasants began to appropriate landowners’ land, politicians and scientists sought to create rules and regulations to curb the chaos in the villages.25 11 During the Soviet period, the rejection of “bourgeois” relations of ownership and the dream of large‑scale enterprises shaped agrarian discourse and agrarian policy. While the coercive collectivization of the village at the beginning of the 1930s was driven by the wish of the Stalinist elite to subjugate rural regions, the belief in economies of scale determined Nikita S. Khrushchev’s ultimately unsuccessful amalgamation campaign.26 Up until the Soviet Union’s end, officials in the Party and the government continued to debate on how much farmland should be allotted to individual households for independent agricultural production.27
Soil : The natural resource
12 While land is an economic and political category, soil stands for the “uneasy relationship” between agriculture and the natural environment.28 Farming often reduces the productive capacity of the soil ; processes of degradation, especially as a result of erosion, salinization and compression, lead to losses in agricultural surface area. This affects not only individual farmers and local communities ; in extreme cases soil degradation can trigger famine, mass migrations and wars over land and water. That is why the UN Food and Agricultural Organization declared 2015 the International Year of Soils, seeking to raise awareness about the importance of soil for global food security, the preservation of biodiversity and the stabilization of the climate.29
13 The problems identified by the United Nations are by no means new. In recent years, fascinating yet disquieting studies have acknowledged soil as a defining factor of human history. In his influential environmental history of the 20th century, John R. McNeill stresses that the “earth’s skin,” which is rarely more than hip‑deep, takes centuries to build up but only a short time to degrade through inappropriate land use. The thin fertile crust of the earth is “the basic of human survival, the source of sustenance for plants, the foundry of life.”30 The geo‑morphologist David R. Montgomery has emphatically warned that “we are skinning our planet.” In his cultural and social history of soil from ancient to modern times Montgomery identifies soil as “our most underappreciated, least valued, and yet essential natural resource” and argues that more historical research is urgently needed in order to illustrate that social orders “rely as much on soil conservation and stewardship as on technological innovations.”31 Using the example of dust storms, a special issue of Global Environment has recently demonstrated that soil degradation is a promising field of research. Its history still has to be written, with narratives mirroring the ambivalent experiences of both destruction and revitalization, as well as of ignorance and betterment. Without any doubt, studies on soil exhaustion provide instructive views on the interconnections between agrarian, cultural and environmental histories.32 14 In Russia, the management of soil has been a concern for intellectual and political elites since the 19th century. The pioneering soil scientist Vasilii V. Dokuchaev (1846‑1903) sought more appropriate ways to farm the fertile black earth and semi‑arid regions. He argued that the steppe environment suffered from widespread soil erosion and a growing vulnerability to aridity because settlers ignored local environmental constraints.33 The “Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature of 1948”—at that
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point the “world’s largest ecological engineering project”34—borrowed from Dokuchaev’s idea to afforest the steppe, providing for the planting of huge shelterbelts, the development of protective tree lines and the stabilization of sandy soils.35 Two years later, a further series of decrees ordered the construction of dams and hydroelectric power plants as well as a huge network of irrigation canals on the Volga, Don and Dniepr. Celebrated as the “The Great Stalin Construction Works of Communism” (Stalinskie Velikie Stroiki kommunizma), these projects sought to transform the entire south of the Soviet Union by means of an “ecological revolution” in “flourishing stretches of land.” In the end, the plan proved abortive due to its overblown scale and the absurdities of the Soviet command economy.36 15 Yet failure could also inspire debates about more careful ways to use the soil. In the 1960s, Khrushchev’s Virgin Land Program sustained a heavy setback due to severe dust storms. In light of the environmental effects of the expansion of farming in the steps, Soviet agronomists drew from Canadian experiences with dryland farming, non‑inverting tillage, contour plowing and the beneficial role of stubble and crop residues. Lamenting that Soviet agriculture seriously lagged behind in soil conversation, they started to introduce measures similar to those employed in the North American prairies and to produce farm equipment modeled on Canadian prototypes.37 16 Closely related to the careless use of soil were Soviet endeavors in irrigation. They illustrate the constraints on agriculture stemming from climatic and other natural conditions. The second half of the 20th century has been called “irrigation’s modern era.”38 Over the course of fifty years irrigated agricultural land increased worldwide from 100 million to 271 million hectares. At the beginning of the 21st century, around 20 percent of the agricultural land was under artificial irrigation, providing over 40 percent of total global agricultural yields.39 In the second half of the 20th century, the south of the Ukraine and Russia and the dry zones of the Soviet Central Asian republics became prominent showplaces of the hazards of large‑scale irrigation. The water diverted into open fields often washed salt into the topsoil from the earth below. It accumulated in the roots of arable crops, causing significant losses. As a result, more agricultural land was ultimately lost than proved possible to regain through improvement projects. Irrigation, once promising, turned out to be a threat.40
People : The social resource
17 Soil has been cultivated in many different ways through history, yet land was often worthless without the people who worked on it.41 Until the end of serfdom the wealth of a Russian landowner was measured not by the land he possessed but by the number of “souls” he could call his own.42 After the emancipation of the serfs, the government, private companies and settler communities relied on a large workforce for agricultural production. In the Tsarist period the allotment of land and taxation exemptions for colonists were central for farming in remote regions.43 As part of the Stolypin agrarian reforms and the construction of the Trans‑Siberian Railway, the Tsarist government promoted the resettlement of peasants to the fertile steppe regions of western Siberia. Between 1897 and 1911, 3.5 million persons left the European part of the Empire in a scramble for land handed out by the government. They reclaimed areas that for centuries had been used by Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads for grazing their cattle herds.
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In 1910 the Siberian peasants increased butter production and achieved a notable grain surplus, which served to boost Russian agricultural exports. At the same time, the nomads were pushed southward as the new agricultural production threatened their way of life.44
18 During collectivization, peasants and nomads were forced onto collective farms, where they often lived in extreme poverty as cheap and ready labor. This merciless exploitation of the village was what enabled the massive transfer of resources from agriculture to the industrial sector. Because kolkhoz peasants were no longer permitted to migrate legally into the cities after 1932, many used semi‑legal ways to leave their villages. Due to this continued subjugation by the Soviet party state, rural residents dubbed the Stalinist collectivization the “second serfdom.”45 In addition, the authorities willingly used forced labor in the Stalinist period. Millions of people were compelled to work the land and tend to the animals—in Gulag camps, special settlements and labor battalions.46 After 1953, the Soviet leadership relied on large‑scale campaigns, such as Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands Campaign, instead of forced labor to mobilize workers for their ambitious agricultural projects.47 19 Ever since their coming into power, the Soviet government had claimed to seek a balance between urban and rural regions. But differences in living standards and income remained so great that ever more kolkhoz members turned their backs on the countryside for better jobs in industrial urban areas. In the 1970s, thousands of villages disappeared from the map, while Soviet agriculture faced a constant shortage of young specialists. Despite full‑bodied party conference resolutions and governmental decrees, mechanization and electrification in many places were delayed and the great leaps promised never came.48
Expertise : Turning visions into practice
20 Equipped with specialist knowledge and skills, experts played an important role in pre‑modern societies. Their number was small, though, hence their influence was limited to certain professional fields.49 With the rise of modernity, the state’s growing aspirations to intervene in every sphere of social and natural life enhanced the role of professional political advisors. Scientization and rationalization pluralized expertise and increased the numbers of experts significantly. As social change accelerated since the 19th century, political and economic elites sought to back up their decisions by qualified opinions, which lent political importance and social prestige to scientists, engineers and professional administrators. These experts “were not only entirely self‑motivated and self‑created ; rather, they were shaped by their interactions with political and social actors.”50 They furnished those in power with tools for thought, arguments for decisions and scripts for action.51 As a result of their growing influence, scientific advisors were even labeled as the “fifth branch of government.”52 Indeed, there is good reason to describe the 20th century as the century of the expert.53
21 The management of land, soil and people required knowledge about agriculture as well as about the social and natural characteristics of rural regions. Knowledge also served to legitimize any attempts to transform nature and landscapes. But knowledge alone did not suffice to reshape rural regions in accordance with the demands of modern economies and modern states. It also had to be administratively regulated and contained, to be recognized as a relevant resource and systematically implemented into
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practice. Decisive for this transformation of knowledge into expertise was the belief that the world could be refashioned. “Generated in the framework of the relationship between science and power, with its own claims of validity and forms of representation,”54 expertise is not merely an attribute of especially educated or experienced individuals. It also enables humans to transform physical and social environments. 22 In 2002, the German historian Margit Szöllösi‑Janze called the agrarian sciences “one of the last really large unexplored ‘blind spots’ in the sphere of the history of science.”55 Since then a lot has changed. Recent studies have shown that agricultural sciences and their related disciplines became important political resources in the 18th century, facilitating the integration of rural spaces into national economies and state bureaucracies. Initially, scientific societies played a key role in the generation of agricultural knowledge.56 As the demand for products from plant cultivation and animal breeding increased with urbanization, so did political and popular interest in soil and life sciences.57 The great leap in scientization at the end of the 19 th century established new institutions and organizations and introduced new methods of cultivation and farm machinery that brought an upsurge in agrarian knowledge production.58 23 Calculability and efficiency were considered decisive prerequisites for the realization of a rural modernity. Economic success should no longer depend on the vagaries of the weather or an allegedly incompetent rural population. Instead, efficient forms of organization, scientifically grounded prognoses and technical innovation promised to predict agricultural yields and to guarantee reliable rates of growth. Scientists and engineers found a new role in society as experts, opening the door for them to embark on the reordering of agrarian economy and village life.59 24 In the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, the production of knowledge about the rural peripheries was bound up inseparably with the integration of those regions and with the wish for more predictability in agricultural production.60 Beginning in the early 19th century, agrarian experts were needed for the “scientization of the social”61 as well as for the “industrialization of nature.”62 After Alexander II’s Great Reforms, specialists found new career options in the bodies of local self‑government (zemstvo) and, after the Russian Revolution of 1905, in educational institutions, associations and cooperatives. They advised the rural population on agricultural questions, collected extensive data on rural living standards, carried out experiments and championed hygiene standards.63 The peasants in turn increasingly made their voices heard beyond the village, eventually making their way into elite discourse.64 25 At the same time, numerous forums for scientific exchange, such as scholarly conventions, periodicals, agricultural schools and traveling exhibitions promoted the flow of information and the popularization of knowledge.65 The Russian Empire and early Soviet Union were fully involved in the transnational circulation of agrarian knowledge and practices.66 In the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 and 1890, the Russian pavilion’s 280 exhibits on soil science enjoyed great public interest.67 In the following decades, the soil scientist Vasil´ii V. Dokuchaev, the geneticist Nikolai I. Vavilov, the landscape geographer Lev S. Berg and the economists Aleksandr V. Chaianov and Nikolai D. Kondrat´ev became internationally recognized authorities in their disciplines.68
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26 The supplementation of generalists by well‑trained specialists, which had started in the late Imperial period, accelerated after the 1917 Revolution.69 The Bolsheviks abolished the public sphere and subjected scientific expertise to state control.70 The fate of numerous Soviet specialists showed that the power of experts depended on whether they were recognized by the ruling elites. Experts were likely to become targets of critique when reality could not be reordered as planners envisioned. During Stalinism many fell victim to state terror.71 27 The repression of prominent agronomists went hand in hand with the rise of the Soviet biologist Trofim D. Lysenko. With the aid of Stalin’s personal backing, Lysenko promulgated his pseudo‑scientific theory of heredity at a specially convened congress of the All‑Union Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948. In show‑trial style the congress branded genetics a “bourgeois pseudo‑science.” Promoting the idea of “creative Darwinism” Lysenko became the “virtual dictator of Soviet biological and agricultural science.”72 Lysenko’s career proves that in the Soviet context “scientificity” (nauchnost´) and ideology were often closely linked. Thus, “expertise was […] not first and foremost a technical question, but a political one, including its symbolic dimensions as well as its presentations.”73 At the same time, Lysenkoism illustrates the nexus between competence and arrogance that is a common feature in the history of expertise.74 28 Subjugation and repression were not the only features of the relationship between experts and the state in the Soviet Union. In the post‑Stalinist period, scientists of the rural areas, especially ethnologists, geographers, sociologists and soil scientists, reconsolidated their disciplines and entered the arena of international scientific communities.75 During the years of perestroika, well‑known agronomists rose to the circle of advisors of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. This development challenges “the image of specialists as passive policy actors, dependent entirely upon the Soviet leadership.” Instead, as Neil J. Melvin argues, it points to the “cumulative significance of specialist participation” in challenging existing basic concepts. In the area of rural policy, the fundamental contribution of experts that began long before 1985 was “to redefine the scope of the policy issues, to significantly shape the broad outlook of the elite on the nature of the countryside and its problems.”76
The agrarian paradox : Harvest failure and ecological devastation
29 In contrast to scientific projections and political recognition of expert knowledge about the countryside, the economic and ecological outcomes of rural modernization were often disappointing. The devastating famines of 1891/92, 1921/22, 1932‑34 and 1946‑48 revealed rural inefficiency, disorganization and political failure.77 Despite periods of accelerating agricultural growth,78 the level of agricultural production and the living standards in rural peripheries remained low relative to Western Europe and the United States, causing constant headaches for the authorities. Rural peripheries remained an important field of politics up until the late Soviet period.79 In the 1980s, with an almost limitless supply of funds, the Soviet countryside witnessed “the highest food‑and‑agriculture subsidy known in human history.”80 Nonetheless, the agricultural sector remained the veritable Achilles heel of the economy. Beginning in 1963, the Soviet Union depended on ever more grain and meat imports from capitalist countries
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to compensate for frequent crop failures. Given that the Soviet Union possessed the world’s largest area of arable land, this was a major embarrassment for the country’s leadership.81 In frustration, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet Kremlin leader, candidly described Soviet agriculture as a “hopeless liability on the national economy, a sort of bottomless pit absorbing immense resources.”82
30 Authorities often tried to compensate for poor production with the unrestrained deployment of heavy machinery and chemicals and the expansion of cultivation areas. This went along with massive environmental damage and serious health problems for millions of Soviet citizens.83 A state commission report in 1993 noted that since the 1950s a fourth of the land under cultivation had been eroded on the territory now belonging to the Russian Federation. As a result, a third of the fields and meadows was lost or severely damaged.84 The most dramatic proof of the disastrous consequences of Soviet agricultural policy has been the steady shrinkage of the Aral Sea after its tributaries were diverted for cotton irrigation.85 31 The tension between the scientization of rural affairs on the one hand and regular crop failures and massive environmental destruction on the other raises questions around which this special issue centers. What did political elites and experts understand by rural modernization ? Did experts assist the authorities by providing them with detailed knowledge and improvement proposals within already defined frameworks ? Or did they conceive of new programs, set new aims and mark out new paths ? Was expertise more than a source of legitimacy and argumentative arsenal for the authorities ? What relevance did the ruling elites ascribe to scientific knowledge and engineering expertise for the implementation of their agenda ? Invariably associated with these questions are others : What impact did politics have on the scientization of rural affairs ? What were the consequences of the pursuit of modernizing policies for the rural population ? Was reliance on expertise a reason for the undesirable developments and setbacks in agriculture ? 32 Linking agrarian and environmental history with the history of sciences and politics, the case studies contained in this special issue show how knowledge was transformed into expertise and the role played by experts in the attempts to modernize the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. The authors explore how researchers and engineers acted in science, politics and the public sphere, and describe the strategies they used to gain recognition beyond their professional communities as mediators between the state and rural society. In doing so, the authors illuminate the creative power of expertise as well as its institutional, political and environ-mental limitations.
Regulating land use
33 From the Great Reforms in the mid‑19th century to the end of the Soviet period, the codification of landed property and the distribution of land were repeatedly focus of intense scientific and political debate. Three articles in this special issue show that the surveying, categorization and allotment of land occurred at the interface of power, economy and morality. Officials, experts and the rural population legitimized their ideas with arguments about economic necessity and social justice. Even so, complex property relations and local interests frequently blocked the path toward realizing an ideal rural order. The legal, economic and moral dimensions of land use were intrinsically intertwined, in theory as well as in practice.
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34 In his contribution, Igor´ Khristoforov shows that the promotion and enforcement of private property rights proceeded sluggishly up until the late imperial period. After the Great Reforms, the state claimed an increasingly prominent role in rural peripheries of the Empire. With the establishment of private land ownership, however, this claim was not enforceable because the surveyors lacked authority over the rural population. Representatives of the landed gentry counted on informal agreements whereas peasants feared that the surveyors represented foreign interests. The two groups were pursuing different aims, yet they were united in their reluctance to accept outsiders interfering with local affairs. 35 The question concerning the appropriateness of landed property and economic profit remained a constant theme even after the caesura of 1917. David Darrow’s article demonstrates that for more than half a century the reforms of Alexander II served as a benchmark for land use rights. In the revolutionary period, parties and experts from all political camps, and also peasants themselves referred to the category of nadel (allotment) that had passed into law with the abolition of serfdom in 1861 in order to define criteria for the allotment of land. Their proposals for providing a just rural order in line with objective criteria avowed the moral obligation of the state to secure land for the peasant population. 36 What was the proper and permitted extent of land to be allotted to the rural population for its own use ? That question continued to be relevant even decades after collectivization. In her contribution, Katja Bruisch shows that agrarian discourse in the Soviet period was closely intertwined with changing notions of socialism. Household farming, a concession made by the Soviet state after the collectivization, came to be recognized as an integral part of the socialist village during the 1970s. The official turn toward subsidiary farming was legitimized by reference to the complementary function of household farming, which did not compete with collective or state‑run enterprises. Moreover, Soviet leaders acknowledged private agriculture as an important part of the country’s food production. The private use of land now seemed compatible with the socialist aspirations of the Soviet state.
Economic and political interests as determinants of expertise
37 The agency of experts fluctuated widely in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though they presented their knowledge as universally applicable, economic and political interests were always decisive factors in their reputation and influence.
38 Susan Smith‑Peter presents a case study of how agricultural societies spread agrarian knowledge among the landed gentry. In the 1830s, the Moscow Agricultural Society began to promote the sugar beet industry by providing entrepreneurs with seed and technical expertise. However, economic factors and the natural environment proved more decisive than the support by scholarly societies. The sandy and loamy soils in Right‑bank Ukraine were vast and entrepreneurs had access to free labor. As a result, the region evolved into a hub for sugar beet cultivation and processing in the Russian Empire. 39 Within the entanglement of science, economy and politics, new forums for exchanging knowledge developed and transcended the borders of the Russian Empire. In her article
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on irrigation experts in Central Asia, Maya Peterson explores how transnationally generated knowledge was implemented in a concrete local setting. Focusing on the interplay between political and economic interests in the context of colonial expansion, Peterson shows that in the early 20th century, programs for irrigation were considered a key part of imperial policy. Hydraulic engineers worked closely with experts from the United States, whose experiences in the American West proved useful for the management of scarce water resources in Turkestan. Even as technical knowledge moved across continents, its application followed national interests. Russian experts, supported by the central government, used their knowledge to help cultivate cotton in the region and prepare the way for Russian settlers. Though the Tsarist government failed to transform the steppes and deserts of Central Asia into fertile landscapes, the dream outlasted the Russian Empire and opened numerous possibilities for hydraulic experts during Soviet rule. 40 Olessia Kirtchik explores how in the years of perestroika the rural economy became a major field of state politics. Different groups of agro‑economic experts tried to push through their agendas with policymakers. While reform‑minded economists favored the introduction of free‑market incentives and the privatization of agriculture, experts within the classic institutions of Soviet agrarian science advocated the retention of collective farming. Kirtchik’s contribution shows that expertise, irrespective of its technocratic appearance, frequently is embedded in a larger political agenda. Gorbachev’s decision for close cooperation with the reform‑oriented experts, too, was ultimately politically motivated.
Conflicts and constraints
41 Even as experts acquired a host of ways to apply their knowledge, success was anything but certain. Often, complex relationships between various actors and institutions as well as the interplay between man, technology and nature set narrow limits to the realization of their visions. For many experts, conflicts and constraints were therefore part and parcel of their professional experience.
42 As Stephen Brain shows in his article, institutional factors sometimes impeded the successful application of scientific expertise. The Tsarist government entrusted the Russian Army of the Don and the Vladikavkaz Railroad Company with afforestation in the steppe region to curb soil erosion in the 19th century. But the foresters who journeyed to the south of the Empire faced rigid regulations, often making it impossible to fulfill their task. In addition, soil conservation for the involved institutions, as Brain notes, was only of secondary importance. The afforestation programs achieved some short‑term success, yet did little to contain erosion in the long run. 43 Along with institutional factors, power affected the influence of experts. In his article, Stephan Merl explores why a revolution in agricultural yields in the era of Stalin failed to materialize. Merl notes that Soviet specialists lacked the authority to implement their proposals despite repeated attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to rationalize farming by consolidating land and providing farms with high‑grade seed. The centrally planned production targets for state grain supplies were not conducive to sustained increases in yields, when at the same time, agrarian experts were reprimanded whenever the harvests fell short of the quotas. The balance sheet of Stalin’s policy was disastrous. The
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rural population lost interest in their work and agriculture remained a lasting concern of the Soviet government. 44 In some cases, terror and repression obstructed rural modernization, as Christian Teichmann describes in his analysis of the Vakhsh River Valley project during the 1930s. Soviet planners had hoped that the construction of irrigation canals in the Soviet republic of Tadzhikistan would expand arable land for cultivating cotton. Yet the political atmosphere of Stalinism fomented mistrust amongst engineers, and many lost their lives during the reign of terror. In addition, insufficient food supplies and miserable living conditions—including malaria and typhus—debilitated the workforce. Moreover, the rivers could not be controlled effectively by the planners which caused uncontrolled flooding, eventually salinizing the earth. Instead of a blooming oasis, the project created a salty desert.
Research agenda of the special issue
45 Analyzing intellectual, social, technological, and natural conditions, the authors in this special issue show that rural orders are determined not only by human intentions and interactions, but also by the interplay of administrative procedures and cultural assignments. Since agriculture relies heavily on living resources (soil, plants and animals), the processes and results of rural modernization have often differed significantly from modern interventions in the urban and industrial sectors.86 After the assemblages of land, soil, people and expertise are unraveled, Timothy Mitchell writes, “human agency appears less as a calculating intelligence directing social outcomes and more as the product of a series of alliances in which the human element is never wholly in control.”87 This issue’s case studies prove that agriculture, as David Moon pointed out, provides “fertile ground for innovation in conceptualizing human‑nature relationships.”88
46 This special issue is devoted to exploring how great political caesurae like the collapse of the Russian and Soviet empires and the rise of Stalinism and perestroika reconfigured established fields of expertise. Political change often motivated experts to rethink their trajectories and to reconsider how their knowledge could be used. At the same time, the wide historical scope—from the early 19th century to the 1980s— uncovers continuities that outlasted those changes. Studying the development of rural expertise over a long timeframe thus helps to establish a more adequate narrative of the rise of modernity by reconsidering the impact of political turning points on the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. 47 The scientization of rural affairs was an international phenomenon, and expertise often developed and proliferated through transnational exchange. As the case studies show, however, the authority and the impact of experts always depended on the political and social structures in which they were embedded. Rural modernization was intrinsically linked to the decisive role of the state in the organization of technology, science and reason.89 Addressing the complex relationship between national and international affiliations, the contributions in this special issue exemplify that the “fate of the expert” is “to operate somewhere between a universalist understanding of his or her expertise […] and the politically or culturally defined requirement of the state.”90 48 Instead of retelling the old story of agrarian backwardness, this special issue provides revealing insights into the rise of modernity in the Russian Empire and the Soviet
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Union. The aim here is not so much to add to an incomplete picture as to open up new views on the role of experts in the transformation of rural regions. The articles help understand the agrarian paradox of Russian and Soviet history : On the one hand, the scientization of rural affairs was a prominent trend in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The rise of knowledge and expertise was central to economic development, social progress and identity in rural regions, all of which shaped the thinking and acting of contemporaries. On the other hand, even as scientific experts and engineers promoted rural modernization the outcomes of their initiatives were ambiguous, ranging from complicated bureaucratic reforms to the failure of grandiose projects. 49 Rural modernization was never only an aim in itself. It was also a means through which to maintain or establish the power of the Tsarist and later the Soviet state in remote regions. In many cases, expertise served the larger political interests of internal colonization and empire‑building. Conversely, the state could obstruct the work of experts when it feared the loss of influence in one of the most important areas of policy‑making. Faced with this complex interplay of power, expertise and economy, rural modernization programs often fell short of expectations. In some cases, they even engendered tremendous social and ecological costs, leaving in their wake unfulfilled promises instead of scientifically and technologically driven progress.
NOTES
1. The idea for this special issue derives from the workshop “Managing Land, Soil and People : Environmental Knowledge and Expertise in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union (18th ‑ 20 th Century),” organized in March 2014 at the German Historical Institute (DHI), Moscow (see the conference report by Julia Herzberg : Managing Land, Soil and People : Environmental Knowledge and Expertise in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, 14.03.2014 ‑ 15.03.2014 Moscow, in : H‑Soz‑Kult, 26 May 2014,
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Yale University Press, 1998) ; Stanley D. Brunn, ed., Engineering Earth : The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, 3 vols. (Dordrecht : Springer 2011). 3. Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld : Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 18. Translation of the authors. 4. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology : American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2000) ; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future : Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) ; David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission : Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2010. For rural modernization as an instrument of the British Empire see Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert : Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens : Ohio University Press, 2007). 5. Helga Schultz and Angela Harre, eds., Bauerngesellschaften auf dem Weg in die Moderne : Agrarismus in Ostmitteleuropa 1880 bis 1960 (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 2010) ; Eduard Kubů, Torsten Lorenz, Uwe Müller and Jiři Šouša, eds., Agrarismus und Agrareliten im östlichen Mitteleuropa : Forschungsstand, Kontextualisierung, Thesen (Berlin : Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2013) ; Peter Moser and Tony Varley, eds., Integration Through Subordination : The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe (Turnhout : Brepols, 2013). 6. Meredith McKittrick, “Industrial Agriculture,” in John R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Maudlin, eds., Companion to Global Environmental History (Chichester : Wiley‑Blackwell, 2012), 411‑432. 7. Deborah Fitzgerald, “Blinded by Technology : American Agriculture in the Soviet Union, 1928‑1932,” Agricultural History, 70, 3 (1996) : 459‑486 ; Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress : Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930‑1963 (New Haven, London : Yale University Press, 2014), ch. 2. 8. Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory : The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2003) ; Joseph Leslie Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt : Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945‑1972 (DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). 9. Richard Manning, Food’s Frontier : The Next Green Revolution (New York : North Point Press, 2000). 10. Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress : An Environmental History (London, New York : Routledge, 2014). 11. On changing conceptions of rural modernity in the 19 th and 20th century, see Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld ; Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World : An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800‑2000 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2005) ; Andreas Dix and Ernst Lagenthaler, eds., Grüne Revolutionen : Agrarsysteme und Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck : Studien Verlag, 2006) ; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World : America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2010) ; Jonathan Harwood, Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since : The Rise and Fall of Peasant‑Friendly Plant Breeding (London : Routledge, 2012) ; Corinna R. Unger, “Agrarwissenschaftliche Expertise und landlichë Modernisierungsstrategien in der internationalen Entwicklungspolitik, 1920er bis 1980er Jahre,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 41, 4 (2015) : 552‑579. 12. Klaus Gestwa, Proto‑Industrialisierung in Russland : Wirtschaft, Herrschaft und Gewerbe in Ivanovo und Pavlovo, 1741‑1932 (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 222‑225. 13. Paul R. Gregory, Before Command : An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five‑Year Plan (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1994), 27‑29 ; Barry K. Goodwin and Thomas J. Grennes, “Tsarist Russia and the World Wheat Market,” Explorations in Economic History, 35, 4 (1998) : 405‑430.
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14. In five Soviet republics (Moldavia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tadzhikistan), the rural population exceeded 50 percent even in 1989, underscoring the unbroken dominance of the agrarian sector. See Thomas M. Bohn, “Bevölkerung und Sozialstruktur,” in Stefan Plaggenborg, ed., Handbuch der Geschichte Russlands. vol. 5 : 1945‑1991 (Stuttgart : Anton Hiersemann, 2003), 595‑657, here 621‑623. 15. On the southern Russian steppe regions, see, for example, David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes : Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700‑1914 (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013). Railroad construction especially played a key role in creating an integrated economic area and sphere of control. See Stephen G. Marks, Road to Power : The Trans‑Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850‑1917 (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1991) ; Walter Sperling, Der Aufbruch der Provinz : Die Eisenbahn und die Neuordnung der Räume im Zarenreich (Frankfurt a. M. : Campus, 2011) ; Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne : Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner, 2014). 16. George L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize : Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861‑1930 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1982) ; David A.J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861‑1906 : The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 1987). 17. Klaus Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus : Sowjetische Technik‑ und Umweltgeschichte, 1948‑1967 (Munich : Oldenbourg, 2010) ; Stephen Brain, “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” Environmental History, 15, 4 (2010) : 1‑31 ; Andy Richard Bruno, The Nature of the Soviet Power : An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016) ; Christian Teichmann, Macht der Unordnung : Stalins Herrschaft in Zentralasien, 1920‑1950 (Hamburg : Hamburger Edition HIS, 2016). 18. The current public interest in questions of land utilization is reflected in the debate on so‑called “land grabbing,” where journalists have also expressed vehement views : Winfried Bommert, Bodenrausch : Die globale Jagd nach den Äckern der Welt (Frankfurt a. M. : Eichborn, 2012) ; Fred Pearce, The Land Grabbers : The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth (Boston : Beacon Press, 2012) Birgit Englert and Barbara Gärber, eds., Landgrabbing : Landnahmen in historischer und globaler Perspektive (Vienna : New Academic Press, 2014). 19. Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth : The Transforming History of Land Ownership (London : Bloomsbury, 2013). 20. R.C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1992) ; J.M. Neeson, Commoners : Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700 – 1820 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993) ; Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England : The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500 – 1850 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996), 147‑168. 21. Alan Krell, The Devil’s Rope : A Cultural History of Barbed Wire (London : Reaktion Books Ltd, 2002) ; Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire : A Political History (New York : The New Press, 2003). 22. Heinz‑Dietrich Löwe, Die Lage der Bauern in Russland 1880‑1905 : Wirtschaftliche und soziale Veränderungen in der ländlichen Gesellschaft des Zarenreiches (St. Katharinen : Scripta Mercaturae, 1987) ; Ben Eklof, ed., The World of the Russian Peasant : Post‑Emancipation Culture and Society (Boston : Unwin Hyman, 1990) ; Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons : Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth‑Century Russia (New York : Oxford University Press, 1993) ; Heike Kathrin Litzinger, Die Juristen und die Bauernfrage : Die Dis-kussion um das bäuerliche Grundeigentum in Russland von 1880 bis 1914 (Frankfurt am Main : Klostermann, 2007). 23. Leo Tolstoy, How much Land does a Man need ? (St. Lucia, Queensland : Locks’ Press, 1986). 24. Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906‑1917 : Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (London : Oxford University Press, 1999).
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25. Orlando Figes, Peasant War, Civil War : The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917‑1921 (Oxford : Clarendon, 1989) ; Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War : Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914‑1922 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008) ; Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution : Le cas russe, 1870‑1930 (P. : Édition Albin Michel, 1998), 183‑206. Closely associated with land apportionment, conflicts also arose regarding the use of the forest ; see Brian Bonhomme, Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries : Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia, 1917‑1929 (New York : Columbia University Press, 2005). 26. Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture (New York : Norton, 1987), 152‑156 ; Neil J. Melvin, Soviet Power and the Countryside : Policy Innovation and Institutional Decay (Houndmills : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5‑7, 29‑52 ; Auri C. Berg, Reform in the Time of Stalin : Nikita Khrushchev and the Fate of the Russian Peasantry (doctoral diss., University of Toronto, 2012). 27. Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture ; Karl‑Eugen Wädekin, Privatproduzenten in der sowjetischen Landwirtschaft (Cologne : Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1967) ; Stefan Hedlund, Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union (London : Routledge, 1989). See also the article by Katja Bruisch in this special issue. 28. Federico, Feeding the World, 5‑15. 29. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Year of Soils 2015,
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Environmental Thought, 109‑132 ; Klaus Gestwa, “Von der Katastrophe zum Kommunismus : Die Hungersnot 1946/47 und ‘Stalins Großartiger Plan der Umgestaltung der Natur’,” in Alfred Eisfeld, Guido Hausmann and Dietmar Neutatz, eds., Hungersnöte und Epidemien in Russland und in der Sowjetunion : Regionale, ethnische und konfessionelle Aspekte (Essen : Klartext, forthcoming). 36. Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture , 144. For further details, see Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten. 37. Marc Elie, “The Soviet Dust Bowl and the Canadian Erosion Experience in the New Lands of Kazakhstan, 1950s‑1960s,” Global Environment, 8, 2 (2015) : 259‑292. 38. Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand : Can the Irrigation Miracle Last ? (New York : Norton, 1999), 40‑64. 39. World Commission on Dams, ed., Dams and Development : A New Framework for Decision‑Making : The Report of the World Commission on Dams (London : Earthscan, 2000), 137 ; Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold : The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (New York : The New Press, 2002), 60. 40. Bo Libert, The Environmental Heritage of Soviet Agriculture (Wallingford : CAB International, 1995), 41‑65. See also Christian Teichmann’s contribution in this special issue. At the University of Tuebingen, Timm Schönfelder and Tommaso Trevisani are currently working on the menacing relationship between irrigation and salinization in South Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan since the 1950s. 41. On labor in agriculture see Federico, Feeding the World, 56‑64. For a Marxist perspective, see now Martin Empson, Land and Labour : Marxism, Ecology and Human History (London : Bookmarks Publications, 2014). 42. Stephen Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia. Petrovskoe : A Village in Tambov (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1986) ; David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600‑1930 : The World the Peasants Made (London : Longman, 1999) ; David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (Harlow : Longman, 2001) ; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom 1649‑1861 (Malden : Blackwell, 2008) ; Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011). 43. Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field : Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2004) ; Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery : Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (New York : Routledge, 2007) ; Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization : Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge : Polity, 2011). 44. Marks, Road to Power, 153‑169 ; Dittmar Dahlmann, Sibirien : Vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), 195‑201. Still very informative is Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration : Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1957). 45. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants : Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York : Oxford University Press, 1994) ; Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society : Controlling Movement in Russia and the USSR (Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 1993) ; Gijs Kessler, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932‑1940,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 42, 2‑4 (Avril‑Décembre 2001) : 477‑504 ; David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism : Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924‑1953 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009), 243‑284. 46. On the history of the northern Kazakh camp complex KarLag, in which countless prisoners facilitated the expansion of regional agriculture, see Wladislaw Hedeler and Meinhard Stark, Das Grab in der Steppe : Leben im Gulag. Die Geschichte eines sowjetischen “Besserung-s- arbeitslagers” 1930‑1959 (Paderborn : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008) ; Steven A. Barnes, Death and
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Redemption : The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2011). 47. Martin McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture : The Virgin Land Programme 1953‑1962 (London : Macmillan, 1976) ; Michaela Pohl, The Virgin Lands between Memory and Forgetting : People and Transformation in the Soviet Union, 1954‑1960 (Doctoral diss., Indiana University, 1999) ; William C. Rowe, “Turning the Soviet Union into Iowa : The Virgin Lands Program in the Soviet Union,” in Brunn, ed., Engineering Earth, vol. 1 : 237‑256 ; Paul R. Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013), 146‑152. 48. Bohn, Bevölkerung und Sozialstruktur, 621‑623 ; Gestwa, Die Stalinschen Großbauten, 225‑235 ; Vitalii S. Belozerov, Dmitrii Meshkov and Dietmar Neutatz, eds., Migratsiia i prostranstvennaia mobil´nost´ v sel´sko‑gorodskom kontinuume Rossii v XX veke : upravliaemost ´, adaptivnost´ i strategii preodoleniia [Migration and spatial mobility in the rural‑urban continuum in Russia during the 20th century : Governability, adaptability and strategies for negotiation] (Stavropol´ : Izdatel´stvo Stavropol´skogo Universiteta, 2011) ; Judith Pallot, “Rural Depopulation and the Restoration of the Russian Village under Gorbachev,” Soviet Studies, 42, 4 (Oct. 1990) : 655‑674. 49. Eric J. Engstrom et al., eds., Figurationen des Experten : Ambivalenzen der wissenschaftlichen Expertise im ausgehenden 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, 2005) ; Jakob Vogel, Ein schillerndes Kristall : Eine Wissensgeschichte des Salzes zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Moderne (Cologne : Böhlau, 2008) ; Eric H. Ash, ed., Expertise : Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2010) ; Björn Reich et al. eds, Wissen, maßgeschneidert : Experten und Expertenkulturen im Europa der Vormoderne (Munich : Oldenbourg, 2012) ; Hedwig Röckelein et al., eds., Experten der Vormoderne zwischen Wissen und Erfahrung (Berlin : Akademie‑Verlag, 2012). 50. Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise : Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8. 51. Joris Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters and Kaat Wils, eds., Scientists’ Expertise as Performance : Between State and Society, 1860‑1960 (London : Pickering & Chatto, 2015). 52. Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch : Science Advisors as Policymakers (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1990). 53. Mitchell, Rule of the Experts ; Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise ; Thomas Etzemüller, ed., Die Ordnung der Moderne : Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld : Transcript, 2009) ; Martin Kohlrausch, Katrin Steffen and Stefan Wiederkehr, “Expert Culture in Central Eastern Europe – Introduction,” in idem, eds., Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe : The Internationalization of Knowledge and the Transformation of Nation States since World War I (Osnabrück : fibre Verlag, 2010), 9‑30 ; Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann, Experts : The Knowledge and Power of Expertise (London, New York : Routledge, 2011). 54. Kohlrausch, Steffen and Wiederkehr, “Expert Culture in Central Eastern Europe,” 20. 55. Margit Szöllösi‑Janze, “Die institutionelle Umgestaltung der Wissenschaftslandschaft im Übergang vom späten Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik,” in Rüdiger vom Bruch and Brigitte Kaderas, eds., Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik : Bestandsaufnahmen zu Formationen, Brüchen und Kontinuitäten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner, 2002), 60‑74, here 72. Translation of the authors. See also Uekötter, Die Wahrheit liegt auf dem Feld, 12‑13. 56. Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld, 43‑50 ; Stefan Brakensiek, “Das Feld der Agrar- reformen um 1800,“ in Engstrom et al., eds., Figurationen des Experten, 101‑122. 57. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland, eds., New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (Heidelberg, New York : Springer, 2015).
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58. Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld, 50‑53, 133‑181. See also Sarah Jansen, “Schädlinge” : Geschichte eines wissenschaftlichen und politischen Konstrukts, 1840‑1920 (Frankfurt am Main : Campus, 2003) ; Thomas Wieland, “Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser” : Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzüchtung in Deutschland, 1889‑1945 (Munich : Deutsches Museum, 2004). 59. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of the Experts : Egypt, Techno‑Politics, Modernity (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002). 60. Jonathan Oldfield, Julia Lajus and Denis J.B. Shaw, “Conceptualizing and Utilizing the Natural Environment : Critical Reflections from Imperial and Soviet Russia,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 1 (2015) : 1‑15. The most comprehensive treatment of the genesis of agrarian scientific knowledge in the Russian Empire is Ol´ga Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov do sovetskikh polei : Istoriia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh opytnykh uchrezhdenii XVIII – 20‑e gody XX veka [From the Tsarist gardens to Soviet fields : The history of agricultural experimental stations from the 18th century to the 1920s] 2 vols. (M. : Egmont, 2008). See also the review articles by Brian Bonhomme, “Writing the Environmental History of the World’s Largest State : Four Decades of Scholarship on Russia and the USSR,” Global Environment, 12, 1 (December 2013) : 13‑37 ; Randall Dills “Forest and Grassland : Recent Trends in Russian Environmental History,” Global Environment, 12 (2013) : 38‑61. 61. Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische und konzeptionelle Herausforderung für eine Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22, 2 (1996) : 165‑193. 62. Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature : Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington : Island Press, 2002). 63. Ilya V. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia : Rural Professionals and Self‑Organization, 1905‑30 (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ; Kimitaka Matsuzato, “The Fate of Agronomists in Russia : Their Quantitative Dynamics from 1911‑1916,” Russian Review, 55, 2 (1996) : 172‑200 ; Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward : Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861‑1914 (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999) ; Angelika Strobel, “Die Gesundung Russlands : Hygienepropaganda in der Provinz um 1910,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 61, 4 (2013) : 531‑551 ; Katja Bruisch, “Populismus, Profession und Politik : Agrarexperten im späten Zarenreich,” in Tim Buchen and Malte Rolf, eds., Eliten im Vielvölkerreich : Imperiale Biographien in Russland und Österreich‑Ungarn, 1850‑1918 (Berlin : De Gruyter, 2015), 240‑260. 64. Julia Herzberg, Gegenarchive : Bäuerliche Autobiographik zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Bielefeld : Transcript, 2013). 65. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform, 11‑24 ; Anastasia Fedotova, “The Beetle Question : The Growing Problem of Insect Infestations in South Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 1 (2015) : 66‑95. 66. Catherine Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions : Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro‑Environmental Issues,” in Benno P. Warkentin, ed., Footprints in the Soil, 125‑148 ; Anastasia Fedotova, “The Origins of the Russian Chernozem Soil (Black Earth) : Franz Joseph Ruprecht’s ‘Geo‑Botanical Researches into the Chernozem’ of 1866,” Environment and History, 16, 2 (2010) : 271‑293. 67. Jan Arend, “Wie die Bodenkunde russisch wurde : Zur nationalen Imagebildung in den Wissenschaften,” in Christof Windgätter, ed., Verpackungen des Wissens : Materialität und Markenbildung in den Wissenschaften (Vienna : Böhlau, 2012), 97‑108, here 107. 68. Oldfield and Shaw, Development of Russian Environmental Thought, 78‑108 ; Arend, Wie die russische Bodenkunde “klassisch” wurde ; Sergei V. Zonn, Vasilii Vasil´evich Dokuchaev : 1846‑1903 (M. : Nauka, 1991) ; Igor G. Loskutov, Vavilov and his Institute : A History of the World Collection of Plant Genetic Resources in Russia (Rome : IPGRI, 1999) ; David Moon, “The
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Environmental History of the Russian Steppes : Vasil´ij Dokuchaev and the Harvest Failure of 1891,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 15 (2005) : 149‑174 ; Martina V. Loskutova and Anastasia A. Fedotova, Stanovlenie prikladnykh biologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii [The rise of applied biological sciences in Russia] (Sankt‑Peterburg : Nestor‑Istoriia, 2014) ; Katja Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war : Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Cologne et al. : Böhlau, 2014), 197‑205. 69. Peter Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’ : The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review, 69, 1 (2010) : 151‑179. On the rise of specialists into the state administration, see more generally Don K. Rowney, Transition to Technocracy : The Structural Origins of the Soviet Administrative State (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1989). 70. James W. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside : State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917‑1929 (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004) ; Markus Wehner, Bauernpolitik im proletarischen Staat : Die Bauernfrage als zentrales Problem der sowjetischen Innenpolitik 1921‑1928 (Cologne et al. : Böhlau, 1998). 71. Susan Gross Solomon, The Soviet Agrarian Debate : A Controversy in Social Science, 1923‑1929 (Boulder : Westview Press, 1977) ; Elena S. Levina, Vavilov, Lysenko, Timofeev‑Resovskii… : biologiia v SSSR : istoriia i istoriografiia [Vavilov, Lysenko, Timofeev-Resovskii… : Biology in the USSR, history and historiography] (M. : AIRO‑XX, 1995), 35‑110 ; Tatjana P. Mironowa, “Der Sturm auf die Agrar‑wissenschaften,” in Dietrich Beyrau, ed., Im Dschungel der Macht : Intellektuelle Professionen unter Stalin und Hitler (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 106‑120 ; Peter Pringle, The Murder of Nikolaj Vavilov : The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century (New York : Simon & Schuster, 2008) ; Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war, ch. 3. On agrarian experts scapegoated for the poor record of Soviet agriculture during the 1930s, see also the contribution by Stephan Merl in this issue. 72. Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture : From Alexander II to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1970), 315. 73. Kohlrausch, Steffen and Wiederkehr, “Expert Culture in Central Eastern Europe,” 20. 74. On the rise of Trofim Lysenko, see Nikolaj Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1997), 158‑183 ; Nils Roll‑Hansen, The Lysenko Effect : The Politics of Science (New York : Humanity Books, 2005) ; Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2006), 41‑71 ; Ethan Pollock, “From Partiinost´ to Nauchnost´ and Not Quite Back Again : Revisiting the Lessons of the Lysenko Affair,” Slavic Review, 68, 1 (2009) : 95‑115. 75. Levina, Vavilov, Lysenko, Timofeev‑Resovskii, 111‑153 ; Melvin, Soviet Power and the Countryside, ch. 7 ; Marc Elie, “Formulating the Global Environment : Soviet Soil Scientists and the International Desertification Discussion, 1968‑91,” Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 1 (2015) : 181‑204. 76. Melvin, Soviet Power and the Countryside, 26. See on this also Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996), 43‑47 ; as well as the contribution by Olessia Kirtchik in this special issue. 77. On these famines, see Nikolai M. Dronin, Edward G. Bellinger, Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia 1900‑1990 : The Interaction of Climate and Agricultural Policy and Their Effect on Food Problems (Budapest, New York : Central European University Press, 2005) ; Nicolas Ganson, The Soviet Famine of 1946‑47 in Global and Historical Perspective (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ; Felix Wemheuer, Der Große Hunger : Hungersnöte unter Stalin und Mao (Berlin : Rotbuch‑Verlag, 2012) ; Andrea Graziosi et al., eds., After the Holodomor : The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA : Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013) ; Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden : Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan (Hamburg :
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Hamburger Edition HIS, 2014) ; Eric M. Johnson, “Demographics, Inequality and Entitlements in the Russian Famine of 1891,” Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 1 (2015) : 96‑119. 78. On the dynamics of peasant agricultural production before the revolution see Michael Kopsidis, Katja Bruisch and Daniel W. Bromley, “Where is the Backward Russian Peasant ? Evidence Against the Superiority of Private Farming, 1883‑1913,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 42, 2 (2015) : 425‑447. 79. For an overview of agrarian development and policy since the abolition of serfdom, see Carol S. Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia : The Road from Serfdom (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011). 80. As in the formulation of Alec Nove, quoted in Chris Miller, “Gorbachev’s Agricultural Agenda : Recollectivization and the Politics of Perestroika,” Kritika, 17, 1 (2016) : 95‑118, here 96. See also Dronin and Bellinger, Climate Dependence and Food Problems, 221‑222. 81. In the years 1970/71, the Soviet Union was already spending 20 percent of its gains in hard currency for imported foods ; a decade later, this proportion had already doubled while exports had substantially risen. See Karl‑Eugen Wädekin, “Soviet Agriculture’s Dependence on the West,” Foreign Affairs, 60, 4 (1982) : 882‑903 ; Philip Hanson, From Stagnation to Catastroika : Commentaries on the Soviet Economy, 1983‑1991 (New York : Praeger, 1992), 9. 82. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York : Doubleday, 1996), 120. 83. Libert, The Environmental Heritage of Soviet Agriculture ; Viktor A. Kovda, “Kak pomoch´ nashim chernozemam [How to help our Black-earth regions ?],” Nash Sovremennik, 53, 7 (1985) : 122‑128 ; Ihor Stebelsky, “Agricultural Development and Soil Degradation in the Soviet Union : Policies, Patterns, and Trends,” in Fred Singleton, ed., Environmental Problems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Boulder, London : Rienner, 1987), 71‑96. 84. Gosudarstvennyi (natsional´nyi) doklad o sostoianii i ispol´zovanii zemel´ Rossiiskoi federatsii za 1993 g. [State (national) report on the condition and the use of land in the Russian Federation in 1993] (M. : Komitet Rossiiskoi Federatsii po Zemel´nym Resursam i Zemleustroistvu, 1994). See also Nicole Kovalev, Bodenschutz durch Flurgehölzsysteme in der Russischen Föderation (Berlin : Mensch und Buch, 2003), 2, 10‑11. 85. Ernst Giese, Gundula Bahro and Dirk Betke, Umweltzerstörungen in Trockengebieten Zentralasiens (West‑ und Ost‑Turkestan) : Ursachen, Auswirkungen, Maßnahmen (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner, 1998) ; Julia Obertreis, “Der ‘Angriff auf die Wüste’ in Zentralasien : Zur Umweltgeschichte der Sowjetunion,” Osteuropa, 58, 4‑5 (2008) : 37‑56 ; Igor S. Zonn et al., eds., The Aral Sea Encyclopedia (Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer, 2009). 86. This point is emphasized by Moser and Varley, eds., Integration Through Subordination. 87. Mitchell, Rule of the Experts, 10. 88. David Moon, “The Steppe as Fertile Ground for Innovation in Conceptualizing Human‑Nature Relationships,” Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 1 (2015) : 16‑38. 89. Ulrike Fell, Profession und Nation : Die Ideologie der Chemie in Frankreich vom Zweiten Kaiserreich bis in die Zwischenkriegszeit (Leipzig : Universitätsverlag, 2000) ; Alan J. Rocke, Nationalizing Science : Adolphe Wurtz and the Battle for French Chemistry (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2001) ; Ralph Jessen and Jakob Vogel, eds., Wissenschaft und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main : Campus, 2002) ; Mitchell G. Ash and Jan Surman, eds., The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848‑1918 (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillian, 2012). Especially for agriculture Nadine Vivier, ed., The State and Rural Societies : Policy and Education in Europe 1750‑2000 (Turnhout : Brepols, 2008). 90. Kohlrausch, Steffen and Wiederkehr, Expert Culture in Central Eastern Europe, 10. Similarly, Kohlrausch and Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise.
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AUTHORS
KATJA BRUISCH
German Historical Institute Moscow, katja.bruisch@dhi‑moskau.org
KLAUS GESTWA
University of Tuebingen, gestwa@uni‑tuebingen.de
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Réglementer l’utilisation des terres Regulating land use
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Blurred Lines Land surveying and the creation of landed property in nineteenth‑century Russia
Le flou des limites : arpentage et création de la propriété foncière au XIXe siècle en Russie
Igor Khristoforov
EDITOR'S NOTE
Translated from Russian by Christopher Gilley
1 In late autumn 1861, eight months after the abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire, Titular Councillor Smirnov, a state land surveyor of the Ministry of internal affairs, took leave from his position to travel to Kovno province.1 Three wealthy local landowners—Oginski, Mirski and Zaba—had sent a request to St. Petersburg for a state land surveyor to map their properties. They promised to pay him well : 20 kopeks per desiatina of land, compared to a usual rate of 8‑10 kopeks.2
2 To understand the reasons for such generosity, one must remember that immediately after the abolition of serfdom, landowners suddenly began worrying about drawing boundaries and surveying their properties, a part of which they had to transfer to the peasants. The authorities in St. Petersburg (above all, the Ministry of internal affairs) received numerous petitions from the provinces requesting state land surveyors. Most landowners only had a very vague idea of the external boundaries of their property, let alone the area of land allotted to the peasants. On the majority of estates, the boundaries between the lords’ and peasants’ land—if they existed at all—were defined by custom. Few landowners had thought to waste time and money on an internal survey of their land.3 3 The landowners’ interest in land surveying after the abolition of serfdom seems logical. The land question was the main issue of the peasant reforms : on this, contemporaries of the reforms and historians agree. The peasants were to receive enormous expanses of land, first for their use and then to own, for which they were to pay very significant
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sums. As the government had taken on the role of mediator in organising the purchase of plots, it should also have had an interest in determining their boundaries. The plots were used as a collateral for loans which the State Treasury issued to pay to the landowners for the land, and then collected from the peasants in the form of redemption payments. Of course, peasants generally received land they had already been working for a very long time. Consequently, as liberal reformers pointed out, they considered it to be theirs in accordance with the well‑known Slavophile formulation “We are yours, but the land is ours.” However, this ambiguous ownership now seemed to have acquired clearer legal status. 4 It is therefore all the more surprising to note that the governmental programme of the Emancipation entirely ignored the question of demarcating the boundaries of landed property. The Statutes of 19 February (the laws regulating the reform) only mentioned land surveying procedures briefly and unclearly. The rules for drawing up settlement charters (ustavnye gramoty, the documents that established the mutual rights and duties of landowners and peasants) and land redemption agreements (vykupnye dogovory) required the designation of the boundaries of peasant plots and landowners’ land. However, these very rules indicated that the professional surveying of plots was voluntary and should not delay the paperwork. The government somehow altogether divested itself of the obligation to assist in land surveying.4 5 This was precisely the reason why Smirnov was sent while on leave : the Ministry, not wanting to accept responsibility, gave officials the opportunity to contribute to the reform and raise some money unofficially. Nonetheless, several months of bureaucratic correspondence between the local authorities and the ministry were needed to arrange the journey, and Smirnov arrived in Kovno to find out that his services were no longer needed. Mirski’s steward claimed that he had not invited anyone. The stewards of Oginski and Zaba declared that they had invited a surveyor in summer, and it was now almost winter ; a land survey was out of the question. Minister P.A. Valuev had to ask the governor of Kovno to take care of Smirnov, who was a long way from home without a penny. The archival file contains no further information on the land surveyor’s fate. 6 This story bears a remarkable resemblance to that of another, much better‑known land surveyor : K., the hero of Franz Kafka’s novel “The Castle.” Like Smirnov, K. arrives at the estate of Count Westwest and discovers that neither the Castle nor much less the intimidated villagers require his services. He decides to take advantage of the conflict between the Castle and the peasants. To do this, he first has to understand the rules that determine the relationship between the two sides and somehow find his place within it. However, in this area, K. experiences a complete disaster. As a result, he falls deeper and deeper in the villagers’ estimation. They fear and shun but do not respect him. The unfinished novel is cut off at the moment when the entirely disoriented K. agrees to work as a groom helper. 7 “The Castle,” of course, is not a book about the difficult profession of land surveyor ; it is an existential not a social novel. However, it would be a mistake to believe the reality depicted in it to be a groundless phantasmagoria. As Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner have recently demonstrated, Franz Kafka was not only a writer, but also a highly professional bureaucrat, an outstanding insurance expert, well‑versed in the mechanisms and pathologies of rationalised administration.5 From this perspective, “The Castle” is an attempt to recreate a conflict between the bureaucratised order (of the Castle), the life of the closed, conformist collective (the village) and the lone hero
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(K.). But why did Kafka choose the profession of land surveyor for his hero ? And how does this unexpected intersection of modernist prose and the realities of post‑reform Russia enable a better understanding of the history of Russian agrarian reforms ? 8 The land surveyor is synonymous with the outsider, the eternal traveller and guest. His position is twofold : he has the power to create visible boundaries, but this power is purely functional—it renders the land surveyor himself a living instrument, a marionette. Land surveying is a very old profession. It has come to contemporary European culture, like property laws, from the ancient world. In Latin, there are two terms for the trade of land surveyor with different roots—agrimensor and gromaticus. The meaning of the first is clear ; the second comes from the main instrument of Roman land surveyors, the groma (from the Greek, gnomon), which initially had a ritual purpose connected with consecration—the religious dedication of a settlement.6 In a recent interpretation of “The Castle,”7 the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben brought attention to the fact that Kafka, having a legal training, undoubtedly knew Roman law well. Consequently, he must have been acquainted with the classic publication of works by Roman land surveyors published by Karl Lachmann in Germany in the mid‑19th century.8 This book was full of numerous esoteric‑looking illustrations, dozens of which featured different castles. It is easy to imagine that if Kafka had indeed held the book in his hands, the drawings would have remained in his memory. 9 The Roman law on land surveying, argues Agamben, was, as in many other areas, not an expression of rationality but a system where pragmatism closely intertwined with magic and ritual. Thus, unsanctioned surveying was punishable in Rome by death and the individual who destroyed a boundary was regarded as a homo sacer—a person outside the law subject to summary execution. Homo sacer is a key category for Agamben which he uses, following Carl Schmidt, to explain the essence of the European polities by placing the “exclusion” (eccezione) at the heart of the “political.”9 In this way, in “The Castle,” Kafka gets straight to the heart of the ancient and the modern worlds, while K.’s profession ideally positions him as “alien.” 10 One can also examine the sacralisation of the boundary and the process of surveying in traditional peasant cultures from an anthropological perspective. This process had a direct relationship to the drawing of boundaries between the inhabited, cultivated and outside worlds. Russian folklorist N.I. Tolstoi observed how the Slavs viewed the infringement of boundaries as a terrible sin. In boundary disputes, oaths were made upon the lives of one’s children, often in their presence. In northern Russia, initiation rites accompanied the ploughing of boundary furrows : children were brought here and beaten in order to remind them of the borders of their father’s plot of land ; from here comes the Novgorod saying “Don’t try to teach or tell me ; I was flogged at the boundary ditch” (Ty menia ne uchi, ty mne ne rasskazivai, ia na mezhevoi iame sechen). However, the most striking parallel with Rome is the legend widespread among the Slavs of Herzegovina that he who takes another’s land and moves boundary markers will die a terrible death ; his soul will not be free until earth from the boundary is brought to him and placed upon his breast. The corpse, like that of the volkolak [werewolf] will not decay in the grave.10 11 In this way, the transgressor is subject to an even more severe punishment than that imagined by Agamben : he is excluded not only from the social network, but also from the natural, biological order.
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12 Thus, the drawing of the boundaries of landed property was a matter in which the bureaucratic order was destined to clash with the very deep layers of traditional consciousness.11 This article does not merely study land surveying and the cadastre in the Russian Empire “from above,” i.e. from the perspective of establishing protocols and the regulations issued by the authorities.12 It also examines this process as an area of interaction among and conflict between the bearers of different concepts of land settlement and the meaning of surveying boundaries. The proponents of these competing ideas were, on the one hand, members of the elite—bureaucrats, landowners and the land surveyors themselves—and, on the other, the peasants. Recent historiography has increasingly problematized the view of two profoundly opposed worlds—the popular and the elite. It has provided evidence for the mobility and permeability of the boundaries between “cultures” and demonstrated the agency of both peasants and different members of educated society who acted as mediators between peasants and the authorities.13 An analysis of the practice of land surveying and demarcating boundaries of landed property, it seems to me, can shed new light on these processes. 13 It is widely believed that the failure to resolve “the peasant question,” which, in turn, came down to the problem of landed property, was one of the main reasons for the collapse of the “old order” in Russia. However, we still know very little about how that property was regulated in the imperial period, what procedures were used to set its boundaries, what problems with the government arose in connection with this and how the landowners and peasants perceived these problems. The exceptions are the General land survey, the first large‑scale attempt by the imperial state to enter into contact with the Russian village, and the Stolypin agrarian reform, which was the last such effort. But, while these two major campaigns for the rationalisation of landed property have generated a substantial body of literature, they are rarely examined by historians on their own account as procedures for regulating property. 14 The materials of the General land survey are used as sources of information for everything except land surveying and legal institutions : for economic developments, social structures, the population’s literacy, and so on.14 In contemporary historiography perhaps only Martin Aust analysed the interaction between officials, landowners and, to a lesser extent, peasants in various land disputes in the 18th century.15 15 For historians analysing the Stolypin reform, land settlement is one of the clearest manifestations of modernist bureaucratic planning and administrative utopia.16 During the reform land settlement was used to transform peasants into a new class for Russia, that of rational farmers. The land surveyor was one of the main agents in realising this epic process. However, historians studying the reform almost never discuss either the government’s earlier attempts to rationalise the peasants’ use of land or why these attempts failed. 16 Works on the 19th‑century Russian village barely ever employ the term “land surveyor.” Remarkably, pre‑revolutionary authors—lawyers and specialists for land settlement—preferred to write about the Land registers of the 16th and 17th centuries (soshnoe pis´mo) or the General land survey than the institutions and practices contemporary to them. Thus, the complex procedure of demarcating landowners’ and peasants’ land after 1861 receives no more than two pages in I.E. German’s textbook on the history of land surveying in Russia.17
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Property regimes and the General land survey
17 The late 18th and early 19 th centuries were precisely the period that witnessed the import from Europe and rapid dissemination among the Russian elite of rational understandings of property based on a simplified (and disenchanted) Roman law. These ideas proclaimed that “genuine” property had to have definable proportions, palpable boundaries and a clear legal status. These understandings began to create their own institutional environment—bureaucratic organs that conducted land surveys and regulated land disputes and the corresponding legal norms. The General land survey marked the beginning of these processes. It officially started in 1766 and covered 35 provinces (23 of which were already completed in the 18th century ; the rest, mostly in the Steppe, continued into the first half of the 19th century).
18 This grand undertaking involved mapping, describing and building “in nature” (on the ground) the boundaries of the so‑called “dachas.” These large tracts of land might belong to one landlord, but more often contained the land of different owners, including seigneurial, court, vacant and populated state lands. Villages and “parts” of villages that constituted an estate “often were not connected to a single territory, and were interspersed with villages belonging to different owners.”18 It was the so called “strip holding property” (cherespolosnaia sobstvennost´) that must not be confused with the peasant strip holding land use (cherespolositsa). The first formed during the initial granting of the land to the nobles and its subsequent breaking through market circulation, exchange, and inheritance. The second were a product of the repartitions of land within the peasant commune in proportion to taxes and dues. The landed property could also be joint (obschaia) when different landlords owned shares in one estate. In addition, the exact share in the joint property (one half, one quarter) was sometimes not defined. In the 18th and the first half of the 19 th centuries, this strip holding and joint forms of ownership were very widespread.19 19 The situation was complicated further by the fact that certain natural resources (forests, fishing grounds, islands and hayfields) were almost always used in common by different owners. This practice, common for different countries and legal systems, added one further level to the complex pattern of land ownership. We do not have a full picture of how widespread joint and strip holding ownership was in the empire as a whole. Judging by some regional studies, by the beginning of the 19th century, one encounters them no less often than consolidated (undivided) estates under one owner. 20
20 It is unsurprising, then, that during the General land survey the government could not and did not even try to solve this problem, proclaiming instead that the consolidation (razmezhevanie) of joint and strip holding dachas had to take place later and at the cost of the owners themselves. As a result, the so‑called “circuit boundaries” (okruzhnye mezhi) of the survey did not so much designate the borders of properties as serve as topographical and geodetic orientation for the later setting of boundaries, settling arguments and contracts. These boundaries were seen as inviolable and eternal. In contrast, the setting of mobile and changeable property and estate boundaries was acknowledged to be a private, not a state, matter. The geodetic accuracy of the General land survey, especially in its first decades, was very poor. But the authority of the state that stood behind it was perhaps more important than the accuracy of borders.
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Speransky’s plan and the “Kiselev cadastre”
21 Consolidation of property along the principle of “one property, one owner” became the next task for a “well‑ordered police state” at the first half of the 19th century. The consolidation was driven mainly by the needs of fiscal and administrative control that constituted the essence of cameralism,21 rather than demands of owners. At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, continental European countries were genuinely obsessed with the idea of the land cadastre. It was precisely in the context of the cadastre and taxation that European bureaucracies understood and solved problems of general measurement and land surveying. In accordance with the physiocratic doctrine popular at that time, the universal land tax (l’impôt unique), had to become the basis for the new fiscal system, replacing the numerous “mediaeval” estate‑based obligations.22 During the first decades of the 19 th century, Europe enthusiastically followed post‑revolutionary France’s attempts to solve this problem.
22 The country spent many millions of francs on unsuccessful attempts to count the comparative income of millions of land parcels. However, it would be a mistake to view the cadastre of this time as just a fiscal measure meant to increase the income of the Treasury. The discussion on the cadastre among scholars and politicians, administrators and experts in France testifies to the fact that this enormous undertaking was seen as an all‑national project, designed to guarantee the “rationality” and “justice” of the assessment of the tax burden for the country’s different regions and localities. In this way, the cadastre became an important part of the consolidation of France into a single civic nation.23 Certainly, many critics questioned the financial benefits of the French cadastre and suggested what they saw as cheaper and more promising means of making the land tax “just.” However, hardly anybody denied the necessity of such a procedure in continental Europe.24 At the same time, Great Britain, whose legal system was not based on Roman law, did not exhibit interest in cadastral projects.25 23 It would seem that connecting the cadastre and land surveying was not an urgent task for the Russian Empire’s government in the first half of the 19th century. Land ownership and direct taxes were not linked here in so far as the landowners (private landlords, the Treasury, the Imperial family) did not pay taxes, and the taxpaying peasants, in their turn, lacked the legal right to land. The poll tax, introduced by Peter I, was always attractive to the state because of its simplicity and low administrative costs. However, fearing dissatisfaction among both the peasants and landowners, the government was extremely reluctant to raise poll tax rates. As a result, the poll tax’s contribution to the state’s income steadily declined : if, on its introduction in the mid‑1720s, it made up two thirds of all income, by the end of the 18th century it was already about half, in 1825 roughly one third, and at the beginning of the 1850s just 22 %. In the early 1880s, the poll tax, that at the time was seen as archaic and unjust, was finally abolished with no actual replacement. On the eve of the First World War, the peasants basically paid indirect taxes on consumer products alongside zemstvo and commune taxes. In general, the contribution of direct taxes to the state income (in 1911, about 14 %) was much lower in Russia than in other European countries.26 To a large extent, this was a consequence of the fact that property and income, despite all the efforts of the state, eluded accounting and control.27
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24 Such was the fiscal context of the problems surrounding land surveying and establishing landed property boundaries. The idea that cadastre was a necessary component of wide‑ranging tax reforms came to Russia from Europe at the beginning of the 19th century and initially did not have a significant impact on the governmental policy. Yet in the 1830s and 1840s, the epoch of “regulation” under Nicholas I, two large‑scale experiments unfolded in this sphere. The first was the so called Special land survey (spetsial´noe mezhevanie) that was voluntary for landowners and sought to “disentangle” the owners of joint and strip holding dachas from one another and from the state lands. The second was the “Kiselev cadastre,” a project aimed at transforming the communal system of land use and taxation among the state peasants. It was named after the first Minister of state domains and Nicholas I’s “chief of staff” for the “peasant question,” Count P.D. Kiselev. 25 Both projects originated from a plan for the general regulation of landed property in the empire that was drawn up by M.M. Speransky in the mid‑1830s. The plan had several intertwined goals : 1) defining the size and boundaries of all landed property ; 2) regulating state peasants’ rights and duties, rationalising their land use and moving from a poll tax to an assessment based on land ; 3) expanding the regulation on serfs in the spirit of the “inventories” introduced in the 1840s by the government in the South‑Western territories. Nicholas I’s main concern was the standardisation of the life of peasants, who to that point had eluded direct governmental control. Past forms of customary law defining the allotment of taxes and duties and repartitions of land in the communes had to give way to universal and rational principles. This control, not an attempt to “emancipate” the peasants, was at the centre of the emperor’s understanding of the “peasant question.” Speransky was able to adapt his liberal views to Nicholas I’s beliefs.28 26 All the tasks mentioned above required new administrative institutions and techniques. A land surveyor was supposed to be the key figure in implementing the plan. In 1835, to educate enough surveyors, the modest Moscow school for land surveying was transformed into the Konstantin Land surveying institute. At the end of the 1840s, the institute was militarised and became, along the example of the Corps of communications engineers, mountaineers and foresters, a Russian version of the French elite professional schools. Officials and technocrats of the new generation gradually formed an active and ambitious core in the Ministry of state domains, led first by Kiselev and since 1857 by M.N. Murav´ev (the head of the Surveying corps). They were able to experiment over two decades (up to the early 1860s), with the aim of transforming the state peasants into farmers and, at the same time, working out something like a “Russian cadastre” whereby the peasants’ dues (poll tax and obrochnaia podat´) would be assessed on the basis of their income from land.29 27 These experiments turned out to be very expensive. More importantly, their ultimate goal (simplification and rationalisation), as in the case of the French cadastre, turned out to be unachievable. The more officials buried themselves in the details of peasant land use and the more refined the cadastral procedures became, the less satisfactory the results appeared to be. The endless verification of the data over and over again revealed that the main object of assessment – the peasants’ income – eluded exact counting ; it was too elastic and did not directly depend on the size or the fertility of the peasant plots.30
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28 The task of a general survey and measuring of the peasant plots also remained unrealised. All attempts to force a transition from communal land use to the system of detached “farms” met with resistance from the peasants and the lack of resources for its implementation. An internal land survey of state land proved to be an extremely difficult task. State land bordered or was in joint ownership with private land. In cases of joint ownership, the practices of peasant land use were very intricate. Historically inhabitants of a village made up one land commune, using one and the same land. Legally, this land belonged to several owners. The creation of boundaries in such cases required a complex legal and land settlement procedure. However, the Ministry of state domains did not have the legal authority to conduct any process involving private owners : in such cases, it could only represent the Treasury as a party in a “peaceful settlement” or in a court case over property boundaries. Such demarcation following the procedures of the Special land survey certainly took place in the 1840s and 1850s, but by no means everywhere. 29 In Europe and elsewhere, the most important “side effects” of the cadastre were the mapping landed property throughout the country, but also the updating of administrative and statistical techniques.31 But, once the cadastre was separated from the idea of surveying landed property, it could not enable the creation of a national system of registering it. At the same time, it was also not possible to achieve the goal of rationalising tax assessment with a calculation based on land. Individual household continued to “elude” the authorities ; it remained subsumed in the commune, which preserved all its earlier functions of allotting and collecting taxes. Above all, the new order of assessing “in accordance with income” was incomprehensible to peasants due to the complexity of the procedure. At the level of the village commune, it was either not introduced at all or only with fundamental distortions.32 30 As a result, despite the efforts over many years, there was no clear or publically accessible presentation of the results of the “Kiselev cadastre” or land surveying in the state villages. The Ministry of state domains increasingly came under criticism from both the bureaucracy and society at large for its ineffective methods and “utopian” goals. By the end of the 1850s, the highest‑ranked officials had become deeply sceptical regarding the prospects of rationalising peasant land use. At the same time, there was no consensus on the reasons for this fiasco. Some of the experts attributed it to poor qualification of the lower level personnel, including land surveyors.33 Others questioned the goals themselves : were they unrealistic from the beginning ?34 Finally, the idea of the peasants’ intractability and unwillingness to cooperate for the good of rationalisation should receive special attention. In 1857, the Deputy Minister of internal affairs A.I. Levshin, a former colleague of Kiselev, said of the attempt to introduce “foreign farms” that “as for the peasants, one can say—putting it positively—that they do not understand this order [consolidated family plots of land demarcated on a map], justifiably fear it and, as a result, oppose it.”35 The Editorial commission responsible for drafting the Emancipation statutes was even more categorical regarding “the well‑known blind and at times even incomprehensible aversion of the peasants to any form of change in land ownership.”36 Thus experts understood the peasants’ opposition to the regulatory encroachment from outside as a product of what we would call today the “clash of two cultures.”
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The Special land survey
31 This interpretation, however, contradicted another fact that became clear at the time. Not only “backward” peasants but also many educated noble landowners resisted (mostly passively) to the government’s intention to regulate their property in course of the Special land survey. After its beginning in 1836, it quickly became clear that the government was not able to motivate the landlords to divide jointly owned land and create boundaries. “Populated estates” were mortgaged and sold on the basis of the number of souls in them, and the regulation of peasant land use was normally delegated to the peasants themselves. Only the wealthiest landowners made recourse to the services of private land surveyors. “Boundary disputes” were either settled by the landowners themselves (or even their peasants) or went to corrupt courts, where the result of the case was unpredictable. Not surprisingly, many landowners were not sufficiently interested in demarcation to justify the considerable expenses. In order to urge on the “initiative from below,” the government created an institution of boundary arbitrators (mezhevye posredniki ; not to be confused with the arbitrators of the peace of 1861‑1874 !) and intermediary commissions. It promised various incentives and, at the same time, threatened that it would introduce compulsory demarcation at the cost of the landowners themselves (a threat it never followed through upon).
32 Consequently, the process thereafter proceeded much more successfully and all those who so wanted “vied with one another in rushing to take advantage of the incentives.” 37 The procedure had several stages and was quite complicated technically : in the numerous agreements, the landowners with the help of arbitrators and land surveyors came to a compromise over allotment boundaries. After that, it was necessary to wait for confirmation and implementation of the agreement, i.e. the erection of boundary markers. This part of the process could last several years and often did not take place at all. If the compromise did not satisfy a landowner, the matter reached a dead end and was referred to the courts, where it could languish for decades. The reputation of the pre‑revolutionary Russian courts was such that the very idea of turning to them frightened many landowners. On the other hand, after the legal reforms of 1864, as I will show below, there was no much increase in enthusiasm for appealing to the courts in the cases of land property boundaries. Clearly, land surveying was only one aspect of legal regulation in this sphere. The state capacity for establishing a rational property regime depended on the effectiveness and legitimacy of the legal and administrative authorities on the ground, but also on the existence of a national system for registering landed property rights, which failed to appear in the Russian Empire until its very end. 38
33 Nonetheless, before 1861, the Special land survey made progress, albeit somewhat slower then initially planned. What happened afterward ? From the official point of view, because “the number of jointly owned dachas fell and reached an insignificant number”, by the mid‑1880s the arbitrators and commissions had almost nothing to do and were abolished.39 One gets an entirely different picture from the proceedings of the Local Committees and the Special Commission on the Needs of Agriculture under the chairmanship of S.Iu. Witte (1902‑1903). Many committees lamented that the abolition of the boundary arbitrators meant that the only solution for those hoping to define the boundaries of their land was the courts—“a horror it was best to avoid.” Almost all landowners thought that “it was better to agree to own strip plots than undergo the
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surveying process,”40 since the courts followed very complex and formalised legal procedures. In particular, they required evidence of the legality of ownership and official plans, which many owners never possessed. Assessing the risk of legal action educated landowners preferred to maintain the status quo. One can imagine that they exaggerated the threat : those with a lower social and educational status had no monopoly on fear to become tied up in complex court cases. However, when they met such reactions from peasants, members of the elite normally offered entirely different explanations than when describing their own behaviour. The peasants’ lack of desire to participate in the formal process of land surveying was taken as a sign not of the backwardness of legal institutes but of the peasants themselves. 34 Was the Special land survey ultimately successful ? Let us look at the statistics. In 1836‑1849, there were around 75,194 dachas (with an area of about 51.5 million desiatinas) requiring demarcation. State peasants lived on 15,344 of them. About 57,875 dachas (with an area of about 32.8 million desiatinas) were demarcated in agreements with the owners. However, by the end of 1849, demarcation had only been realised on the ground in 39,559 dachas (with an area of 23.4 million desiatinas, i.e. less than half of the total area). 130,196 plots were allotted. Similar information from 1913 suggests that, throughout its existence (i.e. up to the mid‑1880s), the Special land survey affected 143,00 dachas, roughly 151 million desiatinas, and allotted 296,000 plots.41 It is difficult to say how reliable these figures are. Many cases settled by arbitrators were not confirmed or implemented. Moreover, dachas that had been demarcated often returned to joint or strip holding forms of ownership. In this way, a significant number of dachas might be counted several times. Nevertheless, these figures demonstrate the enormous scope of the surveying operation even after the abolition of serfdom. The area affected by the Special land survey increased threefold from 1850 to the mid 1880s in comparison to the initial surveys of the 1830s and 1840s, but the number of joint and strip holding dachas went up rather than fell. 35 Undoubtedly, the main reasons for the sharp rise in the number of cases of peaceful demarcation were the end of the noble monopoly on land ownership and the revival of the real‑estate market after the Emancipation. Due to lack of reliable statistical data we cannot estimate the share of privately owned joint and strip holding land by the end of the 19th century42. Does this mean that authorities were ignorant of the problem ? Many intragovernmental documents refer to the concern of different departments (particularly, the Land surveying corps and the Ministries of justice and finance) regarding the chaos with landed property. However, these complaints had no practical consequences. On the contrary, the state gradually relinquished its responsibility for land surveying. In the 1860‑1890s, experts and officials often stated that land surveying and land settlement had to be seen as a private matter for landowners.43 36 How this attitude to land surveying corresponded to the paternalist ideology, which largely motivated the peasant reform of 1861 and steered governmental policy making during the so‑called “counter‑reforms” in the 1880s and 1890s ? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand why in 1861 reformers refused to consider land surveying and land settlement as the essential parts of the Emancipation.
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Land surveying and the emancipation
37 The materials of the Editorial commission suggest that most of its members initially took for granted a rationalised view on the future agrarian order in which land settlement would play a considerable role. However, the implementation of these common ideas faced almost insurmountable obstacles : first, the government had neither the means nor the time for complex and prolonged procedures of land settlement ; second, and much more importantly for the reformers, the peasants seemed to be in no way prepared for them.
38 In attempting to defend the former serfs from their owners, corrupt local officials and the alleged agents of the market (“speculators”), the reformers tried as much as possible to close off the village commune from the outside influences. Undivided, consolidated communal lands with their nebulous legal status became a symbol of the peasant special “way of life” and guarantor for social stability. Thus by the end of commission’s work, land surveying and rationalisation of the land use were regarded as a possible way of intruding upon the “natural” life of the commune that would lead to its destruction and the breakup of the “primordial and eternal” link between the peasants and the land. The Slavophile influences here are obvious. However, within the Editorial commission, these ideas were shared by both members of the Slavophile circle (Iu.F. Samarin, V.A. Cherkassky) and some “liberal bureaucrats” (including the key figure of the commission N.A. Miliutin). 39 It was a very distinctive “paternalism of non‑interference” resulting not only from romantic understandings of the peasants,44 but also the failure of the Kiselev experiments of the 1840‑1850s. The reformers came to the conclusion that the “regulation” from above should be tolerated only in order to prevent peasant bankruptcy. Since property with well‑defined boundaries was easier to lose (to sell or to mortgage), land surveying was eventually excluded from the reform programme. The Statutes of 19 February contained no technical requirements to survey and map the “properties” of millions of future peasant “landowners”. The so‑called “initial allotment” of peasant land (i.e., its separation from the landlord’s domain) could be done approximately, without any survey. Subsequent “verifying surveys” were allowed only in cases of disputes and could be conducted “by domestic means” (using a rod and chain or by estimate of the grain cut and grass mown). A “final demarcation” was limited to a six‑years period, was not obligatory and had no connection to redemption. 45 40 On the whole, the reform, as a process of “divorcing” the peasants from the landowners, was transferred to the level of village communes and estates. The state refused to deal with individual households not only in central Russia, but also in the Western provinces, where repartitional communes never existed and land was held by households. This approach, in addition, reduced the amount of administrative work and let the government to postpone all the critical decisions on land settlement and legal status of peasant land. Landowners received the opportunity to implement the settlement charters not only without topographical checks and the demarcation of boundaries, but also without the agreement of peasants and even in cases of their explicit disagreement (such charters in fact were the majority). 41 Thus, from the government’s point of view, it made no sense to create exact boundaries between the land of landowners and peasants. Both the liberal reformers and their
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conservative opponents (for example, the Minster of internal affairs P.A. Valuev) understood well that land surveying would have increased disputes between landowners and peasants, strengthened tensions in the village and forced the government to provide costly and symbolically disadvantageous intervention that undermined its claim to stand above conflict. As strange as it may seem, many landowners were also not interested in a definitive solution to the land question. Some preferred to wait and hope that their negotiating position vis‑à‑vis the peasants would improve over time. Others, by contrast, wanted a “quick fix” rather than boundary disputes and court cases. 42 As for the peasants, the formal land surveying procedures was hardly likely to inspire their understanding or approval. Since the government and the landowners preferred to deal with the commune rather than individual householders, the peasants could interact with them only as a “united front” on the basis of customary law that had nothing in common with general legal norms that regulated surveying. Even more importantly, peasants in most cases were not satisfied with the conditions of the Emancipation and regarded fixed land boundaries as an obstacle for revising these conditions in the future. Thus, their aversion to the land surveying testified neither their inability to understand the boundaries between “theirs” and “others’” nor a specific “communal” psychology. Rather, the peasants simply refused to play by unknown rules and reserved the right to change the status quo. 43 Both peasants and landlords made an entirely rational choice from their perspective. The problem, however, was that their choice promised a mass of complications. Of course, a compulsory demarcation of peasants’ plots would have significantly delayed the redemption and provoked a multitude of disputes. In practice, communal strip land use meant that it was necessary not simply to measure several compact plots of land and establish boundaries between them, but to create these plots by bringing scattered strips of land together. This operation threatened the very fragile social peace in the village, but it was the refusal to take this step that in most cases preserved a mishmash of mutual rights and obligations about which Soviet scholars since Lenin so loved to write as the “vestiges of serfdom.” 44 Vestiges certainly existed, but their hostages were not only the former serfs but also their former owners. Compared to the peasants, the nobles had at their disposal much greater material and legal resources, and enjoyed more freedom of action. This freedom was nonetheless seriously limited by the lack of land boundaries, the peasants’ attachment to the commune, and the weakness (if not absence) of legal institutions that could regulate property, rents, hiring labour, and enforce contracts. In this sense, the landowners were much closer to the peasants than it may have seemed. A peculiar symbiotic relationship not only tied them together, but sometimes also set them against outside forces, including the governmental officials.46 However, this unity invariably ended when it came to the question of where “ours” (the peasants’) ended and “his/her” (the lord’s) began. And very often, land surveying disputes turned out to be the apple of discord. 45 Statistics from the Ministry of Justice gives the following picture of the demarcation of peasant allotments from the landowners’ domain by 1877 : from the total of 80,957 redemption deals (for 25.3 million desiatin), only 13,956 deals (17.2 %) were finalised with the demarcation and mapping. However, even from this small number, the government had only confirmed the maps for 2,812 deals (3.5 %).
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A further 1,236 maps were recognised as accurate and were under consideration for confirmation. 4,172 maps were described as erroneous, 3,709 unexamined and 2,027 as “lacking the ability to implement in practice”. This could mean one of two things : (1) the land mentioned in the text and/or the accompanying boundary map did not correspond to the real peasant holdings ; (2) the land surveyors had met with active or passive peasant resistance.47 46 From 1870, any demarcation agreement between peasants and landlords had to follow general legal norms, just like the Special land survey of joint and strip holding dachas. Unsurprisingly, the process almost stopped. Authorities insisted that “disputes over the lack of boundaries” between peasant plots and seigneurial lands would no longer be subject to special peasant institutions. However, general courts did not examine them either due to the lack of reliable plans.48 Thus, the demarcation took place on a “terra nullius”. At the end of the 1880s one official document mentioned that “currently, only 13 % of the entire number [of peasant allotments] has been formally demarcated.”49 47 It is noticeable that in the core Russian provinces, where communal land ownership dominated, the very existence of communal organisation to some extent smoothed the path to demarcation. Since a commune could jointly resist a landowner, the two almost equally strong parties were sometimes forced to find a common language. Where the household ownership of land prevailed, the struggle for land was much fiercer. Extreme tension around land surveying existed in the South‑Western provinces (Right- bank Ukraine), where as early as the 1860s there was a considerable land shortage and even greater complexity surrounded the liquidation of servitudes. According to Daniel Beauvois’s data, by 1870, 80.4 % of estates in the Kiev, Podol´ and Volyn provinces were still undemarcated, many because “the authorities feared possible conflicts.”50 Materials of the Senatorial inspection under A.A. Polovtsov (1880) give a glimpse at the process of demarcation. In Kiev province, by 1870 there remained 1,536 undemarcated estates from a total of 2,057. Over the next ten years, the procedure (conducted by private land surveyors) affected just 129 new estates. However, “the provincial drawing office, after examining all the cases under consideration, only considered” three dachas [ !] to be “ready for confirmation by the state seal.” The land surveying had to be redone at the state’s cost. Out of the 512 disputes that had arisen since 1861, only 186 had been settled by 1880, when the demarcation had to end due to a massive peasant unrest. 48 Local peasants thought that land surveying was something of a landowner conspiracy aimed at depriving them of the right to additional allotments of land, rumours of which persistently circulated in Ukraine. Peasants saw land surveyors as the agents of the lords and opposed any attempts to determine the size of their plots.51 Their attitude was by no means irrational : the landowners’ basic aim in “establishing boundaries” was to gain control over the situation and reinforce a state of affairs that the peasants viewed as entirely unjust. In reality, both sides understood each other very well. It is unsurprising that, following the peasant unrest, conservative public opinion began to see demarcation as a means of ending peasant hopes for a “black repartition” : Only the energetic land survey backed up by a general, universal regime of strict directives […] so that the population sees in it a governmental decree, and not the satisfaction of landowner requests by the land surveyors supposedly in their pay […] might finally end any unrealisable hopes for a repartition of land that may arise.
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49 Polovtsov also shared this opinion.52
50 In 1880, the Ministry of Justice acknowledged that the demarcation of peasant allotments “represents not only the culmination of the peasant reform, but also meets the requirements insistently put forward by practical life.” Now, officials noted, given the lack or extreme unreliability of plans, witness testimonies provided the only means of settling disputes between landowners and peasants. These testimonies, in turn, were becoming less and less reliable every year. However, the draft new rules of surveying drawn up by the ministry from 1880 to 1883 were not confirmed.53 On the other hand, the landowners themselves often opposed demarcation, fearing that it would provoke new peasant protests, and called for the maintenance of the status quo.54 51 The overwhelming majority of officials and landowners had a somewhat cartoonish view on peasant motives. As the Ministry of internal affairs stated in 1879, the peasants did not understand surveying formalities ; the meaning of what was happening only reached them when the decision taken was being realised “on the ground,” at which point it turned out they did not like it at all. While these decisions were under discussion, the peasants acted passively and were not very interested in the process.55 What, for the peasants, was the sense of such behaviour ? The proceedings of the Local committees on the needs of agriculture show that at the beginning of the 20th century, landowners were already extremely disturbed by the lack of plans and boundaries between their land and the peasant plots. Many complained that this situation made it easier for peasants to grab land by “the smallest areas.” Peasants sabotaged any attempts to define boundaries and consolidate plots ; landowners had to propose concessions by offering additional plots of disputed land, but often this did not help to end the process. Instead of confirmed plans, the peasants had “some scraps of paper” for which they had to pay private land surveyors an arm and a leg. In the absence of confirmed surveying plans, land disputes were decided in court according to actual ownership as confirmed by witnesses, and peasants, unlike landowners, had no problems finding witnesses among their neighbours. Under these conditions, struggle for a “scrap of land” (not that the peasants viewed them as scraps !) often seemed to the landowners senseless.56 52 The peasants just made skilful use of the assortment of practices of passive resistance57 at their disposal in order to complicate land surveying. Only a few members of local committees could understand this and reach accurate conclusions from their observations. For example, A.V. Kolendo, a member of the Mikhailov uezd committee of Riazan province, maintained that it is irrelevant to explain the peasants’ lack of respect for their neighbours’ rights with their ignorance of private property resulting naturally from the communal experience. One can see their strongly developed sense of private property right in their inexhaustible patience and stunning persistence in struggle for every inch of the land belonging to them. 53 He saw the solution in the liquidation of the peasants’ special legal status, which allowed them to “look upon themselves as a special element in the state, vigorously preserved and protected by their laws.”58
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The times of the land surveyors
54 The position of land surveyors in the Russian village somewhat resembles Kafka’s “The Castle” : the land surveyor simply could not find a place between different actors competing with one another in a game that was incomprehensible to him. Indeed, among the typical roles of populists (narodnik) and kulturträger that included zemstvo teachers, statisticians, agronomists and, more rarely, doctors we do not find land surveyors. In a way, the populist myth only mirrored the fact that a land surveyor had nothing to do in the village order dominated by customary law. But why customary law did not impede, for example, the rapid development of zemstvo statistics at the end of the 19th century ?59 The statisticians tried to describe the peasant life as a universe with its own rules. They ignored those legal categories that seemed to have been imposed on peasants from the outside. Private property, with its clear legal and physical boundaries, undoubtedly, was the first on the list of such imposed values. Neither land surveyors nor their activity could fit the institutional landscape of rural Russia or the educated elite’s perception of the Russian village.
55 In 1879, at the height of the populist campaign and political crisis in Russian Empire, the Latvian narodniks, the brothers Reinis and Matīs Kaudzīte published the novel “The Times of the Land Surveyors.” It was translated into Russian and German and was long seen as the first Latvian realist novel. Contemporary literary scholars argue that the novel is close rather to folklorist satire à la Gogol.60 It is worth remembering that in 19th century Russia Gogol was not at all seen as a forerunner of modernism but an “unmasker of social ills.” 56 The plot of “Times of the Land Surveyors” certainly seems to aim at such unmasking. Land surveyors arrive at the estate of the rich German landowner who hired them to survey his leaseholders’ land so that they could later purchase farms. One of the peasant leaseholders, the “kulak” Pratnieks, with the help of bribes, manages to have the poor peasant Kaspar deprived of his land through the survey. The plot also has a love line. Pratnieks tries to achieve (and is achieving) the goodwill of the parents of a girl who loves Kaspar. However, this is in vain ; she remains true to her feelings. As a result, Kaspar and his beloved die tragically. The fate does not favour the evildoers either : the corrupt land surveyor goes mad and Pratnieks loses everything. Notably, the novel depicts the landowner neutrally : the basic conflict is between neighbours ; the land surveyors play the role of a passive instrument in the unfolding of the conspiracy that developed from within the village. 57 In this way, the “times of the land surveyors” turn out to be a period of collapsing social ties and transgressions against justice. Years later, peasants described them as “times of hostile attacks and epidemics of plague.”61 As Elina Vasil´eva has shown, the novel contrasts property with “the home” as the focus of traditional values and patriarchal integrity. The boundaries drawn by the land surveyors run through the middle of houses, separating people and destroying traditions. The Latvian author Guntis Berelis writes that the Kaudzīte brothers was precisely delineating the space characteristically featured in Latvian prose. It is the quadrangle formed by the peasant farmstead, pub, local baron’s estate, and church […]. The small “inner” world is, at the same time, the great universe […]. The “outer” world, the metropolis where the fates of the “inner” world are decided, exists of course, but it is so remote and alien, that the characters of the novel simply ignore it.62
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58 The land surveyors, as emissaries of the outer world, have stumbled into the inner world and clearly do not have a place here.
59 In a way, the novel by the Kaudzītes can be seen as a prototype for “The Castle.” The introduction of land boundaries was a matter not only fraught with technical difficulties but also one that boded the collapse of the traditional cosmos. The reality in which land surveyors lived was multi‑layered and full of unexpected meanings. Of course, in the Latvian village, there was no communal ownership or repartition of land ; the peasants were leaseholders. This social structure differed fundamentally from the Russian village, but it did not prevent Russian and Latvian narodniks from having a common agenda. 60 Allusions and dissonances between the Latvian and Russian “times of the land surveyors” emerge clearly when one compares the Kaudzītes novel with the short story by Evgeni Zamiatin “The Land Surveyor” (1918). Characteristically, here, as in Kafka, the land surveyor, in contrast to other heroes, is nameless. At the centre of the story are the suddenly aroused feelings between him and the female owner of the estate who had invited him. The role of the “foreigner” is attributed to the peasants, whose cunning in relations with the “lady” oscillate between good‑willed tones to indignation and open aggression. The land surveyor occupies in this conflict a neutral position, although he is part of the world of the lords and not the peasants. After buying land (surveyed by the land surveyor) from the estate steward, the peasants are full of regret : “And it is entirely clear that the lord steward sold us land in a vulgar and improbable way. It is currently not a time to sell.” (the action by all indications takes place in summer 1917). The peasants do not seem to have grounds for complaint against the “lady” : “We do not know of her having any illegal vices. Her only affair is to go for walks with a white dog.” However, this does not prevent them from organising a pogrom on the farm : Do not become angry, Lizaveta Petrovna : we will take bread from the granary and the livestock there […]. And do not fear, we are quiet, gentlemanly. We will burn the steward, that’s for certain. But as for everything else, we are quiet, gentlemanly.63 61 In the story’s finale, the land surveyor is doomed to travel to his “lonely, smoky room” in the city, and the landowner is fated to return to her destroyed estate.
62 In all three literary works discussed, the land surveyor is not only occupied with demarcating village and the Castle, but also with vain attempts to understand the nature of the unbreakable ties between them. The dynamic opposition between the inner and outer worlds that is fundamental to Kafka, the Kaudzīte brothers and Zamiatin allows to look at the problem of establishing the boundaries of landed property from a variety of angles. One sees how elites vs. people and state vs. society dichotomies, which contemporaries actively employed and were embedded in historians’ perceptions, are, in fact, quite conditional. When it comes to land surveying, landowners and peasants quite surprisingly have a lot in common : neither trust formal bureaucratic protocols, and both sides look at the outer world as if it were alien to them. In addition, they both need and are more inclined toward cooperation with one another than they admit. In turn, the outside world clearly does not know what to do with the two sides’ concurrent conflict and symbiosis. The image of the state reducing its attempts to regulate their relationship in the second half of the 19th century clearly does not correspond to the image of the growing bureaucratic intervention in the life of the country. Are the weakness of the state and the “ungovernability” of the village
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the only reasons for this ? Is it not necessary, on the contrary, to consider them the results of the bureaucrats’ conclusion that outside interference is hopeless ? Laissez faire, laissez passer in the matter of land surveying clearly was involuntary, not normative. 63 Only the first Russian revolution of 1905‑1906 and the sudden mobilisation of the bureaucracy, landowners and peasants over the land question put the matter of demarcating boundaries and isolating different parts of the inner world in the centre of government’s political agenda. The Stolypin agrarian reform granted the land surveyor new prominence. According to Stolypin himself and the head of the Chief Administration of Land Settlement and Agriculture (GUZiZ) A.V. Krivosheev, “land surveying is a good half of the Russian agrarian question. It has been lacking ; measures are needed to pay special attention to it so as not to be left behind by the questions of life.”64 Between 1906 and 1913, the number of land surveyors in GUZiZ rose tenfold : from 600 to 6,000.65 The state was trying to make up for its past omissions by hastily concentrating administrative resources. However, the land committee’s attention was not directed toward the settling of property collisions but rather the large‑scale, utopian project of transforming communal peasants, now seen as a threat to the throne and order, into loyal “strong farmers.” The technocrats of GUZiZ did not even think about unravelling the tangle of problems that had developed over decades.66 They saw the village as a tabula rasa and land surveying as a reliable instrument of social discipline. In other words, the surveying of boundaries was seen not as the result of complex social and legal collisions, but, on the contrary, a means of avoiding them. The predictable failure of this project had already become visible in 1917 following the sharp rise in agrarian discontent, reflected in Zamiatin’s story. This failure did not prevent certain officials of GUZiZ, alongside many zemstvo statisticians and other experts in peasant affairs, from undertaking even more large‑scale projects in the creation of the new, Communist reality.67
NOTES
1. The article was written within the framework of the project “Elites, resources, and governance in Modern Russia” supported by the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics in 2015. 2. RGIA (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv – Russian State Historical Archive), f. 1291, op. 55, 1861, d. 6, l. 75‑76. The file probably refers to Prince Ireneusz Oginski, Henryk Mirski and Iosef Zaba. I am grateful to Dariusz Szpoper for identifying them. It was not possible to find out Smirnov’s first name. 3. RGIA, f. 1291, op. 55, 1861, d. 6, l. 4‑5, 31‑34, 42‑43, 48‑49, 88, 111‑112. 4. Zhurnaly Glavnogo komiteta ob ustroistve sel´skogo sostoianiia. T. 1. S 5 marta 1861 goda po 28 dekabria 1862 g. [The journals of the Chief Committee on the Organisation of Village Society. vol. 1. From 5 March 1861 to 28 December 1862] (Pgd : Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1918), 241‑244. RGIA, f. 1181, op. 1. t. 15. d. 125, 129. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii.
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Sobranie 2 [The complete collection of the laws of the Russian Empire. Collection 2], vol. 36, no. 2, No 37299. 5. Stanley Corngold and Benno Wagner, Franz Kafka : The Ghosts in the Machine (Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 2011), 109‑132. See also Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, eds., Franz Kafka : The Office Writings (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2009). 6. Nikolaus Thurn, Die Geburt der Theorie aus dem Instrument : Über Bedienung und Bedeutung der antiken Instrumente Groma und Lyra (Munich : Wilhelm Fink, 2008). 7. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2010), 20‑36. 8. F. Blume, K. Lachmann und A. Rudorff, eds., Die Schriften der römischen Feldmesser, vol. 1‑2 (Berlin : G. Reimer, 1848‑1852). 9. See Giorgrio Agamben, Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1995). 10. N.I. Tolstoi, “Granitsa [The Boundary]”, Slavianskie drevnosti : Ėtnolingvisticheskii slovar´, t. 1 [Slavic Antiquity : Ethnolinguistic Dictionary, vol. 1] (M. : Vostochnaia literatura, 1995), 538‑539. 11. On this, see also Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom : The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth‑Century Russia (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2006). 12. See I.A. Khristoforov, Sud´ba reformy : Russkoe krest´ianstvo v pravitel´stvennoi politike do i posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (1830‑1890‑e gg.) [The fate of the reform : the Russian peasantry in government’s policy before and after the abolition of serfdom (1830s‑1890s)] (M. : Sobranie, 2011). 13. See, for example, Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court : Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905‑1917 (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2004). 14. L.V. Milov, Issledovanie ob « ėkonomicheskikh primechaniiakh» k General´nomu mezhevaniiu [Study of the “economic annotations” to the General land survey] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1965) ; A.A. Golubinskii, Gramotnost´ krest´ianstva Evropeiskoi Rossii po materialam polevykh zapisok General´nogo mezhevaniia. Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata istoricheskikh nauk [Peasant literacy in European Russia based on materials of the field notes of the General land survey. Candidate of sciences dissertation] (M. : MGU, 2011) ; A. Golubinskii, D. Khitrov and D. Chernenko, “Itogovye materialy General´nogo mezhevaniia : O vozmozhnostiakh obobshcheniia i analiza [Concluding materials of the General land survey : On the possibilities for generalisations and analysis],” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriia 8. Istoriia, no. 3 (2011) : 35‑51. 15. Martin Aust, Adlige Landstreitigkeiten in Russland : Eine Studie zum Wandel der Nachbarschaftsverhältnisse, 1676‑1796 (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 2003). 16. George L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize : Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861‑1930 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1982) ; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998) ; Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917 : Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1999). 17. I.E. German, Istoriia russkogo mezhevaniia [A history of Russian Land Surveying], 3rd ed. (M. : Tipo‑litografiia V. Rikhter, 1914). 18. L.S. Prokofieva, Krest´ianskaia obshchina v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII‑pervoi polovine XIX v. (na materialakh votchin Sheremetevykh) [The peasant commune in Russia in the second half of the 18th to the first half of the 19th century (on materials of the Sheremetev estates)] (L. : Nauka, 1981), 22‑23. See also Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011), 93‑95. 19. According to official information from the middle of the 19 th century, the General Land Survey found 185,181 properties with an area of 253.3 million desiatinas (one desiatina is about
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one hectare), of which 82,398 (with an area of 60.4 million desiatinas) were in joint or strip holding ownership. These included 7,406 dachas, where one of the joint owners was the state. M.N. Murav´ev, “Vedomost´ o chisle i prostranstve dach, byvshikh pri General´nom i otkrytykh pri poliubovnom spetsial´nom mezhevanii s 1836 po 15 noiabria 1849 g. po 31 guberniiam [Record of the number and area of dachas being formerly under the General and opened under the Special land survey from 1836 to 15 November 1849 in 31 provinces],” Sbornik staticheskikh svedenii o Rossii, izdannyi statisticheskim otdeleniem Imperatorskogo Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva. Kn. 1 [Collection of statistical information about Russia published by the statistical section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Book 1] (SPb. : Tipografiia morskogo ministerstva, 1851), 31‑32 and inset. In so far as one can judge by these numbers, joint and strip holding properties were relatively small. However, it did not mean that they belonged exclusively to small landowners : many large patrimonial estates were made up of numerous “scraps” of land. 20. D.A. Khitrov, “K voprosu ob ėvoliutsii feodal´nogo vladeniia v Tsentral´nom Chernozem´e v XVII‑XVIII vv. [On the question of the evolution of feudal ownership in the central black earth region in the 17th to 18th centuries]”, Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriia 8. Istoriia, no. 1 (2004) : 79‑101. 21. The body of literature on cameralism is enormous. See Keith Tribe, Governing Economy : The Reformation of German Economic Discourse, 1750‑1840 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1988). However, its reception in Russia has not yet been studied. 22. Elizabeth Fox‑Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy : Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth‑Century France (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1976), 240. 23. Roger J.P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State : A History of Property Mapping (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1992) ; Pierre Clergeot, ed., Cent millions de parcelles en France : 1807, un cadastre pour l’Empire (P. : Publi‑Topex, 2007) ; Florence Bourillon, Pierre Clergeot and Nadine Vivier, De l’estime au cadastre en Europe : les systèmes cadastraux aux XIXe et XXe siècles : Colloque des 20 et 21 Janvier 2005 (P. : Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2008). 24. F.K. Gorb‑Romashkevich, Pozemel´nyi kadastr. Ch. 2 [The land cadastre, vol. 2] (Warsaw : Tipografiia Varshavskogo uchebnogo okruga, 1900). 25. Michael Turner and Dennis Mills, ed., Land and Property : The English Land Tax, 1692‑1832 (Gloucester : Alan Sutton, 1986) ; J. Stuart Anderson, Lawyers and the Making of English Land Law (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1992). 26. On this, see V.N. Zakharov, Iu.A. Petrov and M.K. Shatsillo, Istoriia nalogov v Rossii. IX – nachalo XX v. [A history of taxes in Russia from the 9th to the beginning of the 20th centuries] (M. : ROSSPĖN 2006), 127‑128, 223‑226, 236‑238. 27. See Yanni Kotsonis, States of Obligation : Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2014). 28. For more details, see Khristoforov, Sud´ba reformy, 49‑65. 29. N.M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest´iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva [State Peasants and the Reform of P.D. Kiselev], vol. 12 (M. : Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1946, 1958) ; idem, “Kiseleskii opyt likvidatsii obshchiny (Kiselev’s attempt to liquidate the commune)”, Akademiku B.D. Grekovu v den´ 70‑letiia. Sbornik statei [Festschrift for academician B.D. Grekov on the occasion of his 70th birthday] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952). 30. Khristoforov, Sud´ba reformy, 68‑70. 31. See Richard S. Smith, “Mapping Landed Property : A Necessary Technology of Imperial Rule ?”, Huricihan Islamoglu, ed., Constituting modernity : Private property in East and West (London : I.B. Tauris for the European Science Foundation, 2004) : 149‑179. 32. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest´iane, vol. 2, 137.
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33. K.I. Domontovich, a participant in the cadastre process, leaned toward this conclusion. See Komissiia vysochaishe uchrezhdennaia dlia uluchsheniia sistemy podatei i sborov, Poiasnitel´naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu otsenok gosudarstvennykh imushchestv mezhdu guberniiami [Explanatory notes on its work in accordance with the estimation of the state properties between provinces] (SPb., 1860), 8. 34. K.S. Veselovskii, “Vospominaniia [Memoirs],” Russkaia starina, 116, 10 (1903), 20. 35. OR RGB (Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteki – Manuscript department of the Russian State Library), f. 327/1 (Kniaz´ Cherkasskikh [Prince Cherkasskii]), karton 16, d. 14, l. 2 ob. – 3. 36. Vtoroe izdanie materialov Redaktsionnykh komissii po krest´ianskomu delu [Second edition of materials of the Editorial Commission for Peasants Affairs] (SPb., 1860), vol. 3, no. 1, 181. 37. German, Istoriia russkogo mezhevaniia, 241. 38. On the critical importance of the figure of prefect, land surveyor, judge and astronomer in reflecting different sides of knowledge and power in France in the modern period, see Alain Derosières, The Politics of Large Numbers : A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1998). 39. German, Istoriia russkogo mezhevaniia, 245. 40. Trudy mestnykh komitetov o nuzhdakh sel´skokhoziaistvennoi promyshlennosti. T. 19. Kurskaia guberniia [The proceedings of the Local committees on the needs of agriculture. vol. 19. Kursk province] (SPb. : Obshchestvennaia pol´za, 1903), 207‑208. As a result, several committees favored resurrecting the institution of arbitrators, but the majority supported the idea of the national (“general”) land surveying compulsory for all landowners. For more, see S.I. Shidlovskii, Zemel´nye zakhvaty i mezhevoe delo : Svod trudov mestnykh komitetov po 49 guberniiam Evropeiskoi Rossii [Land seizure and land surveying. Collection of proceedings of local committees in 49 provinces of European Russia] (SPb. : Tipografiia V.F. Kirshbauma, 1904). 41. See Murav´ev, “Vedomost´” ; German, Istoriia russkogo mezhevaniia, 245. 42. See V. Sudeikin, “Cherespolositsa [Strip holding]”, Ėntsiklopedischeskii slovar´ Brokgauza i Efrona, vol. 38A, (SPb., 1903), 540‑541. 43. [S.N. Urusov], Otzyv Glavnoupravliaiushchego II odeleniem s.e.i.v.k. [Opinion of the head of the 2nd department of the Emperor’s Own Chancellory]. 2nd imprint, (SPb. : no publisher, 1870) ; S.N. Rudin, Chastnaia initsiativa v mezhevanii [Private initiative in land surveying] (M. : Tipografiia T. Rias, 1884). 44. For more, see Khristoforov, “Krest´ianin kak ideal´nyi grazhdanin : istoki i kontekst agrarnogo mifa v Rossii i Evrope Novogo vremeni [The peasant as an ideal citizen : The sources and context of the agrarian myth in Modern Russia and Europe],” Rossiiskaia istoriia, no. 4 (2014) : 159‑166. 45. Krest´ianskaia reforma v Rossii : Sbornik zakondatel´nykh aktov [Peasant reform in Russia : Collection of legal acts] (M. : Gosiurizdat, 1954), 114‑118, 168‑176, 194‑199. 46. It is interesting that Nada Boškovska came to a similar conclusion analyzing forms of peasant resistance in pre‑Petrine Russia. See Nada Boškovska, “‘Dort werden wir selber Bojaren sein’ : Bäuerlicher Widerstand im Rußland des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 37, 3, (1989) : 366. 47. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 76, d. 4982, l. 72‑73 ; f. 515, op. 37, d. 299, l. 39‑42. 48. RGIA, f. 577, op. 50, d. 323, l. 2‑5. 49. Ob´´iasnitel´naia zapiska k proektu Mezhevogo ustava [Explanatory note on the draft of land surveying regulations] (SPb., 1880), 59. 50. D. Beauvois, Gordiev uzel Rossiiskoi imperii : vlast´, sliakhta i narod na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine (1793‑1914) [The gordian knot of the Russian Empire : state, nobility and people in Right Bank Ukraine (1793‑1914)] (M. : NLO, 2011), 644‑645. 51. OR RNB, f. 600, op. 1, d. 795.
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52. OR RNB, f. 600, op. 1, d. 795, l. 58 ; Kievlianin, no. 200 (1880). See also D.P. Poida, Krest´ianskoe dvizhenie na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine v poreformennyi period (1866‑1900 gg). [The peasant movement in Right-bank Ukraine in the post‑reform period (1866‑1900)], Dnepropetrovsk, 1960, 194‑196. 53. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 76, d. 4982, l. 60‑71. 54. RGIA, f. 577, op. 50, d. 323, l. 23, 27. 55. RGIA, f. 577, op. 50, d. 325, l. 10‑11. 56. Trudy mestnykh komitetov, vol. 8, 88, 241 ; vol. 19, 815 ; vol. 33, 20 ; vol. 34, 323 ; and others. See also Shidlovskii, Zemel´nye zakhvaty, 3‑24, 116‑136. 57. On the techniques of such resistance, see the classic works James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak : Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1985) ; idem, Domination and the Arts of Resistance : Hidden Transcripts (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1990). 58. Trudy mestnykh komitetov, vol. 34, 260. 59. On this, see Alessandro Stanziani, L’Économie en révolution : le cas russe, 1870‑1930 (P. : A. Michel, 1998) ; David W. Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers : Zemstvo Land Assessment and the Conceptualization of Russia’s Rural Economy,” The Russian Review, 59, 1 (January 2000) ; Martine Mespoulet, Statistique et révolution en Russie : un compromis impossible, 1880‑1930 (Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001). 60. Ė.G. Vasil´eva, “Dom v romane R. i M. Kaudzite ‘Vremena zemlemerov’ [The home in R. and M. Kaudzites’ novel “The time of the land surveyors”],” Prostranstvo i vremia v literature i iskusstve. Vyp. 11. Ch. 2. Dom v evropeiskoi kartine mira [Space and time in literature and art. vol. 11, no. 2. The house in the European view of the world] (Daugavpils : Saule, 2002), 3‑9. I am grateful to Ė.G. Vasil´eva for providing me with a copy of her works on the novel. 61. The Kaudzītes brothers, Vremena zemlemerov [The time of the land surveyors] (M. : HIKhL, 1962), 427. 62. http://www.kulturaskanons.lv/ru/1/8/168/ (retrieved : April, 12, 2016) 63. E. Zamiatin, Sobranie sochinenii. T. 1 [Collected works. vol. 1] (M. : Russkaia kniga, 2003), 457‑463. 64. Zapiska Predsedatelia Soveta Ministrov i Glavnoupravliaiushchego zemleustroistvom i zemledeliem o poezdke v Sibir´ i Povolzh´e v 1910 g. [Notes of the Chairman of the Council of ministers and Chief administrator of land settlement and agriculture in Siberia and the Volga region in 1910] (SPb. : Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1910), 68. 65. N.A. Fedorova, “Zemleustroitel´nye komissii [The commissions for land settlement],” Petr Arkad´evich Stolypin : Ėntsyklopediia (M. : Rosspen, 2011), 204. 66. Peter Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’ : The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review, 69, 1 (Spring 2010) : 159‑160. See also footnote 16. 67. Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’,” 179.
ABSTRACTS
This article examines the establishment of boundary lines on private landed property in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. By analysing historical land surveying, the land cadastre,
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the figure of the land surveyor in literature, public opinion and peasant perceptions, the author reaches a new view on the relationship between different actors (landowners, peasants, and bureaucrats) during the Russian agrarian reforms. The article is based upon material of the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg and other sources. It also touches upon such themes as the anthropology of boundaries and property and history of the land cadastre in Europe.
L’article étudie le problème de la création et de la mise en place de limites à la propriété foncière privée dans l’Empire russe au XIXe siècle. C’est par le biais d’une analyse de l’arpentage, du cadastrage et de la représentation de l’arpenteur dans la littérature, dans l’opinion publique et dans la perception paysanne, que l’auteur propose une nouvelle approche de la relation qui unit les différents acteurs – propriétaires, paysans et bureaucrates – au cours des réformes agraires en Russie. L’article s’appuie notamment sur des archives conservées au RGIA à Saint-Pétersbourg. Il aborde aussi les thèmes de l’anthropologie des frontières et de la propriété, ou de l’histoire du cadastre en Europe.
AUTHOR
IGOR KHRISTOFOROV
Higher School of Economics Moscow, [email protected]
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Agrarian Experts And Social Justice Land allotment norms in revolution and Civil War, 1917‑1920 Experts agricoles et justice sociale : les normes gouvernant la répartition des terres pendant la révolution et la guerre civile, 1917-1920
David Darrow
I would like to thank Katja Bruisch and Klaus Gestwa for their work to bring this article to publication, beginning with a conference on the topic of environmental and agrarian knowledge at the German Historical Institute in Moscow in March 2014. Their comments, as well as those of the journal editors and anonymous reviewers, have been invaluable to the revision process, and have made this a better piece of work. Any remaining deficiencies are my own responsibility. Finally, I would also like to thank the University of Dayton Department of History and College of Arts and Sciences for funding my research, David McDonald and Frank Wcislo for reading drafts at various stages, and James Vogel for his editorial assistance.
1 Of the popular demands of 1917—Bread, Land, and Peace—only land was not tied to wartime conditions. Whether expressed as the “land question” (zemel´nyi vopros), “agrarian question” (agrarnyi vopros), “land hunger” (malozemel´ie) or simply as the “insufficient allotment” (nedostatochnyi nadel), the question of land access and the place of the peasantry in the Empire’s future economic development dogged the Emperor’s ministers from the serf emancipation of 1861 until the old regime’s end. The biggest social justice issue in the Russian Empire—the moral question on the minds of imperial subjects from the chancery halls of St. Petersburg to the peasant pastures of Podolsk— was the question of land. The normatized land allotment (nadel) objectified the moral dimension of the land question. With origins as a tool of state agrarian policy dating at least to eighteenth‑century statutes on the organization of crown (udel) lands and running through the Kiselev reforms of the state peasantry (1840s‑1850s), the normatized land allotment, enshrouded in the moral fervor of Emperor Alexander II’s “scenario of power” and his accompanying moniker “Tsar Liberator,” emerged from the Emancipation process as a primary symbol of the state’s moral commitment to the peasantry’s well being.1 Between 1861‑1917, educated society’s interpretation of the Emancipation combined with the state’s “meliorative” and tutelage (opeka) approaches to the peasantry to create public expectations that the state was obligated to solve the
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agrarian question by ensuring peasants sufficient access to land (at least the maximum regional land allotment size stipulated by the Emancipation statutes).2 Having posed the peasantry’s plight as a question, society expected a state answer.
2 This tendency toward, and preference for, state solutions—gosudarstvennost´ or “state‑mindedness”—represented a tradition with roots in eighteenth‑century cameralism and its notion of “public property” and the commonweal. It grew sharper over the nineteenth century as the state positioned itself (with much of educated society’s blessing) as the only entity that could preserve stability and international status amidst a sea of parochial interests in a manner that protected the peasantry from the predation of speculators and socialists.3 At the same time experts in and out of government gained a greater sense of what technical expertise backed by state power might achieve in terms of modernizing peasants viewed as benighted (“dark”), backward, and in need of perpetual guidance.4 Experience on the ground re‑ordering territory on the imperial periphery to facilitate migration to Siberia and Central Asia and the continued collection of statistical information, culminating in the massive land organization project known as the Stolypin reforms, revealed common ground in the agendas of state officials and agrarian experts. This reinforced the idea that the state could correct the deficiencies of the Emancipation and fulfill its moral obligation to the peasantry while at the same time converting it into a meaningful contributor to the national economy.5 3 The land allotment was a prominent component of all of these programs as well as many of the land reform proposals that emerged in the Duma—a tool for solving the agrarian question by ordering agricultural space.6 In the Russian empire this land allotment mentalité defined a moral approach to agrarian reform, especially from 1861 onward, among conservative and liberal state officials, educated society, and the objects of reform—peasants—alike. Indeed, by 1917 one might say that Yaney’s “urge to mobilize” was very much an “urge to normatize” and that the allotment of land by norm—far from being a “revival of the intelligentsia legacy” of the old Populists represented the continuation of a general trend in land reform policy that had been nuanced by professionals as they adapted their project to encounters in the field.7 Even experts who realized that the solution to the agrarian question rested with intensification argued that granting additional land allotments was the first step toward providing peasant households with the requisite resources for adopting intensive agricultural techniques—that some level of extensification was required to make intensification possible.8 There was a consensus that, if managed properly, extensification was a viable part of agrarian reform (although widely differing opinions existed as to the source of additional land).9 Even if honored as much in the breach as in its observance, by 1917 experts and other elites (in and out of government service), as well as peasants saw the normatized land allotment as a state entitlement. It was a symbol of the state’s moral obligation to the peasantry embodied in the Emancipation that all found wanting and in need of correction.10 Agrarian experts could thus solve the Empire’s agrarian question by allotting peasant households additional land according to local “norms” derived from the better information that had accumulated since 1861. In other words, the normatized land allotment was not just an exercise in “administrative utopia” or a statist attempt “to impose social change on a people through administrative means.”11 It was a restoration of the promise of 1861 that peasants, their advocates, and the rest of society had come to expect. The Old Regime
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land allotment, the product of servile life, continued to serve as an expression of rational resource management in the name of national economic prosperity and improvement—a rational approach to constructing a new and more productive rural economy in line with previous reform efforts, including those initiated by Stolypin. The land allotment also became the objectification of the post‑autocratic state’s moral obligation to the peasantry (justice). Allotment norms were a measure of social justice, a technocratic (and thus, supposedly value‑neutral) solution to the land question rooted in earlier attempts at land reorganization that met diverse political needs in a fragmented socio‑political world. This reflected a broader agrarianism in Russian society—a consensus that the agrarian future would center on the peasantry in close collaboration with agrarian experts (broadly defined) and that it was incumbent on the state to ensure peasant households a “sufficient” endowment of land through allotment of land by norm.12
The main land committee and allotment by norm
4 Land reform topped the list of expectations that the autocracy’s end bequeathed to the Provisional Government. To develop a land reform proposal for consideration by the Constituent Assembly, the Provisional Government created a Main Land Committee (GZK) under the Ministry of Agriculture. The GZK brought together government experts and those generated by society’s engagement with the rural economy through both political activism and zemstvo employment. Several of its members, such as Professor A.A. Kaufman, incorporated experience in all three realms. Many members, including the chair, Professor A.S. Posnikov, objected to the Stolypin reforms even though they embraced their goal of increasing peasant productivity.13 The GZK sat at the apex of a system of theoretically subordinate land committees on the provincial, district and township levels. All committees were to include local experts (zemstvo agronomists, statisticians, etc.) that the GZK deemed best situated for ascertaining local conditions and collecting data needed to shape agrarian reform and apply it at the local level.14 The membership of the land committees intersected with non‑governmental professional groups such as the League of Agrarian Reforms (Lig Agrarnykh Reform), and represented most political affiliations from the center‑right through the left. Many members were also active in the Petrograd and provincial peasant congresses that convened throughout 1917. These intersections were fraught with political tensions, but also represented and transmitted a common knowledge base derived from academic and administrative fieldwork with the peasant economy, as well as discussions of agrarian reform of the preceding decade. Most, such as N.P. Makarov and N.K. Volkov, had some sort of advanced training in agrarian economics. Based on their experience, there existed a strong consensus that land norms represented the best means by which the agrarian fruits of revolution could be allotted to meet peasant needs, fulfill their revolutionary aspirations, and ensure just land distribution. Revolution and the establishment of the GZK marked a triumph of the experts who, freed from the constraints of the old regime, could now begin to position peasant participants in a single rural economy of smallholders for developmental success.15 Everything they had spent their professional lives doing had prepared them for this moment—from zemstvo statistical work to agronomy. As the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) N.Ia. Bykhovskii noted, allotment of land by norm was the first step towards modernizing the agrarian economy (intensification) and giving 10 million landless
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peasants access to land—the first step in developing the peasant labor economy as the foundation of Russia’s agricultural future. Land allotments, agrarian improvement and social justice went hand in hand.16
5 A number of key issues confronted and divided GZK members. Would peasants become landowners or merely receive use rights ? If not the former, what about the fate of the Stolypin separators ?17 On what terms should the alienation of private land take place ? Who should be allotted land—anyone who desires to farm it with their own labor or, given limited resources, only those households currently engaged in farming ?18 Despite these differences, widespread consensus existed on a number of fronts. First, members saw themselves as experts charged with righting the mistakes of the 1861 Emancipation —of correcting the perceived injustice of the past that had been demonstrated by statistical studies and popularized in journal publications since the 1870s but that the old regime had failed to ameliorate.19 Second, there was a consensus that, with the exception of model farms and specialized forms of husbandry, all land was now part of single national land fond for allotment to those who worked it. Lands held by various state institutions and private landholders alike would be subject to alienation and redistribution. By extension, most agreed that any “solution” of the land question must be a national one, albeit one that carefully considered local circumstances. Finally, they agreed that the best means of assuring an equal and just redistribution of land throughout the country was by establishing land allotment norms that recognized the particularisms of local economies. The GZK assigned these questions to subcommittees whose membership overlapped extensively with each other and with the League of Agrarian Reforms. 6 Mindful of the failings—real and imagined—of the 1861 Emancipation, mindful of the role that agricultural professionals had played in exposing them, and committed to creating a national program of land reform aimed at eliminating the problem of insufficient allotments in a just way, the specter of 1861 overshadowed the experts’ work as a moral imperative in 1917. As GZK member N.P. Oganovskii noted before the war, the work of Professor Iu.E. Ianson and other experts had discovered by the 1870s “that the greatest causes of the pauperization of the peasant consist in the insufficiency of land allotments, significantly reduced [urezannykh—“cut off”] by the emancipation.” 20 Aware that history would measure their achievements, Oganovskii and his peers did not want to find out twenty years later that their reform had resulted in a redux of “insufficient allotments.” The shadow of 1861 appeared in other forms as well. As N. Ozeretskovskii noted, “The very name of these institutions [land committees] reminds us of the time of the reform of 1861 when prior to the emancipation of peasants were established … a Main Committee…and then 48 provincial committees.” From his perspective, pomeshchiki populated these local committees in 1861 and the deficiencies of the Emancipation resulted from their narrow class interests.21 The work of the current committees would be guided “by different hands,” thus presenting an opportunity to redress these deficiencies in the interests of the people.22 Finally, memories of 1861 also hovered over the process in other ways, including early consideration of introducing “peace arbitrators” (mirovyie posredniki) to perform a similar role in regulating land relations as they had under the Emancipation and in brief explorations of compensating private owners for alienated land with a redemption operation.23 As in 1861, some reformers questioned how alienation would impact state credit institutions given the fact that over half of the land to be alienated
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as part of the proposed reform carried mortgages. The ghost of the banking crisis that had shaped the 1861 Emancipation still haunted the economy.24 7 Given developments of the previous decade, particularly efforts by state officials and agronomists to foster intensive cultivation as a means of solving the agrarian question, the fact that reformers framed their work within the context of the Emancipation might seem surprising. Yet, reformers in and out of government had long recognized that agrarian reform—intensification—required land reform first, both in terms of reorganization and in terms of ensuring household access to sufficient land resources. Revolution sharpened the focus on the latter because peasants expected it and because it provided experts the opportunity to create a better material basis for an improved rural economy rooted in peasant agriculture by eliminating the last remaining constraints on conceptualizing all land as a public good. With few data and resources, the 1861 reformers hoped to achieve little more than a peasant perception of improved living conditions. This time, the experts charged with drawing up an agrarian reform proposal were in far better shape from an information standpoint, and saw themselves as poised to establish the material basis for a new agrarian future. As N.Ia. Bykhovskii noted, given the “grandiose” extent of the territory and historical moment, “the land reform must in and of itself be highly grandiose,” mindful of its national import while attentive to local needs.25 Like their predecessors, these reformers also operated from the assumption that the state should ensure that allotments were sufficient for meeting household needs. In the throes of revolution, the demands of social justice now required that the means by which the state allotted land be perceived as more accurate and more just than those used in 1861. 8 What stands out in this process is the fact that the experts refashioned the allotment of land by norm used in 1861, incorporating new information while attempting to incorporate measures of both consumption and labor usage, and did so with little internal dissention. Some have portrayed this as a sign of the experts’ failure to achieve their own Progressivist agenda of the previous decade—a revival of a Populist “intelligentsia legacy” from the nineteenth century—or as simply being out‑run by events.26 Couched in these terms, land norms certainly were. But this assumes that the “sons” schooled in statistics and agronomy had transcended their “fathers” Populist “intelligentsia legacy” of an additional allotment. Rural professionals well knew that there were instances where land shortage—either of plowland or other land resources needed for a complete household economy—required redress before improved/ intensive cultivation could make an actual difference in productivity and livelihood. GZK members and other experts in the League of Agrarian Reforms recognized this principle—the fact that land reform and agrarian improvement were essential parts of the same process of “solving” the agrarian question. Furthermore, having to conform professional worldviews to changing political realities is not uncommon and is typical for most experts then and now. The majority of urban experts, despite disappointments and frustrations, applied their expertise to the problem at hand : devising a means for redistributing the national land fund in an equitable (i.e., just) manner. Revolution did not yield agrarian experts the agrarian reform they had worked for pre‑1914, but rather put them in the position to apply their expertise, at least on paper, to correcting the ills of 1861 in their current context. In doing so, they hoped to create a mechanism that well positioned rural Russia to realize their professional aims in the future—a vibrant and productive national peasant economy.
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9 The main task of considering the basis for allotting the national land reserve fell to a commission chaired by the Socialist Revolutionary party’s S.L. Maslov. Charged with drafting a plan for redistributing land, the commission heard reports by agrarian economists N.P. Makarov, B.V. Volkov and B.D. Brutskus, and debated them at three meetings in July and August 1917.27 Unlike previous reformers, the assembled experts were not constrained by the need to preserve noble landholding, but rather by deteriorating circumstances in the countryside and the knowledge that available land resources would not allow them to allot land with any sort of arithmetic equality. Makarov’s report became the main basis for the commission’s resolutions passed and submitted to the GZK on August 24. He argued that the norms of 1861 would be inappropriate in 1917, even though they recognized key geographic variations, as by 1917 it was clear that not enough arable land existed to apply them.28 He then outlined the bases, strengths and weaknesses of allotting land by a consumption (potrebitel´naia) or labor (trudovaia) norm. Allotting land according to a consumption norm (ensuring households access to the plowland needed to meet their consumption needs, based on average yields and market prices, of an average household in the area) would result in some households holding more land that they could work and encourage households to continuously expand their needs. Conversely, allotting land according to a labor norm (ensuring households access to the plowland required to occupy its entire labor force during peak agricultural periods without recourse to hired labor) introduced a number of additional variables such as the intensification of the household’s economic organization and variations in the agricultural calendar. Given regional variations and that there was not enough land to allot households a full amount according to either of these norms, Makarov called for deriving and applying a combined consumption‑labor norm (an average based on land held by groups of households in each region that met their consumption needs sufficiently and employed their full labor force without recourse to hired labor), that would include consideration of a norm for non‑agricultural income (promysly). He proposed that the state resolve any remaining inequalities in land distribution through migration and the tax system. Lack of resources, in his mind, also meant that only households currently engaged in farming should receive land (as opposed to more radical calls that all wanting land should receive an allotment).29 10 B.V. Volkov’s report agreed with Makarov’s conclusions, although he argued the case for the more radical SR position of a universal right to land and the elimination of peasant need to secure non‑agricultural income.30 The report by economist Boris D. Brutskus spoke against Makarov’s proposals, arguing that undertaking the massive project of calculating and applying norms was too complicated and divorced from current rural realities. Peasants were thinking only in local terms and would not tolerate the resettlement of outsiders included in Makarov’s plan. Nor would they tolerate any reduction in the land they currently held on the basis of non‑agricultural income, even if the Constituent Assembly established and sanctioned such norms. Brutskus urged a more realistic assessment of the peasant perspective. The simplest thing to do (and what was essentially happening) given the fact that peasants already farmed the majority of available land was to simply give the land to those tilling it. Brutskus lamented the fact that allotting peasants land under current circumstances would reduce grain production and reverse recent agronomic gains by encouraging extensive cultivation.31
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11 In the discussion of the reports, only Brutskus and A.Ia. Piletskii, spoke out against norms flatly. Most found something with which to quibble in Makarov’s report, but accepted norms as the best and most rational means of carrying out the task of land redistribution. The chair, S.L. Maslov criticized Brutskus for offering little beyond the failed allotment process of 1861 (i.e., for going with what was expedient rather than determining norms scientifically). A.A. Kaufman—with experience in land settlement in Siberia from both an academic and ministerial perspective—attempted to synthesize the two positions, calling for norms derived from “real life” that could be verified eventually.32 The agrarian economist A.N. Chelintsev, who hinted at agreement with Brutskus, mainly objected to provisions whereby use of hired labor became an indicator that land holding exceeded household labor capacity. He also thought Brutskus gave peasants too little credit for being able to engage in improved tillage after an allotment process.33 Most disagreements focused not on the use of norms (or even how they should be calculated), but rather on the questions of who should establish them (national vs. local institutions), to what territorial unit they should be applied, the extent to which non‑agricultural income should be factored into the equation, and whether migration might be used to facilitate land equalization.34 Those disagreeing with the idea of norms, did not object to their usefulness in their entirety or think them unjust. Even through Brutskus saw them as futile, he admitted their usefulness for distributing lands not already under peasant cultivation. The main objection to the use of norms was actually an accurate assessment of current events. As N.P. Oganovskii noted, norms were expected by many, but might not be in tune with political reality or the peasant demands. Better to simply let peasants till what they were tilling, allot that small portion outside of this by some sort of norm, and then get on to the business of encouraging intensification.35 12 Despite these concerns the commission approved and submitted to the GZK final resolutions that called for allocating the national land reserve according to land norms “based on the land utilization of the average local consumer‑labor holding as determined (based on local conditions) by an adequate satisfaction of needs, the utilization of a family’s labor force for agricultural work, and the absence of regularly hired agricultural workers.” In addition, in areas where non‑agricultural income played an important economic role, “the effect of these earnings should be taken into consideration in the land allotment process, except in those cases where the scarcity of land fails to provide sufficiently high and stable incomes without such employment.”36 The Commission was content with the idea that the amount of land allotted to the toiler should never fall below the subsistence level nor exceed the level beyond which the household required hired labor. This precedent for the future amounted to the same guarantee of sufficiency of the Emancipation legislation and reform proposals from the Stolypin period such as access to Peasant Land Bank credit—enough land to keep peasant households in the “middle.”
The peasantry and land norms
13 Peasants were accustomed to looking to the state for a solution to their land needs since at least the Emancipation, and recent studies have tied their turn to violence in 1905‑1907 (which became a precedent for the seizure of estates in 1917) with state failure, particularly the promise of the Duma to meet their needs.37 Petitions for an
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additional allotment of plowland or other type of arable persisted throughout 1917. That the Ministry of Agriculture chose to delay decision on all but a few of these petitions pending comprehensive land reform by the Constituent Assembly provided additional frustration for peasants acculturated to making use of official processes, and contributed to their transformation from petitioners to activists.38 Mobilized by the war and the legacy of 1905, peasants soon grasped their emerging autonomy in a new world where the state’s inability to respond to petitions existed side‑by‑side with an inability to coerce.39 Peasant congresses viewed land reform as an intentional state reversal of the cut‑offs (otrezki) of 1861, an act of social justice that removed from owners “the part of land not worked by the owner’s own labor.”40 Of course, determining peasant voice can be difficult, but based on the resolutions of local peasant congresses and volost land committees, peasants shared the GZK’s conceptualization of allotment norms as a mechanism of reform, expression of social justice, and corrective to the “insufficient allotments” of 1861, even if they differed on the question of whether or not the reform should aim primarily at local rather than national needs, and even if they shaped allotment norms to correspond with their local sense of need and lore.41
14 Local land committees based their actions on two sources of information, reflecting the bifurcation of authority after February. They submitted numerous requests for GZK publications, particularly pamphlets on land distribution. More than 120 pages of correspondence with local land committees and other institutions in GZK records are requests for its publications related to the establishment of local land committees and land norms, particularly reports on the latter by Makarov, Kaufman and Chelintsev.42 Resolutions on the land question by national and local peasant congresses and soviets provided local committees a second source of information. Peasant congresses, although populated by peasant deputies, tended to be driven by political activists seeking to woo peasant constituents and establish their land reform credentials.43 In the absence of clear direction, even local Provisional Government officials took their cues from these resolutions and became dismayed as the bifurcation of the dominant SR party disrupted the semblance of stability provided by the First All‑Russian Peasant Congress’ resolutions.44 The main thrust of the peasant congress resolutions, encapsulated in the First Congress’ May 1917 “Model Mandate” (based on a synthesis of 242 local mandates presented by deputies) called for the abolition of private property in land, its recognition as national property (consistent with past state hesitancy to privatize anything considered necessary for supporting the commonweal45), and the alienation of all land and inventory in private and state hands for distribution to, and use by, all desiring to work it with their own family labor (with the question of redemption to be decided by the Constituent Assembly). The distribution of alienated land among the laboring population was to take place on the basis of equality and in accordance with local conditions on the basis of a labor or consumption norm, with periodic repartitions connected to the growth of the population under the guidance of both central and local institutions of self‑governance, including the commune.46 15 Provincial peasant congress resolutions informed national ones, which transmitted them back to the provinces in an amalgamated form. The provincial land committees drew inspiration from both. There was often personnel overlap between the congresses and land committees. The chair of the Mogilev Provincial Land Committee was an active participant in the province’s peasant con-gresses.47 Provincial and district (uezd) land committees populated by (in addition to Provisional Government officials)
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zemstvo professionals and more advanced peasant activists diligently sought to both carry out the GZK’s information requests and regulate land use in a manner conducive to grain production. The Samara provincial land committee illustrates this well. On one hand, the provincial land committee took as a guide for managing land relations the “Temporary Rules of Land Use in Samara Province Prior to the Constituent Assembly” passed by the Second Samara Province Peasant Congress, agreeing in its mid‑July meeting to publish and distribute copies of the rules and draft resolutions about their implementation. At the same time, the committee passed resolutions aimed at fulfilling the GZK’s requests.48 16 To the extent that the Samara provincial land committee’s actions were perhaps atypical, the difference stemmed from the fact that it had an exceptionally competent agricultural statistician in place who, having studied the question of land norms for over ten years, presented a detailed report on land norms for the committee’s consideration. Grigorii I. Baskin, working from the premises of economist S.N. Iuzhakov, reached a similar conclusion as the GZK : that neither a labor norm nor a consumption norm on their own adequately accounted for all peasant households’ ability to use their available labor supply to meet their needs—that neither on its own could equitably achieve a desired increase in households’ well‑being.49 Baskin suggested that while typical indicators such as the number of adult male workers and draft animals were important, the transition of many peasant households from a “natural economy” to a monetized one meant that any analysis aimed at determining norms reflective of both labor and consumption needed to consider distance to markets (and hence, actual market participation) as a key analytical indicator. Baskin’s report also raised the issue of non‑agricultural employment and the role that such income should play in determining the allotment norm for each locale.50 Accepting his analysis, the provincial committee required district and volost committees to obtain answers to questions in addition to those posed by the GZK for the derivation and application of a norm‑based land reform. The questions were a public opinion survey of key difficulties associated with land reform that Baskin’s report raised in the minds of the provincial committee representatives, particularly questions aimed at determining who should get land (Adult males only ? Absentees on otkhod ? Newcomers ? Settled wage laborers ?), whether or not those with non‑agricultural income should be allotted land, attitudes on the commune and communal reorganization, attitudes toward Stolypin separators, and opinion on the size of consumption and labor land allotments.51 17 Unfortunately, we do not have the responses to these questions from Samara’s uezd and volost land committees. We do, however, have the resolutions of volost and district land committees from other provinces, which reveal the extent to which peasants expected and defined allotment by norm. In Vologda province, the Golovetsk volost land committee, meeting at the end of June, called for the transfer of all land to the laboring peasantry and for continued state developmental assistance for the volost’s agricultural economy, including supplying households with the implements needed for farming and forestry. The volost committee also called on the state to use its authority to transfer forests suitable for clearing as hayfields in neighboring Razgortsk volost to Golovetsk volost, as Razgortsk, in its assessment, already had adequate hayfields and as the desired forests were located too far from Razgortsk to do inhabitants any good.52 The Semeikovsk volost land committee also requested agronomic assistance in its resolutions, called for each peasant to have at least six desiatiny of land in one spot and, given that the district’s poor soil quality required “more agronomic cultivation” asked
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the state to provide agricultural implements at a reduced price.53 In essence, committee resolutions asked the state to continue its project of re‑ordering the countryside, a project with which it had been engaged in various forms over the previous century. 18 In addition to expectations of state assistance in creating a new agrarian order, the volost committees also turned to allotment norms as the proper means for allotting land, expressing them sometimes as labor norms and sometimes with no stated rationale at all. Thus Vologda’s Veprevsk volost land committee resolved that […] all land belongs to the laboring peasantry as a whole according to a norm of cultivation from the general state land fond no greater than 7½ des. per good, strong worker able to cultivate the following : 3½ desiatiny of arable land, based on 28 working days in a month, ½ desiatina sown in winter crops, ½ desiatina in spring crops and ½ desiatina of fallow ; besides this it is necessary to have a reserve of ½ desiatina per person and 1½ desiatiny of pastureland. This is all based on extended experience from a purely practical point of view. In addition, all require access for purposes of heating and building repairs to a necessary amount of either communal or state forest reserves.54 19 Vologda’s Sychevsk volost land committee issued similar resolutions, calling for land from the state land fund to be allotted according to a “norm of cultivation (po norme obrabotki).”55 In Poltava the Mashevsk volost land committee, inundated by returning soldiers, resolved on 23 July to temporarily prioritize soldiers in the allotment process (whether out of a sense of patriotism or fear is not known) by establishing a “norm of [land] rental per household” of up to six desiatiny depending on its ability to work the land with its own labor. In Riazan´ the Andreevsk volost land committee, reflecting debate by all the volost’s communal assemblies, resolved that the “labor norm for the alienation of land” should be applied equally to all farmers, including nobles opting to participate under these terms.56 In other words, even prior to the Bolsheviks’ Decree on Land peasants were already incorporating the language of norms to division of the available land fund, not as part of a national plan, but simply as a means of absorbing what land existed.
Land norms and the red repartition
20 The Bolsheviks inherited the “land norm” idea (and the professional staff of the GZK and Agriculture Ministry), although for Lenin and his colleagues, land norms corresponded more to the needs of the moment than their vision an agrarian future based on large‑scale farming operations.57 A decade earlier, Lenin viewed the “norm” idea as evidence of a Kadet desire to preserve a pomeshchik economy behind a veil of reform and Populist timidity.58 October changed all of this, as the new regime nationalized all lands and now required a means to distribute them. Despite their own plans and suspicion of peasants, the Bolsheviks had to make land norms their own, especially given their alliance with the Left SRs, their reliance on existing professionals, and the reality of events in the countryside. The Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies Decree on Land of 26 October 1917 specified land reform terms that, other than blatantly abolishing private property in land, bore a striking resemblance to pre‑October proposals. “Highly cultured” estates such as gardens, nurseries, and orchards were to be kept intact as state property, as were pedigreed livestock herds. Those capable of working land received equal use rights based on local land use conditions and either labor or consumption norms. State‑sponsored migration by
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volunteers or discredited commune members (e.g., deserters) would eventually alleviate land shortages in the densest regions.59 By December there were decrees creating the machinery for land distribution : a main land committee supervising local committees charged with inventorying and distributing local resources to qualified recipients.60 The state served as the primary agent for transforming a national economy and, through the local soviets, overseer of the process of meting out social justice.
21 This was to be a grand reconciliation of the sins of 1861, symbolized by issuance of the Basic Law on the Socialization of Land on the Emancipation’s anniversary (February 19, 1918). The statute aimed to control spontaneous land seizures to ensure that land redistributions corresponded with state and peasant needs, and reflected experts’ realization that events had increased the complexities of implementation. Despite central attempts to gather information and manage the process, including sending surveyors and other professionals to the village, the actions of local communes prevailed.61 As the food situation deteriorated and the influx of urbanites and demobilizing soldiers flooded villages, achieving equal land distributions that respected the labor principle and improved households’ wellbeing made balancing both labor and consumption norms more difficult and more important. Defining what unit to use for determining norms was challenging. “Revisional souls” were now obsolete, relegated to history’s dustbin by the revolution. Balancing allotment by “eaters” with the labor norm idea that land belonged to those who worked it themselves remained administrators’ chief difficulty, as emphasis on the “laboring peasantry” or the “labor economy” encapsulated in the “labor norm” idea conflicted even more with a hungry population’s need for allotment norms based on consumption. Labor norms also proved problematic because they tended to favor large families perceived as being class enemies (kulaks). In practice, the right to eat outweighed the labor norm and the application of some sort of a consumption norm, in some ways the most radical alternative, prevailed.62 In the aggregate, the amount of land gained by any one household was negligible with the exception of steppe provinces. At the same time (and despite jockeying within the village by households seeking to maximize their additional land eligibility), over the course of 1918‑1920 landless and land hungry peasants eventually were able to improve their positions. As Atkinson put it (referring to the process of state formation under Ivan III), the Bolshevik state’s “‘regathering of the lands’” had resulted in a substantial leveling of rural society.”63 In this sense, allotment according to norm had served the interests of social justice in that it addressed the chief complaints of peasants and their advocates. 22 Bolshevik policy increasingly aimed toward an Aristotelian mean in land relations, despite rhetoric privileging poor households over others. “The distribution of land between laborers,” Article 12 stated, must be carried out on equalizing‑labor bases such that the consumption‑labor norm pertaining in a given region to the historically formed system of land use does not exceed the labor capacity (trudosposobnosti) […] of each individual household and, at the same time, would provide the possibility of a comfortable (bezbednogo) existence to the farmer’s family.64 23 Aiming towards the middle, the instructions for determining norms specified guidelines for determining average production figures for all types of arable in a given region and average peasant landholding (including use of purchased and rented lands prior to 1917).65 They also marked a milestone in rural studies, as experts finally agreed which household members should be counted as unable to work, and what portion of a
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worker women and older children would count as in labor norm calculations.66 The instructions granted exceptions allowing allotments of land beyond the norm for households overburdened by non‑workers, holding poor quality existing allotments, or receiving poor quality additional allotments.
24 The Bolsheviks’ Basic Law paid much attention to local particularisms despite their universalizing ideology. This reflected the input of experts anxious to ensure that redistributions justly reflected variations in soil quality and other factors at the local level. Perhaps they also realized that volost committees were already in charge. In a few places, uezd officials created special organizations to establish norms—with or without the assistance of local experts. For example, Stavropol´ uezd (Stavropol´) established a special commission of representatives for this work, while Petrograd province invited communal representatives to serve as permanent members of the land department for determining the allotment norm. As we might expect, the local implementation of specialists’ meticulously crafted guidelines often fell apart due to the complexity of trying to adapt norms established for the “average” or “typical” family to different combinations of workers and “eaters” in individual households. According to one study, 108 of 132 uezdy simply used “eater” as the primary unit of land distribution. Use of the labor norm tended to prevail in the areas bordering European Russia. The central provinces claimed to divide land by “eater,” but often just followed the provisional land division made prior to calculating and assigning norms, which local officials viewed as in the interests of the poor. Local perceptions of who was in need often drove the process. In several cases, local peasants resisted application of labor norms over consumption norms, believing that labor norms favored kulak households. As such, consumption norms alone often prevailed.67 At the same time, evidence indicates that when peasant communities imposed their own divisions, they sought out state bodies to provide their decisions with legitimacy.68 25 Of the local particularisms experts considered, soil variations in provinces and uezdy were the most important. This complicated the allotment process, leading to the establishment of separate allotment norms for different soil categories. Prior to 1917, the use of soil data caused a certain amount of turmoil in zemstvo circles. Even though zemstvo statisticians factored soil quality into assessments, they resisted the idea that this factor always outweighed social factors in computing land values.69 Now that all land belonged to peasants, however, arguments about the particularisms of peasant husbandry were moot and soil quality became a primary factor in equitable distributions. Although some areas, such as Nizhnii‑Novgorod province attempted to make use of existing soil data, many local committees simply divided land into “black soil,” “transitional,” and “non‑black soil” or “good,” “average,” and “poor” sectors, placing volost land into each category based on ten‑year harvest averages. Most instructions simply mentioned considering soil quality in calculations without specifying how, which in most cases simply resulted in considering soil quality along the same lines as communes did in their repartitions.70 26 At the end of the day, the most important factor affecting allotment norm size after October (as peasants already realized over the summer of 1917) was simply the amount of land available for redistribution. Often, boards merely divided the amount of available land by the number of people or “eaters” employed in farming, making the norm essentially an arithmetic factor of the quantity of land and the density of the population. Norms established in many local statutes were reduced owing to a lack of
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available land, or at least available land near enough to needy households as to be useful. In these cases land was often allotted much like it was in the Emancipation— according to existing average allotment size. In some cases, officials remained in the same difficult position as their imperial predecessors in that population density rendered an equal redistribution on any basis nonsensical, as it would result in depriving all households of a sufficient allotment.71 Even if applying norms in the field proved difficult or impractical, however, the norms and instructions reflected the aims of the experts who devised them. The concepts of “sufficiency,” and the labor household prevailed and pointed not just to an equitable distribution of the new national land fund, but a distribution designed to bolster the land‑short at the expense of those who, by the rules, had too much. As the chronicler of these events, GZK member P.N. Pershin noted, “norms of land use played a necessary role [in land redistribution] to the extent that they conveyed the interests of the poor and middle peasantry, supplying it with favorable conditions for the conduct of an economy and, along with the prohibition on hired labor, depriving the kulak strata of the village of agro‑economic primacy.”72 For the Soviet state land allotment norms represented the rational implementation of a class‑based system of social justice, although one frequently supplanted by material realities, local officials, and the peasants themselves.
Land norms and the whites
27 That White governments turned to land norms and a commitment to laboring households (at least on paper) testifies to the deep penetration of the idea of norms into all levels of imperial society, a penetration facilitated by the fact that the White movement inherited its share of agrarian experts and technocrats from the old regime. 73 White reform proposals all endorsed a transfer of land allotments imbued with property rights to the laboring peasantry according to some concept of allotment norms. Estate owners could find in norms a guarantee that they would at least retain some of their land—more if they could prove that theirs was an intensively farmed property or one employing a special form of husbandry. White leaders hoped that peasants would interpret their norms and property guarantees as a better alternative to Bolshevik decrees. By 1918, however, compensation was a non‑starter for most peasants, especially as Bolshevik land policies legitimated land seizures up to a given norm without requiring compensation to former owners. Norms were a convenient tool for White leaders when it came to walking the fine line between their noble officers and the peasants who fed them, but the White leadership’s inability to move beyond the idea of compensation doomed their reforms and any chance of peasant support to defeat.
28 In Siberia, 1919 decrees by Admiral A.V. Kolchak guaranteed sowers a right to harvest the lands they planted, even if such lands were subsequently returned to owners, and offered the possibility of acquiring full property rights over sown lands for laboring peasant households.74 Kolchak (like other White commanders) apparently favored a program of “khutorization.” The land decrees’ emphases on “working peasant households” reflected belief that there should be a connection between land allotments and ability to work them without hired labor. In the Don Territory, Cossack resentment over the state’s award of land to Cossack bureaucrats in lieu of salary and hostility toward land speculators led to near unanimous support for seizing private lands for
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redistribution when the Krug for the Salvation of the Don met in July and August 1918. 75 The resultant land reform law set norms for private property at 30 to 50 desiatiny, with land above this norm to be alienated and allotted to land short Cossacks and native peasants free of charge. Owners would be compensated for buildings and improvements, but not the land itself. As with other White land reform programs, the need for grain and revenue distorted policy implementation. In the Don, free distribution turned into leasing in kind, and some parcels actually went up for auction, undermining the authorities’ credibility.76 29 The Volunteer Army’s land policies illustrate the White predicament and the use of land norms in the South. With a constitution focused on private property and the rule of law and a governing council that never discussed land reform, it would seem that peasants had little chance of acquiring additional land.77 The influence of former landowners and those opposed to expropriation of any sort was strong among White leaders’ inner circles. At the same time, there is evidence that this should be interpreted less as an inherent antipathy to land reform and more as simply a statement of what the Constitution’s Kadet authors valued most : the rule of law and the primacy of the Constituent Assembly in addressing reform issues.78 The essence of the White proposals, in the South and elsewhere, aimed at a “consolidation of the average [household] economy” as the basis for a stable and productive countryside—a wager on the middle peasant who would have enough to maintain a stable economic life but not enough to potentially exploit neighbors.79 General Anton I. Denikin’s attempts to gain peasant support through land reform aimed to fulfill the aspirations of landowners, peasants and procurement officers alike, a balancing act bequeathed to his successors. Land norms provided a mechanism that met this need. Denikin’s attempts to secure support for a land reform came to naught, but embodied the key ideas ultimately incorporated into his successor’s decrees. According to Denikin, land reform should safeguard the interests of the working population by strengthening small‑ and medium‑sized holdings at the expense of the state and large landowners while preserving owners’ property rights. District committees should determine the size of maximum holdings and subject lands in excess of the maximum to compensated forcible alienation. Highly productive estates, forests, land unsuitable for cultivation, and Cossack lands remained inviolable. All landowners should receive state aid to stimulate production. In essence, Denikin was prepared to allot land according to availability and norms under some system of compensation to landowners.80 30 By 1920 defeats and the reality of peasant land seizures forced even opponents of land reform outside of a Constituent Assembly, including General P.N. Wrangel and former Minister of Agriculture A.V. Krivoshein, to admit that the land question required action. Wrangel appointed a committee under Senator G.V. Glinka to devise a reform project.81 Glinka was well suited to oversee the project given his ministerial experience in implementing the Stolypin reforms.82 On the 20 th of April Wrangel sent a memorandum to the committee outlining his expectations that bore much resemblance to Denikin’s earlier proposal. It affirmed his commitment to private property, and demanded that land “should belong to those who work it” and not “be subject to renting or speculation.” Furthermore, “Depending on the availability of land, on density of population, and on the prevailing type of agriculture, norms should be established in such a way as to suit different circumstances (in districts and in provinces)” with lands beyond these norms subject to alienation (with the exception of intensely cultivated estates and special farms. Those receiving land would be
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responsible for compensating its former owners.83 The committee’s initial work disappointed Wrangel, but a subsequent revision became the basis for two orders in 1920 that largely followed his original instructions, but contained stronger language related to compensation and defined how local committees would determine land values.84 31 Wrangel’s land policy, according to Senator Glinka and as manifest in the 1920 Order on Land (Prikaz o zemle), proceeded from the right of private property in land “as the singular foundational basis of a proper state land structure” and was the primary distinguishing feature between Wrangel’s policy and that of the Soviets. Referencing Peter the Great, however, Glinka noted that this foundational principle was subject to modification by the state, which served as the final arbiter of land tenure and which possessed the power of eminent domain to advance its interests.85 At the same time, Wrangel also acknowledged the right of all current farmers “to a defined quantity of land” (as established by the Emancipation). The state’s role, and the aim of the Order, was balancing these two ideas to benefit the common good. Alienation with compensation was a traditional principle of the legal system since 1861. The benefits of free labor applied to property inherent in the Emancipation strengthened the principle of property ownership in the Order on Land. If this was socialism, Glinka argued—taking a swipe at critics from the right—then it was socialism from the throne. The project’s aim at breaking up large estates was not introducing a new idea into the countryside, but merely continuing the process begun by the Emancipation (and also well in line with conceptions of property as a public good). Glinka contrasted this approach, rooted in the Emancipation’s land allotment and redemption process for existing local farmers and that of the socialists’ promises of land to anyone on the basis of some future land order. Wrangel, Glinka argued, was offering something real.86 Thus, a type of eminent domain rooted in Russia’s past and the expansion of private property ownership oddly went hand‑in‑hand in Wrangel’s Order. This is also apparent in its redemption process where, in contrast to the Emancipation’s redemption operation, the real benefit of the redemption process under the Order’s implementation terms went not to those being compensated, but rather to the peasant payers themselves. This was the key to reinforcing the value of property ownership. The actual sufficiency of the payment for the owner experiencing compulsory alienation was not the main guide in determining the size of payments. Furthermore, although the state would certainly accept cash and a shortened redemption time line if offered, the payment structure reflected a moral economy approach : one‑fifth of the average harvest yielded by the land being redeemed over twenty‑five years, thus making both the state and the new property owners equal partners in the assumption of agrarian risk.87 32 Besides a commitment to spreading property ownership and compensating former owners, the Order differed from the GZK and Bolshevik approaches in two other ways. First, Wrangel believed that any allotment of land was a local affair for local persons. There was no single solution to the land question on an all‑Russian scale, and as such, the details of land reform in each locale were best left to local institutions such as the volost (“peasant”) and district zemstvos.88 This represented a more decentralized approach to the land question than that of the GZK and Bolsheviks. Second, although the issue of allotting land to anyone who desired it divided the GZK membership, in the end the SR belief in allotting land to all who desired it and could till it with their own hands prevailed and made it in to the Bolshevik land decrees. Wrangel adamantly opposed this, not only on the basis of practicality and rural stability, but also based on
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the deeply rooted value of a connection to land and place. Only farmers already in situ and engaged in farming there should receive land. The “socialist” plan to relocate peasants from one place to another was “incompatible with the basic freedom to establish an economic life that belongs to everyone.”89 According to Glinka, this distinguished Wrangel’s project from that of the Soviets. 33 Second, the Order took great care to distinguish itself from the Bolsheviks and other socialists in its use of land norms. The GZK and Bolshevik projects’ use of norms aimed at assuring peasants a subsistence niche : labor and consumption norms aimed to provide households the minimum land allotment required to apply the household’s labor/meet its consumption needs. They were norms based on the idea of correcting “insufficient” allotments by making them “sufficient.” Wrangel’s Order, with its emphasis on the local allotment of land to local farmers assured them “not an amount of land calculated according to some sort of utopian provisioning or consumption norm that one might desire, but only that [amount of land] which one has the ability to manage, that is to cultivate.”90 Rather than “sufficiency,” the Order’s conception of norms stemmed from an idea of maximum allotments rooted in past tsarist discussions of agrarian reform, harkening back to the Stolypin Reforms’ prelude and V.I. Gurko’s proposed use of maximums to break up the empire’s large latifundia in order to increase peasant land allotments.91 The Emancipation statute set maximum allotment norms, as did other tsarist initiatives such as the maximum amount of land any one household was allowed to accumulate according to the rules governing the Peasant Land Bank. The Bank established these regional norms in the 1890s.92 In reality, these Peasant Land Bank maximums, stipulated by the Order on Land, were labor norms—the maximum amount of land for a given region that an average family could work with its own labor. As Glinka noted, It may be bad or good, but all land management practices proceed from the fact and only from the fact of farming itself, and from the practical size of land use, which should not leave land un‑worked and should not be outside the closest connection to the landholder himself.93 34 Although Glinka and the Order assiduously sought to avoid using the same language of norms found in the work of the GZK and the Bolshevik land decrees, at the end of the day the transfer of land to the laboring population (here more broadly defined in class terms) according to a household’s ability to live on it and work it was, for all intents and purposes a White labor norm.
35 We generally pass over Wrangel’s Order on Land as a curiosity—another case of White leaders doing too little, too late. Naturally, it differed in key ways from the GZK projects and Bolshevik land decrees, which envisioned implementation of single national plans of reform (albeit via mechanisms that provided for local input and implementation). The Wrangel Order placed more emphasis on the local than the GZK intended for local land committees. Wrangel’s volost (“peasant”) zemstvo was assigned a roll in the land reform process that the GZK’s local land committees had essentially seized (much to many GZK members’ dismay), and which the Bolsheviks then legitimated and directed into local soviets. Furthermore, in line with its emphasis on the local, the Wrangel Order limited land allotment to local inhabitants already farming in the area. This was a departure from GZK and Bolshevik plans to eventually move people from land poor to land rich regions as well as a departure from the plans of more radical GZK members and Bolsheviks to allot land to all who wanted to farm it with their own labor. The most profound difference, of course, was the White insistence on allotting land as private
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property (as opposed to allotting land for use only) and the redemption program (despite its claims to be weighted in favor of those redeeming it rather than former owners). Even though the proposed redemption operation bore a striking resemblance to the future NEP tax‑in‑kind and even though there were peasant communities willing to pay a “fair price” for the land, by the summer of 1917 redemption on any basis was a dead issue. Finally, Wrangel’s Order connected itself to the Emancipation, proceeding from the premise of land ownership maximums based on existing institutional norms rather than the premise of correcting the ills of 1861 by satisfying the quest for “sufficient allotments.”
Conclusion
36 In the end, Wrangel’s “Order on Land” could claim many of the same common roots as the programs of the GZK, the Bolsheviks, and the peasants themselves. Rather than being yet another example of the Provisional Government’s failure, the work of the GZK, succeeded in establishing and perpetuating the language and framework—the allotment norm—that defined the terms and process of land reform (at least on paper) and the pursuit of social justice for a diverse array of socio‑political actors. All parties viewed land reform as a state obligation to allot land. In one way or another, all saw this as a moral obligation to correctly implement the land allotment promise of 1861 to the laboring peasantry. For all participants, land norms provided a measureable means to equitably implement social justice. Although divided on a host of other social and political issues, the place of land norms as the best available mechanism for ensuring the state’s just distribution of available land provided a common interpretive framework for all parties in 1917, a framework reflective of the agrarian consensus that had developed in the preceding decade and of the technocratic statist perspective of the experts propelled into the position of policy makers by war and revolution. In addition to their apparent objectivity and fairness, norms represented for experts a guarantee that the state’s distribution of the land fond would have some chance of advancing their pre‑war agenda for agricultural development. Managed extensification by norm could not only ensure a just land distribution, but also pave the way for continuing the work of land reorganization and technical improvement initiated over the preceding decade by the state, the zemstvos, and agrarian professionals and for fulfilling the state’s moral obligations.
37 In one sense, the revolution opened new doors for agrarian professionals, policy makers and the objects of their work—peasants—by deciding once and for all that Russia’s agrarian future, at least for the time being, was to rest on the household economies of peasant small‑holders provided with normatized land allotments and agronomic assistance. The key to Russia’s agrarian future—whether Imperial, Soviet, or something in between—was neither a two‑tiered economy (peasant and pomeshchik), nor a Stolypin‑esque “wager on the strong,” but rather a wager on a rural economy where farmers had sufficient access to land as a first step toward increasing productivity through improved husbandry. Peasant household economies damaged by the “cut‑offs” of 1861 could now be healed, and all farmers, by a combination of means, given the subsistence means required to become legitimate actors in the new national economy. In essence, this was a revolutionary attempt to normatize the social structure of the countryside as a whole by means of privileging a nostalgic connection between
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the farmer and the soil that could only be found among households with enough land to meet their consumption needs and occupy their complete labor force, but no more. The main beneficiary of this vision of the agrarian future was the middle peasant—the seredniak. For the experts of the GZK and League of Agrarian Reforms such as Professor A.A. Rybnikov, the experience of Western Europe had already demonstrated the efficacy of mid‑sized farms as engines of rural economic development.94 By 1919, Lenin argued to the Eighth Party Congress that the seredniak had become a potential ally in guaranteeing the Revolution’s survival and feeding the population.95 By 1920, farms of middling size based on land allotment maximums provided the retreating Whites with some guarantee that former noble landowners might have some place in the new agrarian order. In this way, land norms pointed toward a just solution to the land question that would create a unified agrarian economy poised for development, allowing the state to fulfill the 1861 Emancipation’s moral promise. 38 Yet, in the end, differing conceptions of this moral commitment—the specifics of local conditions and politics—overrode the theoretical objectivity of norms, especially as the need to feed came to dominate state and local agendas and peasant impatience combined with a sense of agency to advance parochial interests at the expense of national ones. Thus, for the Bolsheviks, land allotment norms were useful only in as much as they provided a convenient mechanism for ensuring a just division of the spoils that would advantage potential village allies to the detriment of class foes and facilitate grain production. For the Whites, land norms perpetuated a statist approach to agrarian reform that provided political cover from the right and left for leaders who belatedly realized land reform’s political necessity. Peasants accepted the concept of allotment by norm, adapting it to fit their local needs and ideas of what constituted “sufficient,” but did so with little regard to how local land resources might fit into a national program of land reform. In their application, norms as tied to local notions of “sufficiency” and local assessments of resources could prevent neither economic chaos nor a violent realization of the “black repartition” (chernyi peredel) long dreaded by some and desired by others.
NOTES
1. On earlier efforts to apply normatized land allotments, see Glavnoe upravlenie udelov, Istoriia udelov za stoletie ikh sushchestvovaniia, 1797‑1897 [The history of the appanages for а hundred years of their existence, 1797‑1897], 3 vols. (SPb. : Tip. Glavnago upravleniia udelov, 1901) ; N.M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest´iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva [The state peasantry and the reforms of P.D. Kiselev], 2 vols. (M. : AN SSSR, 1946 and 1958) ; Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field : Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2004) ; David W. Darrow, “Statistics and Sufficiency : Toward an Intellectual History of Russia’s Rural Crisis,” Continuity and Change 17, 1 (2002) : 63‑96 ; I.A. Khristoforov, “Ot Speranskogo do Stolypina : Krest´ianskaia reforma i problema zemleustroistva [From Speranskii to Stolypin : Peasant reform and the problem of land settlement],” Rossiiskaia istoriia, no. 4 (2011) : 27‑43. On the role of the Emancipation in Alexander II’s image see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of
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Power : Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2000), 3‑14, 42‑43, 58. 2. On opeka see Francis W. Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, 1885‑1914 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1990) ; Gary Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881‑1905 (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1984), 192‑200 ; George L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize : Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861‑1930 (Urbana, IL : University of Illinois Press, 1982), chpt. 3 ; Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward : Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861‑1914 (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 3. On gosudarstvennost´ see Marc Raeff, The Well‑Ordered Police State (New Haven & London : Yale University Press, 1983) ; William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution : The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917‑1921 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1974), 134‑169 ; David McDonald, “1991 and the History of Russian Gosudarstvennost´,” Ab imperio, 3 (2011) : 223‑238. On the emergence of the idea of a “public domain” as an institutionalization of the common good see Ekaterina Pravilova, A Public Empire : Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2014). On fear of speculators exploitation of peasants see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward and Peter Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes : The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review, 69, 1 (2010) : 157. 4. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward ; Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes” ; Judith Pallot, “The Stolypin Land Reform as ‘Administrative Utopia’ : Images of Peasantry in Nineteenth‑Century Russia,” in Madhavan K. Palat, ed., Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 113‑133. On peasant responses to reformers see Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906‑1917 : Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999). 5. Ian W. Campbell, “Settlement Promoted, Settlement Contested : The Shcherbina Expedition of 1896‑1903,” Central Asian Survey, 30, 3‑4 (2011) : 423‑436 ; Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes.” On emerging intellectual synergy among state officials and experts, facilitated in many ways by Finance Minister Sergei Witte’s hiring practices and the Special Conference on the Needs of Agricultural see David A.J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861‑1906 : The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 1987). 6. On land reform proposals vetted by political parties and the Duma see Dorothy Atkinson, The End of the Russian land Commune, 1905‑1930 (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1983), chpts. 3, 8. 7. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize. On expert adaptation in implementation see Pallot, Land Reform in Russia. On the land allotment in 1917 as a revival of the old Populist see Ilya V. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia : Rural Professionals and Self‑Organization, 1905‑1930 (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), chpt. 10. 8. See A.I. Chuprov, “K voprosu ob agrarnoi reforme [On the question of agrarian reform],” in P.D. Dolgorukov, et al, eds., Agrarnyi vopros : Sbornik Statei, T. II (M. : Beseda, 1907), 1‑42 ; Kimitaka Matsuzato, “Stolypinskaia reforma i rossiiskaia agrotekhnicheskaia revoliutsiia [The Stolypin reform and the Russian agrotechnical revolution],” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 6 (1992) : 194‑200. 9. See discussions in the Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture (Osoboe soveshchanie o nuzhdakh sel´skokhoziaistvennoi promyshlennosti) discussed in Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, chpt. 2. 10. Although statistical studies gave the appearance that Emancipation allotments were insufficient (see Darrow, “Statistics and ‘Sufficiency’”), Hoch notes that peasants fared pretty well. Steven L. Hoch, “Did Russia’s Emancipated Serfs Really Pay too Much for Too Little Land ? Statistical Anomalies and Long Tail Distributions,” Slavic Review, 63, 2 (2004) : 247‑274.
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11. Pallot, “The Stolypin Land Reform as ‘Administrative Utopia’” ; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 3. 12. On agrarianism in Russia see, in addition to previously cited works by Gerasimov, Kotsonis, Holquist, and Khristoforov, Katja Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war : Agrarismus und Expertise, zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion, Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas, Band 47 (Cologne et al : Böhlau Verlag, 2014). 13. See his opening speech to the first session of the GZK, IGZK (Izvestiia Glavnago Zemel´nago Komiteta), no. 1 (15 iiulia 1917) : 5‑11. Yaney has his name wrong (“D. Posnikov”—The Urge to Mobilize, 460). 14. IGZK, no. 1 (15 iiulia 1917) : 3‑5. 15. In addition to previously cited works by Kotsonis and Holquist see Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution : le cas russe, 1870‑1930 (P. : A. Michel, 1998), chpt. 8 ; Naum Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties : Names to Be Remembered (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008). 16. See Vremennoe Pravitel´stvo, Ministerstvo Zemledeliia, GZK, TKPZR (Trudy komissii po podgotvke zemel´noi reformy), Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia [Proceedings of the commission for the preparation of the agrarian reform. Issue II. Norms for land provision] (Pgd. : “Prosveshchenie,” 1917), 36 ; TKPZR, Vyp. V, Organizatsiia territorii [Issue V, The organization of territory] (Pgd. : “Prosveshchenie,” 1917), 18. 17. On the issue of peasants and property see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, chpt. 2. 18. On property rights see GARF (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii—State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 17, Materialy o deiatel´nosti komissii po zemel ´no‑pravovym otnosheniiam, 3 iulia‑27 noiabria 1917 g. [Materials of the activities of the commission on land rights, 3 July‑27 November 1917] ; “K organizatsii rabot komissii po pravovym formam zemlevladeniia [Towards the organization of the work of the commission on the legal forms of land tenure],” IGZK, no. 4‑5 (1‑15 sentiabria 1917 g.) : 14‑15. On other questions, see esp. TKPZR, Vyp. I, O krupnom zemlevladenii [Issue I, On large estates] (Pgd. : “Prosveshchenie,” 1917) ; TKPZR, Vyp. III, O krupno‑krest´ianskikh kho--ziaistvakh [Issue III, On Large Peasant Economies] (Pgd. : “Prosveshchenie,” 1917) ; TKPZR, Vyp. IV, O kontingente khoziaistv i lits, podlezhashchikh obezpecheniiu zemlei [Issue IV, On the contingent of households and individuals subject to the provision of land] (Pgd. : “Prosveshchenie,” 1917). 19. Darrow, “Statistics and Sufficiency.” 20. N. Oganovskii, Agrarnyi vopros v Rossii posle 1905 g. [The agrarian question in Russia after 1905] (Khar´kov : Tipo‑Litografiia M. Sergeeva i K. Gal´chenka, 1914), 3 ; Iu.E. Ianson, Opyt statisticheskago izsledovaniia o krest´ianskikh nadelakh i platezhakh [Essay of statistical research of peasant allotments and payments], 1st ed. (SPb. : Tip. M. Stasiulevicha, 1877). 21. Hoch demonstrated that this was not the case. See Steven L. Hoch, “The Banking Crisis, Peasant Reform, and Economic Development in Russia, 1857‑1861,” American Historical Review, 96 (June 1991) : 795‑820. 22. N. Ozeretskovskii, “Zemel´nye komitety,” IGZK, no. 1 (15 iiulia 1917 g.) : 29 ; IGZK [The land committees], nos. 2‑3 (1‑15 avgusta 1917 g.) : 26. 23. IGZK, no. 1 (15 iiulia 1917) : 23 ; GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 24, Perepiska s Ispolnitel´nym Komitetom Vserossiiskago Soveta Krest´ianskikh Deputatov, l. 2ob [Correspondence with the executive committee of the All‑Russian Soviet of peasant deputies]. 24. Z.S. Katsenelenbaum, Finansovaia storona agrarnoi reformy [The financial side of agrarian reform] (M. : Universal´naia Biblioteka, 1917), 11‑27 ; Hoch, “The Banking Crisis.” 25. TKPZR, Vyp. V, Organizatsiia territorii, 9‑10. 26. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia, 168. 27. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 1.
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28. A.A. Kaufman, also a member of the commission and one of the authors of the Kadet land reform program had made this apparent a decade earlier. See Kaufman, “K voprosu o normakh dopolnitel´nago nadeleniia,” in Dolgorukov, et al, eds. Agrarnyi vopros : Sbornik statei, T. II, 261‑304. 29. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 2‑21. 30. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 20‑21. 31. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 27‑30. 32. Kaufman had served in the Ministry of State Domains as part of a party of researchers studying peasant life and land settlement practices in Western Siberia. See his autobiography, published posthumously in Vestnik Statistiki, nos. 5‑8 (1921). 33. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 37, 39, 41. 34. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 40‑41, 46. 35. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 34. 36. TKPZR, Vyp. II, Normy zemel´nago obezpecheniia, 49‑50. 37. Burton Richard Miller, Rural Unrest During the First Russian Revolution : Kursk Province, 1905‑1906 (Budapest and New York : Central European University Press, 2013). 38. GARF f. 1797, op. 1, 1917, d. 52‑55 ; Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants : Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 2007) ; Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court : Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905‑1917 (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2004). 39. Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War : The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917‑1921) (New York : Oxford University Press, 1989) ; Aaron Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War : Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1917‑1922 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012). 40. Z. Maleeva, “Chego zhdut krest´iane ot zemel´nykh reform ? [What do the peasants expect from land reform ?],” IGZK, no. 2‑3 (1‑15 avgusta, 1917) : 31. 41. V.I. Kostrikin, Zemel´nye komitety v 1917 godu [The land committees in 1917] (M. : Nauka, 1975). 42. See esp., GARF f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 24, Perepiska…, 3 iunia‑23 sentiabria 1917 g. [Correspondence…, 3 June‑23 September 1917], l. 83, 95, 99. 43. See Stenograficheskii otchet pervago s´´ezda Zapadno‑Sibirskago Soveta Krest´ianskikh Deputatov (zasedaniia 25‑31 marta 1917 g.) [Stenographic report of the first congress of the Western Siberian Soviet of peasant deputies] (Omsk, 1917) for an illustration of such political beauty pageants. 44. Report of Samara branch of the Peasant Land Bank director, GARF f. 1797, op. 1, 1917, d. 135, Zhurnal Samarskii gubernskii, zemel´nyi komitet 19 iiulia 1917 g. [Journal of the Samara provincial land committee, 19 July 1917], l. 32. 45. Pravilova, A Public Empire, chpt. 3. 46. “Primernyi nakaz. Sostavlennyi na osnovanii 242 nakazov, dostavlennykh s mestnymi deputatami na II‑oi Vserossiiskii s´´ezd Sovetov krest´ianskikh deputatov v Petrograde v 1917 godu [The Model Mandate : Compiled on the basis of 242 mandates delivered by local deputies to the Second All‑Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies in Petrograd in 1917],” in A.V. Shestakov, ed., Sovety krest´ianskikh deputatov i drugie krest´ianskie organizatsii [Soviets of peasant deputies and other peasant organisations], T. 1, ch. I (Mart‑Oktiabr´ 1917 g.) (M. : Izd. Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 1929) : 152‑155. 47. For example Protokol zasedaniia vtorogo Gubernskago S´´ezda Krest´ianskikh Deputatov Mogilevskoi gubernii ot 7‑9 avgusta 1917 goda (no pub. info.) [Protocol of the meetings of the second provincial congress of peasant deputies of Mogilev province from 7‑9 August 1917]. 48. GARF, f. 1797, op. 1, 1917, d. 135, l. 52‑58, 75.
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49. G.I. Baskin, “Proizvoditel´nost´ zemledel´cheskago truda i chistaia dokhodnost´ kho--ziaistva (po dannym Permskoi gubernii) [The productivity of agricultural labor ansd the net income of an economy (according to data from Perm´ province)],” Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, kn. 4 (1902) : 102‑113 ; and his report to the land committee, Metod opredeleniia potrebitel´no‑trudovykh zemel´nykh norm [The method of defining consumption‑labor land norms] (Samara : Tip. Gub. Zemstva, 1917). 50. Baskin, Metod opredeleniia potrebitel´no‑trudovykh zemel´nykh norm, 2‑3. 51. GARF, f. 1797, op. 1, 1917, d. 135, l. 75. 52. GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 51, Protokoly Golovetsago Volost´nago Zemel´nago Komiteta 29 iiunia 1917 g. [Protocols of the Golovets Parish Land Committee 29 June, 1917], l. 3. 53. GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 51, Protokoly Semeikovskago Volost´nago Zemel´nago Komiteta 15 avgusta 1917 g. [Protocols of the Semeikovsk Parish Land Committee 15 August, 1917], l. 33. 54. GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 51, Protokoly Veprevskago Volost´nago Zemel´nago Komiteta, l. 9 [Protocols of the Veprevsk Parish Land Committee]. 55. GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 51, Protokoly Sychevskago Volost´nago Zemel´nago Komiteta [Protocols of the Sychevsk Parish Land Committee], l. 25. 56. GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 58, Protokoly Mashevskago Volostnago Zemel´nago Komiteta 24 June 1917 g. [Protocols of the Mashevsk Parish Land Committee 24 June, 1917], l. 53‑53ob ; GARF, f. 1796, op. 1, 1917, d. 59, Protokoly Andreevskago Volostnago Zemel´nago Komiteta 24 June 1917 g. [Protocols of the Andreevsk Parish Land Committee 24 June, 1917], l. 6‑7. 57. John Channon, “The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry : The Land Question in the First Eight Months of Soviet Rule,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 66, 4 (1988) : 593‑624 ; James Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside : State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917‑1929 (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). 58. P.N. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, kn. 2, Agrarnye preobrazovaniia Velikoi Oktiabr ´skoi Sotsialisticheskoi Revoliutsii (1917‑1918) [Agrarian revolution in Russia, book 2 : Agrarian transformations of the Great October Revolution (1917‑1918)] (M. : Nauka, 1966), 257‑258. 59. Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, T. I. 25 oktiabria 1917 g.‑16 marta 1918 g. [Decrees of Soviet power. T. I. 25 October 1917‑16 March 1918] (M., 1957), 18‑19. 60. Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, T. I, 218‑224. 61. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 173‑175. 62. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, 261 ; Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 177‑178. 63. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 182. See also Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 470‑476, for a less positive assessment. 64. Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, T. I, 408. 65. Paragraphs 5 and 6, Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, T. I, 411‑12. 66. Paragraph 14, Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, T. I, 412‑13. 67. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, 262‑6, 288. See also Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, chpt. 10 ; D.V. Kovalev, “Sotsializatsiia zemli i krest´ianskoe zemlepol´zovanie (po materialam Podmoskov´ia) [The socialization of the land and peasant land use (according to materials from the Moscow region],” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 5 (2007) : 97‑106. 68. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War, 140‑143. 69. N.F. Annenskii, “Zemskii kadastr i zemskaia statistika [Zemstvo cadaster and zemstvo statistics],” Trudy podsektsii statistiki IX s´´ezda russkikh estestvoispitatelei i vrachei. Moskva 3‑11 ianvaria 1894 goda [Proceedings of the statistical subsection of the IXth congress of Russian naturalists and doctors. Moscow, 3‑11 January 1894] (Chernigov : Tip. Gub. Zemstva, 1894), 1‑8 ; Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province : Economy, Society and Civilization in Nineteenth‑Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) ; David
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Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers : Zemstvo Land Assessment and the Conceptualization of Russia’s Rural Economy,” The Russian Review, 59, no. 1 (2000) : 52‑75. 70. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, 268‑270. 71. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, 270‑271. 72. Pershin, Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, 288. 73. Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests,” 173‑174. 74. Jonathan D. Smele, Civil War in Siberia : The Anti‑Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918‑1920 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996), 280. 75. Peter Holquist, “A Russian Vendee : The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside, 1917‑1921” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995), 599. This resentment had been brewing for well over a decade. See Duma debates on a proposal to address these grievances in Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Stenograficheskii otchet. Tretii sozyv, sessiia II, chast´ I, zasedanie dvadtsat´ vosmoe (8 dekabria 1908 g.) [State Duma. Stenographic report of the third calling, second session, part I, 28th meeting (8 December 1908)] (SPb. : Gos. Tip., 1909), 3275‑9. 76. Holquist, “A Russian Vendee,” 602‑612. 77. Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1918 : The First Year of the Volunteer Army (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971), 196. 78. Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919‑1920 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1977), 80, 211. 79. M. Mal´t, “Denikinshchina i krest´ianstvo [The time of Denikin and the peasantry],” Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, no. 4 (1924) : 147. 80. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919‑1920, 88. 81. Senator G. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” typescript, n.d. (but after 25 April 1928), box 166, folder 24 (reel 217), HIA WC (Hoover Institution Archives, Wrangel Collection). 82. On Glinka, see Holquist, “In Accord with State Interests.” 83. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919‑1920, 281‑282 ; Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 9. 84. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919‑1920, 285‑6 ; Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 10. Sevastopol´ Peasant Soviet representatives evidently did not object to the project terms (though perhaps they were simply playing for time ?). 85. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 16. 86. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 19, 21‑22. 87. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 20 ; Glavnokomanduiushchago Vooruzhenymi Silami na Iuge Rossii, Prikaz o zemle, ot 20 maia 1920 goda. So vsemi dopolneniiami (Istanbul : “Za Rubezhom,” n.d.), 5‑6 [The Order on Land from 20 May 1920. With all supplementary materials]. 88. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 28, 31. 89. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 25‑26. 90. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 66, folder 24, 26. 91. V.I. Gurko, Otryvochnyia mysli po agrarnomu voprosu [Fragmentary thoughts on the agrarian question] (SPb. ; Skoropech. P.O. Iablonskago, 1906), 24‑28 ; David A.J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861‑1906 : The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 1987). 92. Ob´´iasnitel´naia zapiska k proektu rospisaniia naibol´shago kolichestva zemli, kotoroe mozhet byt´ priobreteno pri sodeistvii Krest´ianskago Pozemelnago Banka [Explanatory note to the draft schedule of the greatest amount of land that can be acquired with the assistance of the Peasant Land Bank] (SPb. : Pech. S.P. Iakovleva, 1900) ; Prikaz o Zemle, 4‑5. 93. Glinka, “Untitled essay re Wrangel as reformer,” HIA WC, box 166, folder 24, 28. 94. A.A. Rybnikov, K postanovke agrarnago voprosa [Towards a formulation of the agrarian question] (Saratov : Tip. O‑va Knigopechatnikov, 1917), 2‑3.
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95. V.V. Kabanov, Krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “voennogo kommunizma” [The peasant economy in the conditions of “war communism”] (M. : Nauka, 1988), 24.
ABSTRACTS
Between 1861 and 1917 a “land allotment mentalité” developed among government officials, public activists and peasants themselves that shaped discussions of land reform in 1917 and the following years, representing a broad consensus on how social justice as it applied to land reform might be judged and measured. Based on the published and archival materials of the Main Land Committee, peasant congress publications, and the Hoover Institution Archive’s Wrangel Collection this article examines discussions of land reform in the revolutionary period. It shows that from the Provisional Government’s Main Land Committee down to peasant assemblies and ultimately both sides of the post-October Civil War the “norm” was understood as a fundamental moral and economic foundation for any new order.
Entre 1861 et 1917, le développement, chez les représentants du gouvernement, les activistes publics et les paysans eux-mêmes, d’une sorte de « mentalité de l’attribution des terres » façonna les discussions relatives à la réforme agraire, en 1917 et les années suivantes. Elle rassemblait un large consensus sur la façon dont la justice sociale, telle qu’appliquée à la réforme, pouvait être évaluée et mesurée. S’appuyant sur des sources publiées et des archives du Comité central agraire, des publications issues des congrès paysans et du fonds d’archives Wrangel de l’Institution Hoover, cet article étudie les discussions sur la réforme agraire pendant la période révolutionnaire. Il montre que dans toutes les strates – Comité central agraire du gouvernement provisoire, assemblées paysannes, ou belligérants de la guerre civile – la « norme » se comprenait comme le fondement moral et économique essentiel de tout nouvel ordre.
AUTHOR
DAVID DARROW
University of Dayton, Ohio, [email protected]
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The Soviet Village Revisited Household farming and the changing image of socialism in the late Soviet period Le village soviétique revisité : exploitations agricoles familiales et évolution du socialisme à la fin de la période soviétique
Katja Bruisch
EDITOR'S NOTE
Translated from German by Bill Templer
1 Towards the end of perestroika, the promotion of cooperatives and family farming became increasingly accepted as means to overcome the lack of productivity and dynamism in Soviet agriculture.1 Allowing citizens to set up cooperatives and rent land, the Soviet government launched the establishment of a private farming sector. The 1991 Law on Peasant Farms (Zakon o krest´ianskikh (fermerskikh) khoziaistvakh), a reaction to the spontaneous foundation of private farms since the middle of the 1980s, created the legal basis for market‑based household farming. The law was flanked by the Land Code, which marked the end of the Soviet state monopoly on land. Farmers could now become the legal owners of their fields.2 During the transition reforms of the 1990s, the household farm was embraced as a major area of agricultural politics. The preference for large‑scale farming, a dominant feature of Soviet ideology since Stalin’s turn to collectivisation, ceased to be the dominant frame of agricultural policy.3
2 Initially, perestroika was presented as an attempt to revive the spirit of the New Economic Policy (NEP) that had come to an end with Stalin’s turn towards industrialisation and the coercive collectivisation of the village. A combination of market incentives, state intervention, independent cooperatives and central economic planning promised to fulfil Lenin’s last testament. Economic and political reforms should help the Soviet Union overcome the condition of “stagnation” (zastoi) and enter a phase of “acceleration” (uskorenie).4 In this context, there was a return to the thinking of the economist Aleksandr V. Chaianov. In the late phase of perestroika, he was among
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the most frequently cited authorities to which reformers in favour of private farming and cooperatives referred. The reappraisal of the economist manifested itself in publications on his tragic biography,5 while at the same time leaving landmarks in the commemorative landscape of Moscow. Among these were a Chaianov street in the very centre of the city and a memorial plaque on the grounds of the Agricultural Timiriazev Academy where Chaianov had worked until his dismissal in the late 1920s. Nowadays, Russian surveys on the history of economic thought devote special sections to Chaianov, thus assigning him a solid place in the pantheon of Russian economists.6 3 The rediscovery of Chaianov is generally regarded as a result of the changed political and social atmosphere after Mikhail S. Gorbachev had become the head of the Communist Party in 1985. Indeed, the revitalisation of the public sphere during perestroika and the official admission that Soviet modernisation had claimed millions of lives opened the door to memorialising the economist, who had been executed during the Stalinist terror.7 Yet, Chaianov’s return also needs to be linked with the official image of the rural economy—and household farming in particular—prior to the beginning of glasnost´ and perestroika. As will be shown in this article, in academic and political debates on private subsidiary farms (lichnye podsobnye khoziaistva), the socialist village took on new contours long before Gorbachev came to power. In the light of deepening rural crisis, household farming, which had previously been condemned as either a “petty‑bourgeois” mode of production or an indicator of the incompleteness of Soviet socialism, was accepted as a component of socialist agriculture. Mirroring a new understanding of socialism in the Soviet Union, this paradigm shift was also an important precondition for the broad public response to Chaianov’s rehabilitation and the rediscovery of his work in the period of perestroika. Yet in the end, the turn to family farming and agricultural cooperation remained a mainly intellectual and political phenomenon with barely any impact on the Russian agrarian order itself.
Household farming in early Soviet agrarian discourse
4 The turn to Chaianov’s ideas in the late Soviet period followed a long tradition of thinking about agriculture that dated back to the pre‑revolutionary period. In the late 19th century, statisticians constructed the peasant household as a distinct social and economic unit. While before agrarian discourse had evolved around the paradigm of the village commune, it now focussed on the peasant family as the major agent in Imperial Russian agriculture.8 In this context, Chaianov developed a microeconomic model of the peasant household which provided a scientific foundation for the populist vision of a non‑capitalist future for Russia. In keeping with the anti‑capitalist thinking and identity of the intelligentsia, the economist believed that peasant households were free from the logic of capitalism. Instead of a desire for profit‑making, peasants seemed to be motivated solely by the subsistence needs of their families. According to the “labour‑consumer balance,” Chaianov’s major theoretical invention, peasants searched for an equilibrium between the consumption needs and the labour resources of the household. Given their renunciation of hired labour, the demographic composition of a peasant family was a key determinant of their farming activities.9
5 However, Chaianov did not imagine the peasant economy as stationary. In particular, well‑functioning cooperatives would allow peasants to flexibly adjust their production to changing market conditions, while at the same time raising their own standard of
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living. A protagonist of the pre‑revolutionary cooperative movement,10 the economist claimed that peasant agrarian structures and rural development were compatible.11 After the revolution, Chaianov developed a theory of cooperatives which reflected his idea that peasant households should ideally combine the advantages of small‑scale farming with those of large‑scale economic operations. Thus, it would be most efficient if households handed over those tasks, where they were inferior to larger economic units to cooperatives, while carrying on in segments in which small‑scale operations had a clear advantage. In Chaianov’s view, an agrarian order based on these “differential optimums” promised income increases for individual households as well as prospects for growth in the farming sector as a whole, opening up the opportunity for a more fundamental change of the rural order in the long run. The process of gradual “cooperative collectivisation” (kooperativnaia kollektivizatsiia), in the course of which peasant households would give up more and more of their initial activities, would modernise agriculture facilitating the introduction of advanced technology, scale economies and planning, without disbanding the principles of voluntary cooperation.12 6 During the 1920s, Chaianov combined his activity as a scholar with employment as an expert in the ranks of the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture. Although his involvement in the agricultural decision‑making of the Soviet state testified to the economist’s respected reputation, his position was not undisputed. In Bolshevik discourse, the peasants served as the negative antipode of the proletariat. Seizing upon the stereotype of peasant backwardness widespread already before the revolution,13 Soviet elites conceived the mission to educate the peasants and transform them into conscious proletarians.14 While during the years of the New Economic Policy it seemed that peasant‑based agriculture and Soviet rule were compatible, the turn towards accelerated industrialisation and collectivisation in the late 1920s proved the opposite. Chaianov, who had been repeatedly defamed as a “peasantist” since the Bolshevik takeover, was now increasingly attacked for upholding anti‑Soviet positions. Charged with being an alleged member of a conspiratorial organisation, he was arrested in 1930 together with other leading agrarian experts. In 1934 the economist was banned to Kazakhstan, where in 1937 he was arrested again and subsequently executed.15 7 Aimed at the integration of the rural economy into the hierarchies of the centrally planned command economy, collectivisation targeted the peasant household as a concrete economic and social unit as well as an analytical category. In the view of the Stalinist elite, a socialist agrarian economy was bound up with collective enterprises ; it did not take place within peasant households. As kolkhozniki, the rural population was to participate in the construction of socialism, transforming the village into an arena of modernity.16 After the turn toward collectivisation, Soviet agrarian economics focused on technical questions of collective and state farms, while the influential theoreticians of the peasant economy, whose works had shaped the agrarian debate during the previous decades, lost their professional authority and their social prestige.17 As a result, the names of Chaianov and his close colleagues vanished from public and academic discourse. Nikolai P. Makarov (1886‑1980), a close colleague and friend of Chaianov—who unlike many others survived the terror and in the 1960s became active again as an agrarian economist—adhered to the convention of public silence that surrounded Chaianov and others. Makarov used the ideal‑typical divide of Soviet agriculture into collective and state farms as an analytical framework for his later
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works.18 In the mid‑1960s, he even consciously refrained from publicly mentioning the names of his former colleagues.19 8 Other than Makarov, whose personal and professional biography had been strongly affected by the marginalisation of agricultural economists during the Stalinist period, a new cohort of Soviet academics transmitted the intellectual heritage of the 1920s.20 Historian Viktor P. Danilov (1925‑2004), one of the first critics of the collectivisation, reintroduced Chainov’s ideas in academic literature. In an exhaustive study published in 1977 of the Soviet village prior to the collectivisation, he insisted upon a critical examination of Chaianov’s theory of the peasant economy, pointing to the rising interest in the economist among Western scholars.21 Showing that both demographic and economic factors had impacted upon the development of peasant farms before the onset of collectivisation, Danilov attributed some limited explanatory power to Chaianov’s theory, albeit without challenging the official rejection of the economist’s ideas.22 The history of economic thought likewise served to maintain the memory of intellectual traditions that had been cut off during the Stalinist period. From the late 1970s, Nadezhda K. Figurovskaia (1930‑2012), a member of the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, published extensively on agrarian problems in the economic writings of the NEP and the early Stalinist period.23 Avoiding a clear affirmation of Chaianov’s ideas, Danilov and Figurovskaia applied the common distinction between “socialist” and “bourgeois” economists, presenting Chaianov’s ideas as an example of a non‑socialist strand in early Soviet economic thought. After the rehabilitation of Chaianov, both scholars would be intensely involved in the rediscovery of the economist.24
Household farming and the eschatology of socialist progress
9 While it was possible to remember Chaianov as a protagonist of “bourgeois” economic science, social scientists and economists who studied the Soviet village after the end of Stalinism avoided the application of concepts and terms which could have been directly associated with the economist. However, as family farming continued as an important element of Soviet agriculture, Chaianov’s notion of the household whose members tried to balance consumption needs and labour resources kept shaping academic literature about the rural economy. In the early 1930s, as a response to the catastrophic situation in the villages after the collectivisation campaign, the Soviet leadership had made concessions to the rural population granting kolkhoz farmers the right to cultivate private plots and to keep cattle in so‑called private subsidiary farms (lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo).25 Initially conceived as a temporary compromise, this arrangement persisted until the end of the Soviet period. In the late 1950s, about one third of the Soviet agricultural production stemmed from private household farming. In 1990, that proportion was still some 24.2 %.26 Like the Soviet economy as a whole, agriculture was based on an institutionalised compromise.27
10 Ideologically, the continuing importance of private subsidiary farming was anything but a trivial problem. In an ideal‑type socialist village, there was no place for private plots. The considerable contribution of subsidiary farms to Soviet food production challenged the belief in the superiority of large‑scale agriculture, which was a cornerstone of socialist economic doctrine. Moreover, the importance of household
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farming could be interpreted as a concrete danger for the Soviet order, as collective farms and private plots were both competing for the labour resources of the rural population. As long as subsidiary farms accounted for a significant share of their income, rural residents had a real incentive to minimise their time or labour effort in the collective and state farms.28 The fact that many used their poorly paid jobs on collective farms to access resources that they needed on their private plots made those even more suspicious.29 Therefore, until the mid‑1960s, the Soviet government undertook repeated attempts to restrict the extent of subsidiary farming.30 11 The tension between Marxist doctrine and pragmatic arrangements in economic practice made it difficult for Soviet social scientists to make sense of rural life. How could the village be described without questioning the success of socialist transformation in the countryside ? Soviet ideology provided the necessary templates in order to render the phenomenon of subsidiary farming intelligible linguistically and in analytical terms. In accordance with the teleology of socialist progress, material facts that were not compatible with the ideal image of socialist society were declared to be pre‑socialist “leftovers” (perezhitok).31 Imagining the present as a transitional moment on a path from a state of economic backwardness to socialism allowed for the possibility of interpreting the existence of non‑socialist artefacts as indicators of ongoing change.32 12 When at the beginning of the 1950s, Soviet ethnographers under the leadership of Pavel I. Kushner (1889‑1968) carried out an extensive study on kolkhoz life, they noted the fundamental importance of private plots for the budgets of rural families. In their view, the phenomenon was legitimate for two reasons : first, private household farms were purely “consumerist in character” (potrebitel´skii kharakter), and second, the contribution of “social” (i.e. linked to the kolkhoz) production to the income of an average kolkhoz family was constantly on the increase.33 Although their analysis was reminiscent of some features of Chaianov’s “labor‑consumer balance,” Kushner’s team tried to avoid the impression that the demographic composition of rural families rather than collective agriculture was decisive for living standards in the countryside.34 They explained subsidiary agriculture within a comprehensive framework of social and economic change. Compared to the cities, as the authors stressed, the socialist transformation of the village was delayed.35 Pointing to the transitional character of rural realities, they could thus ascribe a certain meaning to household farming without calling into question the Soviet model of progress. 13 Economists used a similar approach in order to address the important role played by private households in Soviet food production. Like the ethnologists that were involved in Kushner’s famous expedition, they regarded private agriculture among collective farm workers as a form of production that would wither away with the further development of socialism. Vladimir G. Venzher (1899‑1990), a staff member in the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a proponent of market‑economic principles in agrarian policy, inspired a group of later economists and sociologists to deal with household farming in the Soviet village.36 In a 1966 monograph, he admitted that private plots testified to the deficient level of production in the kolkhoz and that without them it would be impossible to secure sufficient food provision for the population. Venzher justified food production of private plots by stressing their orientation towards the consumption needs of the family members. However, it was crucial for him to emphasise that subsidiary plots could not be equated
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with the peasant farm (krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo) which had been in the centre of Chaianov’s research. Brought about by the socialist transformation of the village, they would forfeit their compensatory function as soon as collective farms would produce sufficient foodstuffs. From that juncture on, “no one would want to operate a private plot in order to gain additional personal income.”37 Committed to the socialist idea of economic development, the economist Vladislav A. Belianov (1933‑2010) termed private household farming a “specific socialist transitional form of production.”38 14 While the eschatology of socialist progress allowed for discourse about private agriculture in the Soviet village, attempts to attribute private subsidiary plots an importance sui generis remained risky. Gelii I. Shmelev (1927‑2004), a student of Venzher and like him a staff member at the Institute of Economics, found that academic interest in private household farming could stand in the way of an academic career. In his habilitation thesis finished in 1967, Shmelev argued that the potential production capacity of private subsidiary farms was being underestimated. In fact, private plots could substantially contribute and even raise their contribution to the country’s food supply.39 Shmelev’s opinion evidently shattered the foundations of Soviet economic doctrine. The economist was accused of espousing the notion that private subsidiary plots were superior to collective farms, a reproach similar to the one Chaianov had faced with regard to his notion of the “viability” (zhiznesposobnost´) of peasant households under various economic regimes. Shmelev’s work was kept under lock and key, while the official doctoral procedure continued, albeit with considerable delay. After he had defended his thesis twice (in 1969 and 1970), its final approval required another two years and the examination by various scientific commissions.40 Shmelev’s experience was symptomatic : as long as the large‑scale collective farm was lauded unchallenged as the ideal of socialist agriculture, scientists engaged in the empirical study of private farming laid themselves open to the charge of questioning the success of the Soviet path. While it was possible to embed subsidiary agriculture within a narrative of socialist progress, projections of a stable or even greater role of private plots in the future seemed to imply the inability of the country to further move towards socialism.
Real‑existing socialism in the Soviet countryside
15 The framework for making sense of household farming in Soviet villages changed when in the 1970s, the Soviet leadership acknowledged the slow‑moving pace of agrarian development as an urgent political problem. Under Leonid I. Brezhnev, gigantic sums were pumped into agriculture in order to modernise the farming infrastructure and stimulate yield growth. Additional measures to improve the country’s agricultural performance included the increase of procurement and retail prices for agricultural goods, the payment of regular wages to collective farm workers and the issuing of internal passports for the rural population. Yet the attempts to change the trajectory of the rural economy proved unsuccessful. An uptick in agricultural production in the late 1960s was followed by a slowdown in the next decade. The Soviet Union became ever more dependent on imported foodstuffs, while rural‑urban migration caused ongoing headaches for the government.41
16 Notwithstanding the clear preference of the Soviet leadership for industrial agriculture, growing awareness of crisis went hand in hand with a more conciliatory
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approach to household farming. After the 1936 Constitution had recognised private subsidiary farms as components of the collectivised village,42 private plots were treated as a temporary phenomenon that served the singular purpose of securing the personal provision of the rural population. At the Central Committee Plenum in September 1953, it was still official doctrine that subsidiary farming would ultimately disappear. The resolution of the convention stated that kolkhoz members maintained private plots “to satisfy their consumption as long as these needs cannot yet be completely met by social production.” 43 However, the tone changed when Brezhnev came to power. After Khrushchev’s attempts to limit private farming, the October plenary in 1964 decided to rescind the “arbitrary restrictions” on individual plots.44 A resolution by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers in 1977 acknowledged the promotion of private subsidiary plots as an instrument of Soviet agrarian policy. The idea was to support the rural population by less strict regulations for keeping cattle and for the sale of privately produced foods as well as through the provision of cattle feed, credit and other means of production.45 Private agriculture was now seen as a means to secure higher incomes in the countryside and thus help the Soviet Union overcome the rural crisis. 17 In this context, the socialist village took on new contours. In 1978, Shmelev defined subsidiary private farming “as an essential component of socialist economy, which does justice to the socialist relations of production…”46 Shmelev was hardly alone in expressing this viewpoint. In the course of the 1970s, research on private subsidiary farming established itself as a branch of inquiry in the social sciences. Ever more rarely now were the private plots described as a defect of the Soviet rural order.47 Tatiana I. Zaslavskaia (1927‑2013), like Shmelev and Belianov a student of Venzher and a leading authority in Soviet rural sociology, had paid attention to the phenomenon of household farming since the beginning of her academic career.48 In a collective study published by Zaslavskaia and her Novosibirsk colleague Rozalina V. Ryvkina in 1980, private plots were even called a “necessary condition for the development of the village.”49 This expression reflected a fundamental new understanding of the socialist rural economy. Household farming no longer pointed up the incomplete nature of Soviet socialism. On the contrary : now it was its structural feature. 18 Beyond science and politics, the ideological reconciliation with the realities of the Soviet village was being attentively followed. In an influential Pravda article, published in 1977, Shmelev termed private subsidiary farming an “integrated component of socialist agriculture” (sostavnaia chast´ sotsialisticheskogo sel´skogo khoziaistva).50 His readers appreciated that private production of food had finally received the recognition it rightfully deserved. Shmelev was asked to raise public awareness of the topic in the Soviet Union by means of newspaper articles and discussion on television, because “our kolkhozes and sovkhozes can provide the people with grain, sunflower oil, turnips and potatoes […] but meat, milk, fruit […] never ever.”51 In responding to the economist, the residents of a village stressed that their private agricultural activity was valuable not only for the national economy. It also testified to their moral integrity : We all engage in social labour. In our free time, we dedicate ourselves to planting vegetables. We live in the countryside and have learned that work in the field is a noble task. The work of the peasant is honourable (Trud krest´ianina pochoten).52 19 The reactions to Shmelev’s article mirrored the revaluation of the countryside in the late Soviet period. In the context of demographic decline and the advance of industrial
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farming, rural regions became imaginary spaces where the bond to a largely forgotten, presumably better past had not yet been totally torn asunder. Authors of so‑called “village prose” and proponents of the rising nature protection movement praised the rural regions as spaces of purity and authenticity.53 Attributing to household farming a non‑economic value, social scientists contributed to the promotion of a positive image of the rural world as well. For sociologist Zemfira I. Kalugina, like Zaslavskaia and Ryvkina based in Novosibirsk, subsidiary farming was a “form in which the rural population expresses itself, part of recreational activities as well as an instrument for the education and professional orientation of the rural youth.”54 From Kalugina’s viewpoint, the private production of foodstuffs was thus a marker of a distinctive rural identity, whose strengthening would help revive Soviet villages.
20 The positive connotation of (imagined) rural life was in line with the pragmatic need of the government for increased agricultural production and a slowdown in rural‑urban migration. A decree issued in January 1981 by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers “On Additional Measures to Increase Production Levels in Private Subsidiary Farms” stated that it was necessary to promote household farming by means of credits, technical advice and improved conditions for production and marketing. At the same time, private agriculture should also be actively propagandised.55 This resolution set the tone for the further debate. At a conference of agricultural scientists and economists held in the same year, A.I. Ievlev, deputy minister of agriculture, stressed that private subsidiary plots not only helped secure the supply of provisions for the country but also instilled a “love for nature and the soil” in the rural population.56 While being a Party Secretary for agriculture within the Central Committee, M.S. Gorbachev pointed to the non‑economic function of private subsidiary farms as well. In an article published in 1982, he emphasised that apart from their economic importance, subsidiary farms played a “considerable social and educational role.”57 At the beginning of the 1980s, the positive connotation of household farming had already become a commonplace in official Soviet rhetoric. Once ostracised as an indicator of incomplete socialist transformation, private subsidiary farms were now seen as a means for social inclusion. 21 The changing attitudes to private subsidiary farming in academic writing and late Soviet politics reflected growing concern about rural decline and a simultaneous shift in Soviet identity discourse. Although agrarian policy up until the end of the Soviet period continued to promote large‑scale enterprises, the tone toward household farming became conciliatory. While private subsidiary farming had been treated before as a temporary compromise, it was now increasingly acknowledged as a permanent feature of the rural economy. The hesitant approval of the realities of rural life was a concomitant of the ideological shift that took place in the Brezhnev period. Now the guiding motif of Soviet self‑understanding was not movement but stability. The description of their own time as “developed socialism” expanded and lengthened the present, postponing the advent of communism to an indefinite future.58 Ritual behaviour supplanted campaigns, while the revaluation and new coding of central concepts in Soviet discourse made ideology and real‑life facts on the ground compatible. Economic and social phenomena that had no place in the utopianism of the revolutionary period and the actionism under Khrushchev were now integrated into a heterogeneous and less monolithic model of socialism. Under the changed conditions of official discourse, it thus proved possible to acknowledge the economic importance of
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household farming in present and future times and even to reinterpret it as a source of Soviet socialist identity.
Expert post‑mortem : Reinventing Chaianov in the Soviet Union
22 In the light of ever mounting migration from the villages and agricultural decline, M.S. Gorbachev, after being appointed General Secretary, gave priority to the revitalisation of rural regions. His agrarian politics included a reform of the bureaucratic apparatus, measures to improve social welfare and infrastructure in the countryside as well as attempts to create economic incentives to motivate the rural population to increase agricultural production.59 This turn to the countryside involved a gradual revaluation of household farming. Already before becoming party head, Gorbachev had supported the idea that private subsidiary farms should enhance their activity by contracting with state and collective farms. Such an arrangement would help reconcile the interests of the state with those of the rural population.60 Inspired by recent Hungarian agrarian reforms that had included concessions to cooperatives and market‑based trade operations, after the beginning of perestroika Gorbachev increasingly thought of rural households as semi‑independent producers. The enhancement of contract farming and finally the 1988 Law on Cooperatives granted some modicum of autonomy to private producers and made possible the setting up of independent cooperatives.61
23 The recognition of family farming and cooperatives as potential sources of agricultural growth provided the climate for the reappraisal of A.V. Chaianov. A decisive impulse in this respect came from agrarian scientist Aleksandr A. Nikonov, who during the perestroika years became a decisive link between academia and politics. Nikonov had not only been familiar with Chaianov’s writings since the 1950s. He also was personally acquainted with Chaianov’s friend and colleague N.P. Makarov, who was able to establish himself again as an agrarian economist in the 1960s.62 A former minister of agriculture in the Latvian Soviet Republic, Nikonov knew very well the functional logic of Soviet politics. At the same time, he was in personal contact with Gorbachev, since as director of the Stavropol Agricultural Institute he had been a member of the advisory committee for Gorbachev’s doctoral thesis.63 In 1984, Nikonov took over the directorship of the All‑Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), a position of some political importance. After Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikonov made use of his personal connections, calling the attention of the Soviet leadership to the agricultural experts who had been silenced at the beginning of the 1930s. In the name of VASKhNIL, he sent a request in September 1986 to Gorbachev calling for the formal rehabilitation of Chaianov and his colleagues N.D. Kondrat´ev, A.N. Chelintsev and N.P. Makarov.64 Shortly thereafter, the General Secretary ordered the creation of a special commission including the KGB and the state procuracy that was put in charge of reviewing the case against the four economists.65 In June 1987, they were rehabilitated along with a number of other experts on economics and agriculture.66 24 The subsequent rediscovery of Chaianov by the Soviet academic public took place in a transnational setting. Since the mid‑1960s, Chaianov’s ideas had been integrated into the theoretical arsenal of Peasant Studies, which aimed at challenging dominating views
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about agrarian development. While classical modernisation theory predicted the disappearance of peasant households under capitalism, scholars in the new field pointed to the persistence of peasant household farming in large parts of the developing world.67 Teodor Shanin, a former emigré from the Soviet Union and one of the most prominent representatives of the field of peasant studies in the West, was closely involved in the revaluation of Chainov in the Soviet Union. While Shanin was on a research trip in the Soviet Union in 1987, Nikonov asked him to deliver a lecture on the recently rehabilitated Chaianov. The event, initially planned for the senior staff of the Timiriazev Academy, marked the beginning of the public reappraisal and reappropriation of Chaianov. Several hundred persons attended the lecture, in which after more than five decades of public silence Shanin recalled the economist’s tragic biography.68 25 Rising interest in the economist’s intellectual legacy was reflected in numerous new editions of Chaianov’s works. Scholars who had mentioned Chaianov in their publications already before his official rehabilitation, as well as economists who had contributed to integrating household farming into a less monolithic model of Soviet socialism, actively promoted the revival of the economist’s ideas. A.A. Nikonov, G.I. Shmelev and V.A. Belianov, an economist who like Shmelev had been examining the role of private subsidiary plots in the Soviet village, were prominently involved in the publication of Chaianov’s selected writings.69 G.I. Shmelev and N.K. Figurovskaia participated in a new edition of his theory of cooperation, published in 1991. Economist V.G. Venzher, who passed away shortly before the book came out, had been the official editorial reviewer of the edition.70 Historian V.P. Danilov, a close friend of Shanin since the early 1980s, when Shanin started regularly visiting the Soviet Union,71 was active in presenting Chaianov’s cooperative theory to a Western audience.72 26 Mirroring aspirations to reform Soviet socialism, the reappropriation of Chaianov’s ideas linked up directly with the acknowledgement of household farming and the revalorisation of the village during the previous decade. At the same time, the theories and ideas which Chaianov had developed at the beginning of the 20th century were compatible with the new turn in economic thinking that emerged during perestroika among scientists, politics and the public sphere. At a conference in 1988 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Chaianov’s birth, A.A. Nikonov argued that Chaianov had not developed an alternative to socialism but rather an alternative version of socialism : Only a person who associates socialism in a dogmatic and limited way with kolkhoz or sovkhoz farms, their strict centralism and their stereotypical character, only a person who is unfamiliar with the multitude of diverse forms of cooperative initiatives, can accuse Chaianov of having a non‑socialist viewpoint.73 27 V.P. Danilov regarded Chaianov’s work as an inspiration for projections of a socialist order which was different from the Soviet one, calling his theory of cooperation “a real alternative to collectivisation of the Stalinist variety.”74 These statements exemplify the intellectual appeal of Chaianov among the supporters of perestroika. The writings of the economist advanced the conception of a model of socialism that integrated different forms of production and ownership, including household‑based agricultural production and cooperatives. After his rehabilitation, Chaianov was thus considered a prophet of “socialism with a human face,” whose realisation appeared on the political agenda after Gorbachev came to power. Scholars such as A.A. Nikonov, G.I. Shmelev and V.P. Danilov, who were consulted as experts during the perestroika years,75 provided
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the change in agricultural policy with the necessary authority. At the same time, the reappraisal of Chaianov served to testify to the credibility of the reformers themselves. By including Chaianov post mortem into the circle of agrarian experts, they could demonstrate the legitimacy of their own political program.
Conclusions
28 Chaianov’s rehabilitation and the subsequent reappraisal of his economic theory were clearly an episode of glasnost´ and perestroika. The search for new ways to foster agricultural production, criticism of collectivisation and the official condemnation of the Stalinist terror were decisive conditions that allowed for the reappropriation of Chaianov’s intellectual legacy. The integration of the victims of Stalinism within the imagined community of Soviet citizens made it possible for contemporaries to dissociate themselves from the violent past of their country. Like the party ideologue N.I. Bukharin, who was formally rehabilitated in February 1988,76 Chaianov was now regarded as an intellectual precursor and trailblazer of a promising path of socialist development, which Stalin had sacrificed in order to erect a brutal dictatorship and an ineffective command economy. The rehabilitation of the economist made it possible to justify demands for a shift in agricultural policy towards an expansion of household‑based farming from an economic and a moral standpoint at the same time.
29 Yet, the reappropriation of Chaianov’s legacy testifies to more than the political turn under Gorbachev and the revaluation of Soviet history. Made possible by the new conventions of public discourse during perestroika, the relevance which was ascribed to Chaianov’s writings should also be understood as a result of the changed image of socialism that had shaped Soviet agrarian debate in the 1970s. While back then Soviet writers depicted the village as the last bastion of national Russian identity, social scientists and politicians increasingly admitted the fact that a substantial share in the country’s agricultural production stemmed from private plots. Confronted with a slowdown in agricultural production and rural demographic decline, the Brezhnev administration, alongside investing in the public farm sector, took measures to support household farming. As Secretary of Agriculture in the Central Committee, Gorbachev continued this conciliatory approach to private production, approving the formation of family‑based production units that cooperated with collective farms on a contractual basis.77 The teleological model of progress, which implied that household farming would necessarily wither away, had thus become obsolete already before the onset of perestroika. 30 The changing notion of socialism was indicative of a process that was not limited to the Soviet Union : namely the vanishing faith in the existence of a universal developmental path towards modernity. In the West, interest increased in household‑based farming and Chaianov’s theory of the peasant economy when due to persisting poverty in developing countries, modernisation theory lost its credibility. Not the overcoming of peasant farming but its promotion was now put on the agenda.78 In the Soviet Union, rising acknowledgement of household farming resulted from a comparable shift in the ideological system of coordinates : given the high share of the private sector in overall food production, household farming, which before had been perceived as a remnant of pre‑socialist times or a side‑effect of incomplete socialist transformation, was accepted as a feature of “real‑existing socialism.” The private production of food by rural
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households now came to be regarded as a feature of Soviet agriculture in the present and on into the future. From this perspective, the key role played by Teodor Shanin in the iconisation of Chaianov was symptomatic of a crisis in teleological approaches to progress on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The institutionalisation of Peasant Studies as krest´ianovedenie in post‑Soviet Russia can be seen as a further proof of this.79 31 In the late perestroika years, the idea that household plots could potentially increase their production transitioned into suggestions to actively create a family farming sector within Soviet agriculture. The rural household was regarded as a point of departure for agricultural revival during Boris N. El’tsin’s reforms as well. The privatisation of land and the transition to a market economy should help overcome the concentration of land in large‑scale farms, while the expansion of the private farm sector based on the Law on Peasant Farms was expected to boost the standards of living among the rural population. Defining the peasant farm as an independent economic subject, which consisted of the members of a family able to work and other citizens that jointly run a farm, the law appealed to the notion of the rural household as the core of agricultural production, while at the same time legalizing production beyond personal needs.80 32 Yet market‑oriented family farming has not become a dominant feature of Russia’s agrarian structure. Contrary to the reformers’ initial intents, post‑Soviet Russian agriculture has faced the establishment of vertically integrated farms that often control all levels of the agricultural value‑added chain, while labour‑intense subsidiary farming is still widespread.81 Resistance by local administrations to turning land titles into actual landed property, lacking opportunities for the rural population to access credit and input markets, as well as non‑transparent procedures of land entitlement prevented the establishment of a vibrant family farming sector.82 As a result, the enthusiastic return to Chaianov’s vision of peasant farming and cooperation remained limited to academic debate and political rhetoric, with little impact on the outlook of the Russian countryside. The economic legacy of the Soviet rural order and the configurations of local power proved stronger than the belief in family farming as a catalyst for agricultural growth.
NOTES
1. I wish to thank three anonymous reviewers whose comments helped me sharpen the argument of this article. 2. Olesia Kirchik, “Zemel´naia reforma : 1990‑2002 [The land reform : 1990‑2002],” Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 1 (2004) : http://www.strana‑oz.ru/2004/1/ zemelnaya‑reforma‑1990‑2002 (retrieved 1 October 2014). 3. Carol S. Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia : The Road from Serfdom (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85‑121. 4. Lars T. Lih, “Perestroika’s Revival of NEP : A Contemporary Chronicle, 1985‑1990,” The NEP Era : Soviet Russia 1921‑1928, 3 (2009) : 1‑35 ; Robert W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1989), 27‑46.
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5. See among many others : V.N. Baliazin, Professor Aleksandr Chaianov, 1888‑1937 (Moscow [hereafter M.] : Agropromizdat, 1990) ; V.V. Kabanov, “A.V. Chaianov,” Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1988) : 146‑176 ; V.A. Chaianov, A.V. Chaianov : Chelovek—uchenyi—grazhdanin [A.V. Chaianov : person – scholar – citizen] (M. : Izdatel´stvo MSChA, 1998). 6. See S.A. Bartenev, Istoriia ėkonomicheskikh uchenii [The history of economic schools] (M. : Magistr, 2007), 263‑266 ; V. Avtonomov, O. Anan´in and N. Makasheva, Istoriia ėkonomicheskikh uchenii [The history of economic schools] (M. : INFRA‑M, 2013), 440‑47 ; Iu.Ia. Ol´sevich, “O spetsifike natsional´noi shkoly ėkonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii [On the specificities of the national school of economic thought in Russia],” in : L.I. Abalkin, ed., Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi ėkonomicheskoi mysli [Outlines on the history of Russian economic thought] (M. : Nauka, 2003) : 47‑49 ; I.B. Poliubina, “Chaianov Aleksandr Vasil´evich,” in N.N. Dumnaia and O.V. Karamova, Istoriia ėkonomicheskoi mysli v Rossii v litsakh : Slovar´ spravochnik [The history of economic thought in Russia in portraits : A handbook] (M. : Knorus, 2007), 347‑353. 7. See, for example, Davies, Soviet History, 31, 134 ; Eberhard Müller, “Blick zurück im Zorn ? ! Bürgerkrieg, Kriegskommunismus und Neue Ökonomische Politik,” in Dietrich Geyer, ed., Die Umwertung der sowjetischen Geschichte (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 75‑102. 8. David W. Darrow, “From Commune to Household : Statistics and the Social Construction of Chaianov’s Theory of Peasant Economy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43, 4 (October 2001) : 788‑818. 9. Chaianov expressed these ideas already in the late Imperial period. See Katja Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war : Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Cologne : Böhlau, 2014), 60‑66. The first coherent version of his theory appeared in German : Alexander Tschajanow, Lehre von der bäuerlichen Wirtschaft : Versuch einer Theorie der Familienwirtschaft im Landbau (Berlin : Parey, 1923). An extended version was published in 1925 in the Soviet Union : A.V. Chaianov, Organizatsiia krest´ianskogo khoziaistva [The organisation of the peasant economy] (M. : Kooperativnoe Izdatel´stvo, 1925). 10. On the involvement of experts in the pre‑revolutionary cooperative movement, see Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia : Rural Professionals and Self‑Organization, 1905‑30 (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 11. A.V. Chaianov, Kratkii Kurs Kooperatsii : Lektsii, chitannye na staroobriadcheskikh kursakh v Moskve, 1913g. [Short course on Co‑operatives] (M. : Drug zemli, 1915). 12. A.V. Chaianov, Osnovnye idei i formy organizatsii sel´skokhoziaistvennoi kooperatsii. Izdanie 2‑e [Basic ideas and organisational forms of agricultural cooperatives] (M. : Knigosoiuz, 1927) ; A.V. Chaianov, Optimal´nye razmery sel´sko‑khoziaistvennykh predpriiatii. 3‑e izdanie [Optimal farm sizes] (M. : Novaia derevnia, 1928). 13. Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward : Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861‑1914 (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 14. Dietrich Beyrau, “Janus in Bastschuhen : Die Bauern in der russischen Revolution 1905‑1917,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 21, 4 (1995) : 585‑603. 15. On the marginalisation of agrarian experts at the end of the NEP, see Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war, 238‑257. 16. On the modernistic impetus underlying collectivisation, see most recently Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress : Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930‑1963 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2014). 17. Susan Solomon Gross, The Soviet Agrarian Debate : A Controversy in Social Science, 1923‑1929 (Boulder : Westview Press, 1977), 155‑170. 18. N.P. Makarov, Ėkonomicheskie osnovy organizatsii proizvodstva v kolkhozakh i sovkhozakh [The economic foundations of the organisation of production in collective and state farms] (M. : Kolos, 1966). 19. Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war, 301‑302.
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20. Alessando Stanziani, “Čajanov, Kerblay et les šestidesjatniki : une histoire globale ?,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 45, 3‑4 (2004) : 385‑406. 21. V.P. Danilov, Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevnia : Naselenie, zemlepol´zovanie, khoziaistvo [The Soviet village before collectivisation : Population, land‑use, economy] (M. : Nauka, 1977), 6‑7. 22. Danilov, Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevnia, 222‑264. 23. N.K. Figurovskaia, Agrarnye problemy v sovetskoi ėkonomicheskoi literature 20‑kh godov [Agrarian problems in the Soviet economic literature of the 1920s] (M. : Nauka, 1978) ; N.K. Figurovskaia, Razvitie agrarnoi teorii v SSSR konets 20‑kh ‑ 30‑e gody [The development of agrarian theory in the USSR at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s] (M. : Nauka, 1983). 24. See, for example, N.K. Figurovskaia and A.I. Glagolev, “A.V. Chaianov i ego teoriia semeinogo krest´ianskogo khoziaistva [A.V. Chaianov and his theory of the peasant family economy],” in A.V. Chaianov, Krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo : Izbrannye trudy [The peasant economy : Selected works] (M. : Ėkonomika, 1995), 26‑51 ; V.P. Danilov, “Russkaia revoliutsiia v sud´be A.V. Chaianova [The Russian Revolution in the fate of A.V. Chaianov],” Krest´ianovedenie, 1 (1996) : 96‑133. 25. Stephan Merl, Bauern unter Stalin : Die Formierung des sowjetischen Kolchossystems 1930‑1941 (Berlin : Duncker & Humboldt, 1990), 257‑288. 26. Karl‑Eugen Wädekin, Privatproduzenten in der sowjetischen Landwirtschaft (Cologne : Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1967) ; Stefan Hedlund, Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union (London, New York : Routledge, 1989). 27. The coexistence of collective and private economic enterprises was a constant feature of the Soviet economy. In the first few decades after the Second World War, private subsidiary plots were an important source of income for rural and also urban households. Andrei Markevich, “Finding Additional Income : Subsidiary Agriculture in Soviet Urban Households, 1941‑1964,” in Donald Filtzer, Wendy Z. Goldman, Gijs Kessler and Simon Pirani, eds., A Dream Deferred : New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History (Bern : Peter Lang, 2008), 385‑415. On the importance of private production and private commerce in the late phase of Stalinism, see Julie Hessler, “A Postwar Perestroika ? Toward a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR,” Slavic Review, 57, 3 (Autumn 1998) : 516‑542. 28. Stefan Hedlund, Crisis in Soviet Agriculture (London : Croom Helm, 1984), 161‑165. 29. Wädekin, Privatproduzenten, 115‑158 ; Hedlund, Crisis in Soviet Agriculture, 105‑107. 30. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 295‑318 ; Hedlund, Private Agriculture, 18‑24 ; D.N. Konyshev, “Gosudarstvennaia politika ogranicheniia lichnogo podsobnogo khoziaistva (konets 1950‑kh – nachalo 1960‑kh gg.) [State politics toward the restriction of private subsidiary farming (end of the 1950s – early 1960s],” Rossiiskaia istoriia, no. 3 (2011) : 102‑111. 31. Sergei Alymov, “Poniatie ‘perezhitok’ i sovetskie sotsial´nye nauki v 1950 – 1960‑e gody [The concept of the “remnant” and the Soviet social sciences in the 1950s ‑ 1960s],” Antropologicheskii forum, no. 16 (2012) : 261‑287. 32. Maya Haber, “The Soviet Ethnographers as a Social Engineer : Socialist Realism and the Study of Rural Life, 1945–1958,” The Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review, 41 (2014) : 194‑219. 33. Selo Viriatino v proshlom i nastoiashchem : Opyt ėtnograficheskogo izucheniia russkoi kolkhoznoi derevni [The village of Viriatino in past and present : Ethnographical study of the Russian collectivized village] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1958), 162‑177. 34. Haber, “The Soviet Ethnographers as a Social Engineer…,” 218. 35. Selo Viriatino v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 5. 36. On V.G. Venzher, see T. Kuznetsova, “Vladimir Grigor´evich Venzher : uchenyi i ego vremia [Vladimir Grigor´evich Venzher : a scholar and his time],” Voprosy ėkonomiki, no. 5 (2014) : 132‑142.
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37. V.G. Venzher, Kolkhoznyi stroi na sovremennom ėtape [The collective regime in its current phase] (M. : Ėkonomika, 1966), 45. 38. V.A. Belianov, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo pri sotsializme [Private subsidiary farming under socialism] (M. : Ėkonomika, 1970), 6. 39. G.I. Shmelev, Ėkonomika lichnogo podsobnogo khoziaistva trudiashchikhsia pri sotsializme : Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni doktora ėkonomicheskikh nauk [The economy of the private subsidiary farms of the workers under socialism] (M. : Institut Ėkonomiki Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1968). In 1989, Swedish economist Stefan Hedlund would call Shmelev the “leading Soviet authority on the private sector.” Hedlund, Private Agriculture, 16. 40. G.I. Shmelev, “Agrarnaia teoriia : Trudnyi poisk istiny [Agrarian theory : A difficult search for the truth],” in A.V. Petrikov, ed., Teoreticheskoe nasledie agrarnikov‑ėkonomistov 50‑80‑kh godov i sovremennaia reforma v sel´skom khoziaistve : Liudi. Idei. Fakty [The theoretical legacy of agrarian economists of the 1950‑1980s and the recent reform in agriculture : People, Ideas, Facts] (M. : Academiia, 2009), 175‑181. 41. Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia, 77‑79 ; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917‑1991. New and Final Edition (London : Penguin Books, 1992), 377‑382. 42. Konstitutsiia Soiuza SSR i Konstitutsii Soiuznykh Respublik [The constitution of the USSR and the constitutions of its allied republics] (M. : Iuridicheskoe Izdatel´stvo NKIu SSSR 1938), 8. 43. “O merakh dal´neishego razvitiia sel´skogo khoziaistva SSSR. Postanovlenie Plenuma TsK KPSS, priniatoe 7 sentiabria 1953 g. po dokladu tov. N.S. Khrushcheva [On the means for the further development of agriculture in the USSR. Decree of the Plenum of the Central Committee issued on 7 September 1953, based on the speech of N.S. Khrushchev],” in Sbornik reshenii po sel ´skomu khoziaistvu [Collection of decisions on agriculture] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Sel ´skokhoziaistvennoi Literatury, 1963), 81. 44. “Postanovlenie TsK KPSS 27 oktiabria 1964 g. ob ustranenii neobosnovannykh ogranichenii lichnogo podsobnogo khoziaistva kolkhoznikov, rabochikh i sluzhashchich [Decree of the Central Committee of 27 October 1964 on the abolition of the unfounded restrictions of the private subsidiary farms of collective farm workers, workers and employees],” in Resheniia partii i pravitel´stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, Tom 5 : 1962‑1965 gody [Decisions of the party and the government on economic questions, vol. 5, 1926‑1965] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1968), 517. 45. “Postanovlenie TsK KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR 14 sentiabria 1977 o lichnykh podsobnykh khoziaistvakh kolkhoznikov, rabochikh, sluzhashchikh i drugikh grazhdan v kollektivnom sadovodstve i ogorodnichstve [Decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of 14 September 1977 on the private subsidiary farms of collective farm workers, workers, employees and other workers in collective gardening and horticulture],” in Resheniia partii i pravitel´stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, Tom 12 : Iiul´ 1977 g. – mart 1979 g. [Decisions of the party…, vol. 12, July 1977 – March 1979] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1979), 104‑111. 46. G.I. Shmelev, Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo truzhenika sela [The private subsidiary economy of the rural worker] (M. : Profizdat, 1978), 14. 47. A.A. Kurakin “Sel´skoe khoziaizstvo SSSR glazami sovremennikov [The agriculture of the USSR as seen by contemporaries],” Ėkonomicheskaia sotsiologiia, no. 7, 2 (2006) : 95‑97. 48. T.I. Zaslavskaia, Izbrannye proizvedeniia : Sotsial´naia i ėkonomicheskaia sotsiologiia [Selected writings : Social and economic sociology] (M. : Ėkonomika, 2007), 80‑96. 49. T.I. Zaslavskaia and R.V. Ryvkina, Metodologiia i metodika sistemnogo izucheniia sovetskoi derevni [Methodology and method for a systemic study of the Soviet village] (Novosibirsk : Nauka, 1980), 138. 50. G. Shmelev, “O lichnom podsobnom khoziaistve [On the private subsidiary farm],” Pravda, 10 September (1977) : 3.
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51. RGAĖ (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ėkonomiki), f. 1027 : private collection G.I. Shmelev, op. 1, d. 80, l. 2. 52. RGAĖ, f. 1027, op. 1, d. 80, l. 12. 53. Kathleen F. Parthé, Russian Village Prose : The Radiant Past (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1992) ; Klaus Gestwa, “Ökologischer Notstand und sozialer Protest,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 43 (2003) : 349-383, here 373‑375. 54. Z.I. Kalugina, “Politika sovetskogo gosudarstva v otnoshenii lichnogo podsobnogo khoziaistva : kharakteristika i sotsial´nye rezul´taty [The politics of the Soviet state toward private subsidiary farming : characteristics and social results],” in L.A. Khakhulina, ed., Sovremennoe razvitie sibirskogo sela : Opyt sotsiologicheskogo izucheniia. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov [The recent development of the Siberian village : Toward a sociological study] (Novosibirsk : Institut ėkonomiki i organizatsii promyshlennogo proizvodstva, 1983), 96. 55. “Postanovlenie TsK KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR 8 ianvaria 1981 g. o dopolnitel´nykh merakh po uvelicheniiu proizvodstva sel´skokhoziaistvennoi produktsii v lichnykh podsobnykh khoziaistvakh grazhdan [Decree of the Central Commitee and the Council of Ministers of 8 January 1983 on additional means for the increasing agricultural production on private subsidiary farms of the citizens],” in Resheniia partii i pravitel´stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, Tom 13 : Aprel´ 1979 g. – mart 1981 g. [Decisions of the party… vol. 13, April 1979 – March 1981] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1981), 544. 56. A.I. Ievlev, “Dopolnitel´nyi istochnik prodovol´stviia [An additional source of food],” in Lichnoe podsobnoe khoziaistvo v sisteme sotsialisticheskogo sel´skogo khoziaistva : Materialy Vsesoiuznogo nauchno‑prakticheskogo soveshchaniia, 6‑8 aprelia 1981 g. [The private subsidiary farm in the system of socialist agriculture] (M. : Institut ėkonomiki mirovoi sotsialisticheskoi sistemy, 1982) : 4‑10, here p. 5. 57. M.S. Gorbachev, “Prodovol´stvennaia programma i zadachi ee realizatsii [The food program and the tasks for its realisation],” in idem, Izbrannye rechi i stat´i, Tom 1 [Selected speeches and articles, vol. 1] (M. : Izdatel´stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1987) : 302‑320, here 306. 58. Stefan Plaggenborg, “Verstetigte Gegenwart : Über das Zeitverständnis im real existierenden Sozialismus,” in Christiane Brenner and Martin Schulze Wessel, eds., Zukunftsvorstellungen und staatliche Planung im Sozialismus : Die Tschechoslowakei im ostmitteleuropäischen Kontext 1945‑1989 (Munich : Oldenbourg 2010), 19‑32 ; Boris Belge and Martin Deuerlein, “Einführung : Ein goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation ? Neue Perspektiven auf die Brežnev‑Ära,” in idem, eds., Ein goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation ? Neue Perspektiven auf die Brežnev‑Ära (Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 1-33, here 10. 59. Judith Pallot, “Rural Depopulation and the Restoration of the Russian Village under Gorbachev,” Soviet Studies, 42, 4 (Oct. 1990) : 655‑674 ; Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia, 80‑81. 60. M.S. Gorbachev, “XXVI s‑ezd KPSS i agrarnaia politika partii : Iz doklada na Vsesoiuznom seminare‑soveshchanii ideologicheskikh rabotnikov v Moskve 21 aprelia 1981 goda [The 26th congress of the Communist Party and the agrarian politics of the party : From the speech at the All‑Union seminar of ideological workers in Moscow, 21 April 1981],” in idem, Izbrannye rechi i stat´i, 277. 61. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford : Oxford University Press 1996), 142‑154. 62. A.A. Nikonov, Istoricheskii put´ VASKhNIL i ee vklad v agrarnuiu nauku [The historical pathway of VASKhNIL and its contribution to the agricultural sciences] (M. : Ėntsiklopediia rossiiskikh dereven, 1993), 13. 63. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 43. The close cooperation between Gorbachev and Nikonov is covered in greater detail by Olessia Kirchik in this issue. 64. RGAĖ, f. 785 : private collection Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Nikonov, op. 1, d. 156, l. 8‑12. 65. A.N. Artizov et al, eds., Reabilitatsiia : Kak ėto bylo. Dok. prezidiuma TsK KPSS i dr. materialy, Tom 3 [Rehabilitation : How it was. Documents of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the
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Communist Party and other materials, vol. 3] (M. : Mezhdunarodnyi Fond “Demokratiia,” 2004), 10. 66. Davies, Soviet History, 133‑134. 67. Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies (Hardmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1971). For an exhaustive overview on the field, see Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres, “From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change,” Journal of Agrarian Change, 1, 1 (2001) : 1‑56. 68. Teodor Shanin, “Chayanov’s Treble Death and Tenuous Resurrection : An Essay about Understanding, about Roots of Plausibility and about Rural Russia,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36, 1 (January 2009), 83‑101 ; Davies, Soviet History, 31‑32. 69. A.V. Chaianov, Krest´ianskoe khoziaistvo : Izbrannye trudy [The peasant economy : Selected works] (M. : Ėkonomika, 1989). 70. A.V. Chaianov, Osnovnye idei i formy organizatsii sel´skokhoziaistvennoi kooperatsii [Basic ideas and organisational forms of agricultural cooperatives] (M. : Nauka, 1991). 71. “Agrarnyi seminar pamiati Viktora Petrovicha Danilova 4‑5 marta 2005 g. : Stenogramma vospominanii o Viktore Petroviche [The agrarian seminar in the memory of Viktor Petrovich Danilov 4‑5 March 2005 : Stenograph of memories about Viktor Petrovich],” Krest´ianovedenie, 5 (2005) : 38‑63. 72. A.V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Co‑operatives, translated by David Wedgwood Benn, introduction by Viktor Danilov (Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 1991). 73. A.A. Nikonov, “Nauchnoe nasledie A.V. Chaianova i sovremennost´ [The academic heritage of A.V. Chaianov and the present time],” Vestnik sel´skokhoziaistvennoi nauki, no. 7 (1988) : 43‑53, here 46. 74. V.P. Danilov, “Introduction,” in Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Co‑operatives, xi‑xxxiii, here xxxiii. 75. V.P. Danilov, “Iz istorii perestroiki : Perezhivaniia shestidesiatnika‑krest´ianoveda [From the history of the perestroika : Experiences of a shestidesiatnik‑krest´ianoved],” Otechestvennye zapiski no. 1 (2004) : Erreur ! Référence de lien hypertexte non valide. (retrieved : 8 November 2014). 76. Marc Junge, Bucharins Rehabilitierung : Historisches Gedächtnis in der Sowjetunion 1953 – 1991 (Berlin : Basisdruck 1999). 77. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 45 ; Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 382. 78. Eric Vanhaute, “Peasants, Peasantries and (De)Peasantization in the Capitalist World‑System,” in Salvatore Babones and Christopher Chase‑Dunn, eds., Routledge Handbook of World‑Systems Analysis (Oxon : Routledge, 2012) : 313‑321 ; Jonathan Harwood, Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since : The Rise and Fall of Peasant‑Friendly Plant Breeding (Oxon : Routledge, 2012). 79. The establishment of the discipline in post‑Soviet Russia was driven mainly by Teodor Shanin and V.P. Danilov. On the development of the field, see T. Shanin, A. Nikulin and V. Danilov, eds., Refleksivnoe krest´ianovedenie : Desiatiletie issledovanii sel´skoi Rossii [Reflexive peasant studies : A decade of studying rural Russia] (M. : ROSSPĖN, 2002). 80. “Zakon RSFSR ot 22.11.1990 N 348‑1 ‘O krest´ianskom (fermerskom) khoziaistve’ [The Law of the RSFSR of 22 November 1990 “On the peasant farm”],” Vedomosti SND i VS RSFSR, 26 (1990) : 324. 81. Stephen Wegren, “Land Reform in Russia : What Went Wrong ?,” Post‑Soviet Affairs, 28, 2 (2008) : 121‑148 ; Oane Visser, Natalia Mamonova and Max Spoor, “Oligarchs, megafarms and land reserves : understanding land grabbing in Russia” The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39, 3‑4 (2012) : 899–931. 82. Jessica Allina‑Pisano, The Post‑Soviet Potemkin Village : Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008).
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ABSTRACTS
The recognition of family farms and agricultural cooperatives as catalysts for agricultural recovery during the perestroika years went along with the rediscovery of the world-famous theoretician of the peasant farm Aleksandr V. Chaianov. The economist’s rehabilitation resulted from the changing conventions of public discourse towards the end of the Soviet era. Yet, Chaianov’s return needs to be linked also with the official image of the rural economy in the preceding decade when in academic and political debates on private subsidiary farms the socialist village took on new contours. Household farming which had previously been condemned as either a ‘petty-bourgeois’ mode of production or an indicator of the incomplete transition to socialism, was accepted as a component of socialist agriculture. Mirroring a new understanding of socialism, this paradigm shift was an important precondition for the broad public response to Chaianov’s rehabilitation. In the end, the turn towards family farming and co-operation remained an intellectual and political phenomenon with barely any impact on the agrarian order itself. The economic legacy of the Soviet era and local power constellations prevented a fundamental change of the rural order in favor of household-based agriculture.
La reconnaissance des fermes familiales et des coopératives agricoles comme catalyseurs de la relance de l’agriculture pendant la perestroïka alla de pair avec la redécouverte d’Aleksandr V. Čajanov, théoricien mondialement connu de l’économie paysanne et de son organisation. La réhabilitation de l’économiste faisait suite à l’évolution du discours public vers la fin de la période soviétique. Toutefois, le retour de Čajanov est aussi nécessairement lié à l’image officielle de l’économie rurale au cours de la décennie précédente quand, dans les débats politiques et académiques sur les exploitations auxiliaires privées, le village socialiste avait pris de nouvelles formes. L’exploitation familiale, autrefois condamnée parce que synonyme de mode de production « petit-bourgeois », ou révélatrice d’une transition inachevée vers le socialisme, avait été acceptée comme une composante de l’agriculture socialiste. Ce changement de paradigme, qui reflétait une nouvelle conception du socialisme, constituait une condition préalable importante à la réponse du public à la réhabilitation de Čajanov. Finalement, le virage opéré vers l’exploitation familiale et les coopératives resta un épiphénomène politique et intellectuel quasiment dénué d’impact sur l’ordre agraire lui-même. L’héritage économique de la période soviétique et les pouvoirs locaux empêchèrent tout changement fondamental dans l’ordre rural en faveur d’une agriculture basée sur l’exploitation privée.
AUTHOR
KATJA BRUISCH
German Historical Institute Moscow, katja.bruisch@dhi‑moskau.org
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Les intérêts politiques et économiques, facteurs déterminants de l’expertise Economic and political interests as determinants of expertise
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Sweet Development The sugar beet industry, agricultural societies and agrarian transformations in the Russian empire 1818‑1913 Un développement doux : l’industrie de la betterave sucrière, les sociétés agricoles et les transformations agraires dans l’Empire russe, 1818-1913
Susan Smith‑Peter
1 Russian agricultural societies were voluntary associations that linked governmental and private actors with the hopes of transforming Russia’s environment and economy. This article explores how one agricultural society—the Moscow Agricultural Society, established in 1818—encouraged the cultivation of sugar beet in European Russia as a substitute for cane sugar. While the government was not sympathetic, it indirectly assisted the sugar beet industry through its policies on taxes and tariffs. Even before the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the society had successes in spreading the cultivation of sugar beets and encouraging the production of beet sugar, which required complex machinery. Entrepreneurial nobles were able to change their agricultural practices without state assistance, relying mainly on free labor and on motivating serfs to plant sugar beets by paying money. Such nobles were scattered throughout the Russian Empire, and the Moscow Society played a key role in assisting them with seeds and improved technology.
2 At the same time, the Moscow Society was not able to transform the environment in the way they had originally hoped, which was to change European Russia by encouraging small noble producers to shift to growing sugar beet, which would then be processed in the factories of wealthy nobles. Instead, what began to emerge even before 1861 was the rise of extremely large vertically integrated producers in central and southern Ukraine, which is particularly rich in the soil best suited for growing sugar beets. While the patchwork of small and large producers in European Russia needed the tutelage of the Moscow Society to establish the industry, the massive Ukrainian producers required neither packets of seeds nor training for their stewards in the basics of beet sugar production. This article argues that although the work of the Moscow Society was important for introducing the cultivation of sugar beet, ultimately the superior soil found in the central and southern Ukrainian provinces, along with the
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spread of free labor and advanced technology there, allowed for the emergence of a highly successful beet sugar industry that was different from what the Moscow Society had originally envisioned. 3 This article contributes to three major areas of study: Ukrainian and Russian economic history, and the activities of voluntary associations. Ukrainian economic history has attracted scholars for many years, and classic works imply that Ukraine’s economic growth gave it a possible basis for autonomy.1 However, the main focus of Ukrainian history traditionally was to trace the growth of the Ukrainian idea via its ideological bearers and the conflicts they encountered with the Imperial Russian state. The populist thrust of classic historical narratives made it difficult to integrate the growth of factories, which Populists saw as exploitative, into a narrative of an emerging nation. 2 Newer work deals with the interaction of various ethnic groups in regions of Russia.3 Comparing Ukrainian and Russian economic development before 1861 helps to explain one aspect of Ukraine’s divergence from Russia. 4 The history of the rise of market agriculture in Russia has long occupied historians, as it is one part of the long‑running debate about capitalism in pre‑revolutionary Russia.4 In the 1960s, economic historians focused on the role of the state in accelerating a shift from subsistence to market agriculture; in particular, Alexander Gerschenkron argued that Russian agriculture contributed to Russian backwardness due to low yields resulting from serfdom and the peasant commune and that the state had to drive industrialization forward as a result.5 More recently, Carol S. Leonard has argued that the state failed to implement agrarian reform due to the lack of instruments at its disposal, particularly at the local level.6 In the 1970s and 1980s, historians brought the Gershenkron model into question by arguing that development happened even under serfdom and that the state was not the only source of economic development; they also noted the importance of foreign investment in the late Imperial period and the influence of enterprising nobles before 1861.7 Newer works also critique the state‑led argument, and take part in an intellectual turn in Russian economic history, shifting from a heavily quantitative discipline to one interested in changing ideas about the economy, generally focusing on the most important figures in this process.8 This article focuses on both broader social groups and on individuals to introduce a new collective actor in the economic and intellectual history of Russia: the agricultural societies. 5 Scholars working on agricultural societies have given widely varying evaluations of how much impact they had on agricultural practice. The first works were the jubilee histories written by leaders of societies themselves; not surprisingly, they emphasized their important achievements.9 In his classic works, Michael Confino noted that agricultural societies worked with the state to attempt to change agricultural practice, but he questioned whether they had any real impact.10 However, because Confino focused on changes to the three‑field system in central Russia, developments in Ukraine and in beet sugar production were outside the scope of his work. Sugar beets could be grown in peasant vegetable plots without changing the three‑field system, but nevertheless were part of improved agriculture. David Moon has noted that agricultural improvements were most common in southern Russia and Ukraine.11 Tracy Dennison argues that we know little of pre‑1861 agricultural practice and that attention to the local and regional is needed in order to build our knowledge.12 Newer works on agricultural societies argue that they did influence agricultural science and practice, both before and after 1861.13 After 1861, there was a shift from a limited
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number of noble‑dominated voluntary associations to a more broad based series of societies and cooperatives.14 By taking sugar beet production as a case study, this article helps to give a more nuanced understanding of how even when some societies were initially successful at spreading new crops and technologies, the small‑scale agrarian industrialization they hoped for in central Russia was supplanted by massive factories in Ukraine. 6 Even smaller scale producers had to deal with a process that required some knowledge and complex machinery, as first the beets would be grated and boiled, and the juice pressed from them. This juice would then be purified by saltpeter or other chemical means and then evaporated. The resulting syrup would be boiled until it crystalized, a process that required a refinery, meaning that smaller producers often had to sell syrup rather than crystalized sugar if there was no refinery nearby. When the first large refinery appeared in Kiev in 1843, rather than in Moscow, it was an early sign of the shift in the center of the industry.15
The State and the Russian sugar beet industry : the politics of taxes and tariffs
7 Sugar was not only a consumer good but also a matter of state. In Russia, levies of various sorts on sugar were a major source of the state’s income, and there were debates about which levies on which type of sugar would bring in the optimum income for the state. Sugar is produced both from sugar beets and from cane. Due to the influence of the refiners of raw sugar in St. Petersburg, for much of the nineteenth century, refined cane sugar could not legally be imported into Russia, aside from Odessa and a few other Black Sea ports. Raw cane sugar was imported to St. Petersburg, where sugar refineries produced the finished product. Sugar beets could be grown over a large swathe of the central and southern parts of the Russian Empire, although they also required a refinery to produce refined sugar.
8 The state had to raise money through tariffs and taxes without driving sugar prices so high that smuggling or reduced consumption would decrease the government’s income from such levies. It also had to navigate between the pressures applied by the St. Petersburg cane refiners and the emerging sugar beet industry. This section seeks to tease out the main turning points and influences in the development of the sugar beet industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1800, when the sugar beet industry was in its infancy, and 1848, when the first excise was placed on beet sugar, the state was most interested in raising money through levies on cane sugar while placating the St. Petersburg refiners, but they also inadvertently stimulated the growth of the sugar beet industry. 9 Sugar cane produces a large amount of sugar from each plant, and during the colonization of the New World, European countries introduced a colonial system in which imported African slaves worked on sugar cane plantations, in the harshest of conditions, and the sugar was often sold exclusively to the colonizing country or to other countries without tropical colonies at high prices.16 Although experiments with extracting sugar from beets had begun as early as the seventeenth century, it was Franz Carl Achard who, in 1799 in Austria, perfected the process, winning praise from
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Napoleon, who predicted Britain would have to throw its sugar into the Thames, as the Continent’s sugar would now come from beets.17 10 Both Napoleon and Alexander I stimulated the development of the production of beet sugar. Napoleon put the resources of the state behind the promotion of beet sugar, creating six experimental sugar beet stations and assigning one hundred students to them. He spent lavishly on supporting the cultivation of sugar beet and by 1812‑1813, 309 of the 334 sugar factories in Continental Europe were in France.18 During the Napoleonic Wars, prices for cane sugar in Russia and elsewhere reached unprecedented heights due to the Continental System, which Napoleon instituted between 1806 and 1814 in order to prevent much of continental Europe from trading with the United Kingdom, a major supplier of cane sugar. In 1800, Emperor Alexander I approved measures to give free land to those who would grow sugar beets, to reward those who established beet sugar factories and successfully grew sugar beets.19 Sometime between 1800 and 1802, a sugar factory was established on an estate in Tula became the first widely known sugar factory and spurred nobles in central Russia to imitations.20 By 1810, there were four such factories in Russia, and by 1812 there were 10.21 11 Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, which began on June 24, 1812, increased sugar prices to new highs and spurred interest in producing beet sugar. Not surprisingly, there was interest in how to make beet sugar during this period; in 1812, a newspaper in Kazan provided information on how to make beet sugar crystallize faster.22 With the resumption of French trade with Britain in 1814 came the collapse of the sugar beet industry in France, which did not recover until the 1840s.23 However, in Russia, sugar beets continued to be widely grown, to the point that the St. Petersburg refiners began to criticize the new industry.24 12 In 1822, the government levied a high tariff on raw cane sugar that amounted to 15 percent of its value, and forbade refined cane sugar to be imported into Russia.25 The effect was protectionist for beet sugar, even if the intent of the government was to raise money. At the same time, prices for grain in domestic and European markets were so low that growers were not able to cover their costs.26 In 1822, a protectionist tariff on grain expired, driving its price still lower.27 There was a harvest failure in 1822 that was due to a changing climate.28 As a result, Russian landowners engaged in the market were looking for a crop that could offset the losses they were incurring. 13 The new tariff proved to be a turning point. In 1822, there were only two sugar beet factories that made up to 1 500 poods of granulated sugar.29 One of them was the factory of I.A. Mal´tsov, who was the key figure in the spread of the beet sugar industry in this era. Working with the Moscow Agricultural Society, Mal´tsov indefatigably spread information about the technical and agricultural aspects of beet sugar production, as will be discussed below. In 1825, there were eight beet sugar factories; by 1832, twenty had appeared.30 14 In 1832, despite complaints of the St. Petersburg refiners that domestic beet sugar was competing with cane, Minister of Finances Egor Frantsevich Kankrin raised the tariff on cane sugar from 2 rubles 50 kopecks a pood to 3 rubles 15 kopecks, which was 34 percent of its value.31 This very high tariff further stimulated the beet sugar industry by inflating the price of sugar. More nobles became interested in growing sugar beets, and in 1834, a group of beet sugar producers founded the Committee of Sugar Beet Manufacturers within the Moscow Agricultural Society.32 By the late 1830s, sugar beet
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production had begun to spread to left bank Ukraine.33 By 1840, the number of beet sugar factories in the Russian Empire had jumped to 140.34 15 The state did not intend to encourage the production of beet sugar. Due to the serious famine of 1833, the government focused on the need for subsistence items, and sugar was not needed for survival.35 Minister of Finances Kankrin was suspicious of the growth of the sugar beet industry and noted in 1833: “The beet‑sugar industry is one of the most illfounded projects of the Russian gentryman.”36 Nicholas I was also personally hostile to the cultivation of the sugar beet, believing it would damage the soil.37 The government did not prevent landlords from engaging in the sugar beet business, but they refused to make loans to nobles on sugar, even though they did so on nearly all other agricultural products.38 However, it is possible that Kankrin’s comment, which came a year after he levied such a high tariff on cane sugar, was a sort of demonstrative grumbling to placate the refiners.39 16 In 1841, the government raised the tariff again, to 3 rubles 80 kopecks a pood.40 This extremely high levy started to impact the amount of revenue collected as people limited their consumption. Customs revenues from sugar were 3.7 million rubles in 1831, and rose to 8 million in 1844 due to the high tariff, but fell to less than 5.5 million rubles in 1847 due to people reducing their consumption of sugar.41 The refiners were in a position to complain more effectively as the state felt the impact in its pocket. In 1847, the secretary of the Moscow Agricultural Society, Stepan Alekseevich Maslov heatedly denied that the 1841 tariff had stimulated the development of the industry, saying that the extremely low prices for grain were the real force behind the industry’s spread.42 However, the intensity of the denial could not hide the connection between the tariff and the growth of the industry.43 The number of sugar factories jumped from 140 in 1840 to 350 in 1848, the largest increase of any eight‑year period between 1810 and 1914.44 17 With the arrival of a new Minister of Finances, Fedor Pavlovich Vronchenko, the refiners found a more sympathetic ear. They complained that hurricanes in Cuba had hurt the crop there and that they needed the state to allow them to import raw and half‑refined sugar from England, a concession that cost the state 579,000 silver rubles in 1845. The same “hurricane” took place in 1846 and 1847. The refiners also demanded that the government levy an excise on beet sugar.45 18 During this time, there were rumors of such an excise, and the Moscow Agricultural Society mobilized opinion against it publicly and privately. It is particularly interesting to analyze a letter, dated January 31, 1845, from Maslov to Petr Ivanovich Keppen, who was named head of the third division of the Ministry of State Domains in 1838 and was a member of the Scholarly Committee of that ministry in 1841.46 The two had been in correspondence since at least 1839, and this is reflected in the informal nature of Maslov’s style, which includes a frank discussion of the possibility of an excise on sugar beet: To hit factory owners with a tax now would be simply stupid and harmful; give the industry some time to take root and only then go ahead and place a high levy on lump sugar, like tobacco and cigars; an excise will allow consumers to buy sugar 49 1/4 percent cheaper and the flow of producers out of the industry would kill it.47 19 Maslov then ended by saying that his speech on the progress of the sugar beet industry recently appeared in Moskovskie Vedomosti and asked if Keppen would be interested in “helping with publicity” by coauthoring articles with Maslov.
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20 In his articles for the Moskovskie gorodskie listki in 1847, Maslov continued his propaganda campaign on behalf of the Committee of Sugar Beet Manufacturers, appealing to nationalism by saying that beet sugar could replace foreign cane sugar, to fears of change by saying it kept peasants in the villages and avoided creating proletarians, who had made life so difficult for English, French and German ministers, and to humanitarian feelings by saying that cane sugar was stained with the blood of slaves in Cuba and elsewhere.48 Interestingly, in a series of articles critiquing Maslov’s work, several authors argued that bringing down the price of sugar was more important than protecting the infant beet sugar industry, suggesting that Maslov’s fear of lower prices, expressed only in private to Keppen, could be detected by his critics.49 21 In the end, the excise on beet sugar was approved on February 25, 1848.50 However, Minister of State Domains Pavel Dmitrievich Kiselev interceded on behalf of the Moscow Agricultural Society to ensure that the norms set for the extraction of sugar from the beets were low. This meant that factories had a strong motivation to increase the amount of sugar they extracted from the beets, as the more they could exact, the less excise they paid in real terms.51 In practice, the excise hastened the shift from smaller, less efficient factories to large, advanced ones, particularly in Ukraine. 22 The shift of the center of the beet sugar industry to Ukraine meant the rise of large factories using advanced equipment and free labor. This laid the foundation for a competitive beet sugar industry in the Russian Empire. By the second half of the nineteenth century, sugar beets were widely grown in Europe and government policies, such as bounties that encouraged the import of sugar abroad, had led to an overproduction of sugar and a corresponding slump in prices on the world market, which fell by nearly half between 1856 and 1912.52 Even so, the Russian Empire continued to be a major producer of beet sugar, becoming the fourth‑largest producer in Europe, after Germany, Austria‑Hungary and France in 1890 and the second largest, after Germany, in 1917.53
The Moscow Agricultural Society and the origins of market agriculture in Russia
23 The Moscow Agricultural Society (MAS) played a key role in introducing market agriculture into the Russian Empire. Through their publications, they spread knowledge about cash crops to landowners both large and small. They served as nurse to infant industries like sugar beets. The MAS was part of a European‑wide social network of scholars, landlords, and government officials interested in encouraging agricultural production. During the eighteenth century, much of Europe experienced rising prices along with rising population and urbanization. At the same time, the Enlightenment provided new scientific studies of agriculture that promised an increase in production sufficient to feed the cities. Governments in central and Eastern Europe, including those in the German lands, the Hapsburg Empire and the Russian Empire encouraged the application of these new methods.54 In particular, market agriculture increased productivity by introducing fodder crops such as clover and new root vegetables such as the turnip and the rutabaga, which were capable of feeding more livestock and more people. The fallow land was planted with fodder crops for livestock, which in turn provided a greater amount of fertilizer so that the land could be used more intensively.55
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24 Russian agricultural societies were established at around the same time as those in Europe and America. The first agricultural society in the world was the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture, founded in Scotland in 1723, but inactive after 1741. Established in 1731, the Dublin Society is the oldest such society that survives today, while the Royal Agricultural Society of England was established in 1838. In 1761, France established a royal society of agriculture.56 Just four years later, Catherine the Great established the Free Economic Society to improve Russian agriculture and industry by spreading new ideas and techniques; it drew upon the example of recently founded European voluntary societies to do so. The first American agricultural society was the Society for Promoting Agriculture, established in 1785. The 1850s and 1860s was a boom time in the creation of such societies in the West; at just that time they were most active in Russia as well. In the United States, there were nearly 2 000 agricultural societies with roughly 400,000 members, or one in ten farmers. 57 During the mid‑nineteenth century, science had become more useful for farmers and was not yet the province of universities and governmental bodies.58 While agricultural societies in the pre‑reform era were mainly the province of nobles and focused on education, by the late nineteenth century, many were credit associations that lent to peasants and other agriculturalists.59 25 The members of the MAS tended to be large landowners. One count of the 770 members that joined between 1818 and 1860 found that 621 of them, or 81 percent, had more than 100 male serfs, which was considered the minimum needed to allow a fully Westernized existence, while 211, or 27 percent, owned more than 500, putting them among the wealthiest nobles.60 During its first few decades, its members believed technology could fix the problems of serf agriculture; when this hope was dashed by the 1840s, many became abolitionists. During the 1840s, nobles were also influenced by a Romantic reevaluation of the peasantry as the bearer of Russian nationality rather than the Enlightenment image of them as obstacles to scientific agriculture.61 Before 1861, the MAS focused on nobles; afterwards, it spread agricultural information among the peasants. One of its successful programs in reaching the peasants was assisting with the creation of rural credit cooperatives; between 1865 and 1899, 568 cooperatives were established and by 1916 there were more than 5 000.62 The famed agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov came out of the MAS tradition, as he noted himself.63 26 The MAS worked closely with the government, but was still driven by its own interests. In 1836, many MAS administrators became government employees in that the government paid their salaries.64 This was in response to MAS vice‑president Sergei Ivanovich Gagarin’s request that the society’s secretary, the director of the Society for Sheep Breeding, their assistants, and the senior and junior clerks become civil servants. 65 These positions were administrative, not executive. The president, vice‑president and council seats all remained independent of the government. Wealthy nobles filled these more powerful positions and did not require government compensation. The government created almost a shadow ministry in the MAS to deal with landlord serfs at the same time a new ministry was created to deal with state peasants; in 1837, Nicholas I approved the creation of the Ministry of State Domains (MGI), headed by Count Pavel Dmitrievich Kiselev, who conducted a major administrative reform of state peasants.66 27 However, this did not mean that the society lost all initiative. The government collected information from the society but did not give it orders. As MAS Secretary
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Stepan Alekseevich Maslov wrote, “the government stated its willingness to protect the Agricultural Societies, as the closest intermediaries between the landlords and the agriculturalists entrusted to their guardianship.”67 In 1838, Kiselev wrote to Golitsyn to inform him of the new order, noting that the establishment of the ministry included the right “to direct societies, serving for the dissemination of agricultural information.”68 Kiselev asked only for annual published reports from the MAS, information on successful agricultural experiments, and “proposals the Society has for the future dissemination of useful innovations.”69 28 The result was more a coordination of work than a control of it. In an 1858 letter to enlightened bureaucrat Andrei Parfent´evich Zablotskii‑Desiatovskii, Maslov recalled a conversation he had had with Kiselev on the relationship of the ministry with the society. Maslov wrote that he had told Kiselev, Preserve the society; in Russia it is easier to establish two ministries than one society. Why is this? Because in a ministry for each vacancy you will find up to two candidates searching for a job, but the society consists of free people, not bound by anything. Here moral strength is necessary so that the society can hold on and be active, especially among ourselves, who have not grown to fit the demands of societies. The count agreed.70 29 Despite the generally cordial relations between the government and the MAS, the society continued to promote sugar beet production in the face of government disinterest and hostility. The MAS was more than just a handmaiden of the state.
30 In 1822, at the moment when grain had hardly any value and enterprising landlords were seeking a cash crop, the Moscow Agricultural Society played a key role in convincing many that sugar beets were what they were looking for. In particular, Malt ´sov, one of the pioneers of the industry, published an article stating that sugar beets were highly profitable.71 In fact, the budget published in the 1822 article showed that, after expenses, Malt´sov had made 9 670 rubles in pure profit.72 According to Mal´tsov, beets took only a day to plant and required little extra care. Peasant women could grow them in their vegetable plots. In addition, they were harvested after the main harvest, which was a relatively slack time. The byproducts of sugar beet refining could be used to feed livestock and would increase milk production, the article stated.73 In other words, it was possible to start sugar beet production without serious reorganization of peasant agricultural practice—a major advantage for landlords both small and large. 31 The Moscow Agricultural Society encouraged nobles with fewer than 100 serfs, who made up the majority of the noble estate but who sometimes lived in a modest way not unlike their own serfs, to grow sugar beets and process them in small factories in order to expand the base of raw materials and encourage the consumption of sugar.74 Malt ´sov’s article did reach such small‑scale but enterprising nobles, as we see in a detailed account from one Baron Kots, who had a small estate with only 84 peasants. In a letter to the Moscow Agricultural Society in 1833, he described how, after he retired from the military, he sought some cash crop that would make a profit on his small estate, as grain alone had little value and could be grown in quantities that just barely kept himself and his serfs from starvation. In reading the Society’s journal, he came across Mal´tsov’s article and decided to try his hands at growing sugar beets. The Society provided him with crucial technical help, as he did not have enough serfs to qualify for state loans, which were not given for sugar beet in any case. Kots took time to prepare for the beet sugar factory, sending one of his serfs as an apprentice to Malt´sov’s factory in 1825, from whence he returned in 1827 with a certificate. In 1828, Kots was
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then able to build a successful factory and to encourage his serfs to grow sugar beets in their vegetable plots by giving a very high cash advance to one peasant, who spread the word all around the village. Once many peasants and some nobles began to provide him with beets, Kots then decreased the price he paid for beets.75 Kots is an excellent example of the small landlord who would not have been able to establish a sugar mill without the assistance of the Moscow Society’s publications and members. 32 Owners of larger sugar mills also were influenced by Malt´sov to establish their own factories. This included Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakhmetev, who was the owner of a large, technically advanced factory in Penza province, located in southern Russia, just over 300 miles to the southeast of Tula, the original heartland of sugar beet production.76 Bakhmetev was an general from the infantry, a participant in the battle of Borodino, and served as the Governor‑General of Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk and Penza provinces, as well as in the State Council.77 Penza province was in a favorable location for trade at the border of the steppe and forest zones, and had a tradition of market agriculture.78 This sugar beet factory was part of Bakhmetev’s estate in Petrovka village, which also had a weaving factory, a hospital and school, along with crystal and glass factories nearby.79 Bakhmetev was an enterprising landlord with enough capital to undertake major improvements and to produce for the market. In this, he was a model member of the MAS, which he joined in 1836.80 He was among the middling and larger landlords who dominated the Committee of Sugar Beet Manufacturers.81 33 The Moscow Society held up Bakhmetev’s factory as a model. At a May 19, 1832 meeting of the Moscow Society, the problems of the industry were discussed, including a lack of capital to buy steam‑driven equipment and a difficulty in producing white granules, which were a medium‑stage product. Only Bakhmetev had been able to produce white granules, the Society noted.82 In 1835, Bakhmetev’s factory was one of only two sugar mills in the empire that used steam‑driven machines.83 34 Letters from Bakhmetev’s factory manager, Porfirii Riabinin, to Bakhmetev have survived, providing us with a rich source on the day‑to‑day workings of a beet sugar factory and the difficulties in establishing consistent quality control. However, despite these problems, the level of control over the product was enough that sale of the product did not suffer. Between 1837 and 1844, Riabinin wrote several times to report on progress or lack thereof. These letters suggest that only landlords with a high capitalization could afford to spend the money necessary to outfit the factories and cover the inevitable lulls in production. In addition, they show that processing sugar beet would be much easier in warmer regions. On August 23, 1838, Riabinin wrote that the factory was almost ready, with 23 workers already there and 58 more to come.84 Unfortunately, he did not mention if they were hired or serf labor. However, at least some of the more skilled overseer positions would have been hired, even if the rest were serfs. The condition of the workers at times concerned Riabinin. He wrote on December 6, 1839 that the boys in the factory “are not now zealous [because they have] no shirts and high boots. Would it not be possible to order that these be sent to the factory office?”85 The boys were not the only ones to suffer the cold. Some of the beets froze, which meant that it was difficult to produce the right sort of syrup. Riabinin was able to boil it to the required thickness without it undergoing unwanted fermentation, but only when he was personally present. In addition, the workers had a tendency to mix watery or fermented raw juice with good quality runs, jeopardizing the final product.86 But the problems with the winter did not stop there. On December 4, 1840,
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Riabinin wrote with bad news. The pond had frozen solid and all work had ceased. “The water is all gone and the machine stopped working on November 30th,” he noted.87 In order to begin the first step of boiling the grated beets, water was necessary. Without it, the beets had backed up and 459 bushels’ worth were waiting to be processed.88 Riabinin hoped they would not freeze, and stated somewhat plaintively that “the work had been going well from the cellar and the juice was very good, as were the sugar lumps.”89 35 After the beets had been boiled, the resulting juice was purified by chemical means. The Bakhmetev factory used saltpeter, which is also used in gunpowder and for pickling meat. However, Riabinin stated that the juice was of poor quality and required a high percentage of saltpeter, and “I am afraid that after refining the saltpeter might remain in the granules.”90 In addition, when the quality of the beets and juice was bad, more saltpeter was needed, which drove up production costs. 36 The use of complex machinery did not solve all problems. Riabinin complained several times of the lack of cleanliness at the factory, and particularly of the lax overseers who did not ensure that the machines were frequently cleaned. This was a problem, given the sticky nature of sugar making. Sometimes the machinery would break down or the resulting product would suddenly begin to vary, as in one case where a batch ended as “crystallized caramel” rather than as lump sugar.91 Even with the new machines, Riabinin noted the need for more forms for crystallizing the sugar, which would have required an extra expense for Bakhmetev; another time, Riabinin asked for more paper. 92 Thus, although sugar refining was profitable, it was not easy for poorer nobles to take part. Any advanced equipment required access to capital, which was difficult for the reasons Baron Kots laid out. Here, the willingness of the MAS to spread what technical information they could was very important in decreasing the costs of entry, but over time even the Society could not help the smaller factory owners with all their needs. 37 The Moscow Agricultural Society played a key role in the early spread of beet sugar technology through its publications, which opened up networks of assistance to noblemen who owned few serfs, as well as wealthy ones. Malt´sov was the most important individual to encourage the spread of this branch of industry, both through his articles, which gave detailed plans of technology and budgets, and through his willingness to take on apprentices so that other landlords could train their own serfs to be directors of their beet sugar mills. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Moscow Society moved beyond this individualized promotion to a more coordinated approach, as the next section will show.
The Committee of Sugar Beet Manufacturers nurses an infant industry
38 From 1834, when members of the Moscow Agricultural Society established the Committee of Sugar Beet Manufacturers to 1848, when an excise on beet sugar solidified the transition to large sugar mills, the Committee provided interested nobles with technological assistance, commissioners to buy sugar, and access to an extensive network of enterprising landlords. After 1848, the industry had reached maturity and the Committee lost its importance, but only after having served the function of nurturing the infant industry into adulthood. In 1834, two years after a high tariff on cane sugar increased the price of that commodity and turned enterprising landlords’
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attention to producing beet sugar, the Moscow Agricultural Society established the Committee.93 They modeled it upon the Leipzig convocations of sheep breeders, which encouraged the exchange of advice and practical experience.94
39 The members of the new Committee were middling and large landowners, including Malt´sov, Bakhmetev, and others. Although the government did not provide the Committee with the 10,000 rubles a year subsidy they gave to the Moscow Society’s equivalent committee on sheep raising, they did not attempt to hinder the society, either. Instead of a government subsidy, the members funded it, with most giving 50 rubles a year, which was a substantial sum. At one meeting in 1836, members donated 875 rubles; that year the Committee raised 1 278 rubles, the majority of which they spent on their journal, with smaller amounts going to clerical help, the dissemination of improved seeds, and lighting the hall in which they met.95 This program of enlightenment reflects their priorities, the first of which was their journal, which they modeled on that of the beet sugar manufacturers of Paris.96 The example of Baron Kots showed the importance of the written word as a means to reach poorer nobles, who were not part of the more elevated social world of most of the Committee’s members, who met in Moscow during the winter social season. The journal of the Committee of Sugar Beet Manufacturers sought to spread the technical and scientific practices of large growers to smaller producers as well so as to ensure a steady supply of raw material and encourage the more frequent use of sugar among as wide a population as possible.97 40 In addition to spreading practical knowledge, the Committee sought to establish the industry on a scientific basis by studying the best soil and the best strains of sugar beets. In addition, one of the reasons for the founding of the Committee was that some producers were receiving patents for inventions that had actually been known for some time, usually French in origin.98 The Committee sought to ensure that the best technology would not become proprietary knowledge, which would have slowed down the growth of the industry by raising barriers to entrance by smaller producers. 41 The cultural status of sugar beet refining was high, partly due to the work of the MAS, who encouraged nobles to produce beet sugar, arguing it was a form of business especially suitable for nobles. Here, the MAS benefited from the novelty of the sugar beet; already by the late 1820s, it had become fashionable for sugar beet factories to be established on wealthy estates.99 Although most such factories were rather primitive and had low productivity, they suggest that nobles had a motive to engage in sugar beet production, as it bolstered their consequence. In 1835, the MAS reported that sugar beet was an “industry very closely tied with agriculture, which is very proper for landlords who do not wish to go into trade.”100 In addition, the MAS argued that the sugar beet industry “should predominantly belong to the noble class, as they have the land and labor to produce the raw material.”101 42 The stated focus of the Committee was practical: to avoid mistakes and to share advice. 102 They helped beet sugar producers, especially smaller ones, by establishing several agents to sell seeds. Between 1831 and 1846, the Committee’s agents sold 2,574,563 silver rubles’ worth of sugar from the committee members.103 In addition, detailed plans and even models of the necessary equipment made establishing a sugar mill more possible for a larger number of landlords.104 The Committee even built a model sugar factory in Moscow, which soon had to close due to not being profitable.105 In 1839, the Committee petitioned to open a refinery in Moscow so that the
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half‑processed granules of nearby estates could be turned into the more refined and expensive white sugar. Tellingly, however, when a refinery was built, it was in Kiev in 1843, showing the shift from the Moscow to the Ukrainian provinces.106 43 The profitability of sugar beet and the difficulties of using serf labor in such advanced mechanized factories made many enterprising landlords aware of the limits of serfdom when combined with more advanced agriculture. This was also clear in the lack of qualified skilled personnel. When serfs were sent to become technicians and returned as basically the director of the factory, as had happened with Baron Kots’ serf, it required literacy and an ability to command that sat uneasily with serfdom. In 1834, Aleksandr Dmitrievich Chertkov, who was a historian and archeologist whose library dealing with Russian history later served as one of the fundamental collections of the Historical Museum in Moscow, as well as a member of the Moscow Society and the Committee, opened a sugar mill in Voronezh. Chertkov believed that the production of sugar beet had a positive effect on the intellectual development of serfs and established a school for them. One of his serfs, Egor Mikhailovich Chekhov, worked as a clerk in the mill and was given its byproducts, which he used to feed his livestock. He began to trade in livestock for himself and for his master and in 1841 he bought out himself and his family.107 His grandson, the writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, was born into freedom in 1860. 44 In 1848, the new excise on beet sugar was a turning point in the industry, confirming that the center of production had shifted to the Ukrainian provinces and that free labor was dominant there. Right‑bank Ukraine, and particularly the area around Kiev, was an emerging center of beet sugar production, with large, technologically advanced factories that could be much more efficient in the amount of sugar produced from each beet. The smaller, less advanced factories that the MAS had done so much to encourage found it difficult to absorb the cost of the excise, and many went out of business. These sugar factories in Ukraine also underwent a shift to the use of free labor during this time, as the excise coincided with the imposition of inventories in right‑bank Ukraine in 1847‑1848; these inventories specified in great detail what services serfs owed their masters. The government sought to punish the landlords in the area, many of whom were Polish, through these inventories.108 As a result of the inventories and the excise, the large sugar factories in the region used free labor almost exclusively by the end of the 1840s.109 45 Some of the largest and most advanced sugar beet factories belonged to Count Aleksei Alekseevich Bobrinskii. By 1860‑1861, his factories in Tula and Kiev provinces alone produced more than 9,027,500 pounds (4 514 tons) of sugar as well as having an associated coal mine to provide fuel for the machines.110 In his Studies on the Interior of Russia, based on an 1843 trip to Russia, August von Haxthausen described Bobrinskii’s factory in Tula. Haxthausen was shown the factory by its manager, a German school friend of his, and he described it as a plant filled with modern inventions and producing sugar that he found to be just as good as that made from cane.111 The plant used hired labor and paid peasant women for beets. At the 1846 meeting of the Committee, MAS Secretary Maslov gave the first description of Bobrinskii’s massive factory in Kiev, which had a sugar beet farm fifteen times the size of the largest amount of land devoted to growing them elsewhere. The land had 3 500 serfs working on it, and the factory included the use of free labor, with a payroll of 60,000 paper rubles.112 The
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use of free labor in the Ukrainian provinces would only accelerate with the introduction of the inventories and the excise. 46 Sugar beet grows best in soils that have a mixture of sand and clay, and the areas in Ukraine that became centers of its production there are rich in such soils. There is a smaller area of suitable soil surrounding Kiev, but the largest area of this soil is found near Kherson, which produced the second largest crop in the region by 1901, after Baku.113 There were smaller areas of such soil in European Russia, but nowhere was there such a wide expanse as in southern Ukraine.114 47 In addition to a higher use of free labor, the factories in central and southern Ukraine were more technologically advanced compared to those in central Russia. This can be seen in the more widespread use of steam‑driven technology in the sugar mills in Ukraine. Wood‑fired beet sugar mills tended to be smaller, estate‑based factories like those encouraged by the MAS. In contrast, in Ukraine, in 1848, 36 of 184 factories, or 20 percent, used steam. In central Russia, only 40 of 297 mills, or 13 percent, used steam.115 This difference, although not huge numerically, was very important at the moment when the excise was introduced, which rewarded more technologically advanced factories. The percentage of wood‑burning factories in Ukraine fell from 80 to just 60 percent of the total from 1848 to 1857‑58, while in central Russia it only fell from 87 to 70 percent over the same period.116 Steam‑powered factories were making greater inroads into Ukrainian factories than into ones in Central Russia. 48 This shift from central Russia to Ukraine and from smaller factories to large ones meant that the Committee lost its importance. The creation of a beet sugar refinery in Kiev in 1843, rather than in Moscow as the Committee had hoped, accelerated the shift to the Ukrainian provinces, as it was much easier to sell refined beet sugar than granules, which were a middle‑stage product.117 The Committee began to die out in the second half of the 1840s.118 Although the Committee continued to meet and there was a special discussion about the excise in 1848, such meetings became increasingly sporadic. In 1854, the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Committee was observed, but this did not lead to its revitalization. By 1860, no mention of the Committee was made in the publications of the Moscow Society.119 Large factories no longer needed the tutelage of the Committee, and smaller factories often had had to close.120 49 The Southern Russian Agricultural Society, founded in Odessa in 1828 and the only agricultural society in the pre‑reform Ukrainian provinces, did not take a leading role in encouraging the beet sugar industry. It published only two articles on beet sugar before 1861.121 A report covering their first 25 years of activity noted that sugar beet factories were spreading in Kiev and elsewhere and that some were connected to coal mines, which provided the fuel. The report congratulated the factory owners and stated that the Odessa society had been in contact with the Committee of the Moscow Society to distribute seeds and literature through the region, but did not note any independent action of the Odessa society.122 This lack of zeal can perhaps be explained by the rampant smuggling of refined sugar through Odessa. According to Russian laws, refined sugar could only be imported to Odessa as well as the Black Sea ports of the Caucasus. This measure was instituted in order to encourage the use of the ports, and it strictly forbade the distribution of sugar to the interior. However, the amount of refined sugar brought to Odessa increased fourfold between 1827 and 1846, and the amount was so large that it was impossible that it was all being consumed within that
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town.123 This may have made it difficult for all members of the Odessa society to agree that encouraging the production of beet sugar was worthwhile. 50 By the late nineteenth century, owners of large beet sugar mills were interested in voluntary associations to help them with their concerns, but those concerns had changed. Very large beet sugar mills produced mammoth amounts of sugar. The Mikhailov factory of Baron Tereshchenko in Chernigov province in Left‑bank Ukraine alone produced an average of 75,837,790 pounds of beet sugar, equivalent to 37,918 tons, every year between 1907 and 1913, according to statistics kept by the Ministry of Transportation.124 Railroads enabled the transportation of such massive quantities throughout the empire.125 In 1897, the All‑Russian Society of Sugar Beet Producers was founded in Kiev. It was a specialized, scientific society that focused on studying the most productive strains of sugar beets, and they established experimental fields in private estates to do so in 1901, and a central experimental station in 1912.126 The broad‑based propaganda of the Moscow Society no longer fit the more technical concerns of these sugar beet magnates. This also suggests the degree to which the sugar beet industry helped to stimulate science and industry in Ukraine. Bobrinskii’s factory in Kiev helped to stimulate the development of a machine building industry in Ukraine, for example.127
Conclusion
51 The Moscow Agricultural Society played a crucial role in nurturing the infant industry of beet sugar production. It fed the infant industry by providing technical information on how to build factories and grow sugar beets, commissioners to sell the product, and access to a social network of many leading entrepreneurial landlords. This allowed a large number of nobles with smaller landholdings and fewer serfs to enter the market, which did indeed increase the base of raw materials and consumption of sugar, just as the MAS had hoped.
52 However, when the infant industry reached adulthood, the services of the Moscow Society were no longer needed. Large factory owners did not need assistance with seeds or sales, but were able to compete with cane sugar in the large domestic market, as well as in Asia. The Ukrainian beet sugar industry was particularly well positioned in the market, since it already had shifted to free labor before the end of serfdom and was using advanced equipment such as steam‑driven machines. After 1861, sugar beet production exploded, from 70,414 tons in 1860‑1861128 to 777,129 tons in 1897, accounting for fifteen percent of the world’s production of sugar beet.129 An average of 645,300 acres were sown in sugar beets over 1886 to 1895 and 1,425,805 acres (2227.8 square miles) were sown in 1901.130 In 1917, Russia produced 1,120,878 tons of sugar, more than any other country, aside from Germany.131 Most of the sugar was consumed at home, although some was exported to Asia. This was despite a precipitous drop in world sugar prices over the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, Russian sugar production was a success because they were able to provide a product of a relatively consistent quality at a competitive price. 53 This article has shown that the Moscow Agricultural Society played an important, although transitory, role in the introduction of an industry into the Russian Empire that would prove to be an enduring success in the market. The sugar beet industry also was connected to the growth of free labor and industrialization in Ukraine, even before
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the abolition of serfdom, which helps to explain the divergent paths of Russia and Ukraine. Over the course of the nineteenth century, beet sugar moved from being a curiosity to becoming a force for change.
NOTES
1. I.S. Koropeckyj, ed., Ukrainian Economic History : Interpretive Essays (Cambridge : Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1991) ; Oleksander Ohloblyn, A History of Ukrainian Industry (Munich : Wilhelm Fink, 1971) ; Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine : Birth of a Nation (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007), 54‑57. 2. For an excellent overview of the development of Ukrainian historical narrative, see Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia : Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto : University of Toronto, 2005). 3. Andreas Kappeler, “From an Ethnonational to a Multiethnic to a Transnational Ukrainian History,” in Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther, eds., A Laboratory of Transnational History : Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography (Budapest : Central European University Press, 2009), 51‑80. For an economic take on the multiethnic narrative, see Theodore H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. 1 and 2 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1989‑1994). See also the articles on the present Ukrainian crisis in historical perspective in Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16, 1 (Winter 2015). 4. Bernd Bonwetsch, Die russische Revolution 1917 : Eine Sozialgeschichte von der Bauernbefreiung 1861 bis zum Oktoberumsturz (Darmstadt : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991) ; Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850‑1917 (London : B.T. Batsford, 1986) ; Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism : Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (New York : Oxford University Press, 1969). See also V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (M. : Progress Publishers, 1977). 5. Alexander Gerschenkron, Continuity in History and other Essays (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1968). Other classic state‑centered narratives include : Theodore von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York : Columbia University Press, 1963) ; Alexander Gerschenkron, “Problems and Patterns of Russian Economic Development,” in Cyril E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1960) : 42‑72. 6. Carol S. Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia : The Road from Serfdom (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011). 7. Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (New York : Barnes and Noble, 1976) ; Paul Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885‑1913 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1982) ; Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History : The Nineteenth Century (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1989) ; Richard L. Rudolph, “Agricultural Structure and Proto‑Industrialization in Russia : Economic Development with Unfree Labor,” Journal of Economic History, 45, 1 (March 1985) : 47‑69. 8. An excellent example both of the critique and the intellectual turn is Frank Wcislo, “Rereading Old Texts : Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia,” in Susan P. McCaffray and Michael Melancon, eds., Russia in the European Context, 1789‑1914 : A Member of the Family (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 70‑83. See also Vincent Barnett and Joachim Zweynert, eds.,
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Economics in Russia : Studies in Intellectual History (Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2008) ; Esther Kingston‑Mann, In Search of the True West : Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1999) ; Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward : Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861‑1914 (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1999) ; Thomas C. Owen, Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism : Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2005) ; Alessandro Stanziani, “Free Labor – Forced Labor : An Uncertain Boundary ? The Circulation of Economic Ideas between Russia and Europe from the 18th to the Mid‑19th Century,” Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, 1 (Winter 2008) : 27‑52 ; Joachim Zweynert, Eine Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens in Russland, 1805‑1905 (Marburg : Metropolis Verlag, 2002). 9. Stepan Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie deistvii i trudov imperatorskogo Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva so vremeni ego osnovanii do 1846 goda [Historical overview of the actions and works of the imperial Moscow Agricultural Society from the time of its founding until 1846] (M. : V universitetskoi tipografii, 1850) ; A.P. Perepelkin, Istoricheskaia zapiska o 30‑ti letnei deiatel´nosti Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva i ego prezidenta I.N. Shatilova [Historical survey of the 30 years of activity of the Moscow Agricultural Society and its president I.N. Shatilov] (M. : A.A. Levenson, 1890). See also : B.V. Tikhonov, “Obzor ‘zapisok’ mestnykh sel´skokhoziaistvennykh obshchestv 30‑50‑kh godov XIX v. [An overview of the ‘Notes’ of local agricultural societies of the 1830s‑1850s],” in A.N. Nasonov and A.A. Novosel´skii, eds., Problemy istochnikovedeniia [Problems of Source Studies], vyp. 9 (M. : Nauka, 1961). 10. Michael Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle ; étude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (P. : Institut d’études slaves, 1963) ; Idem, Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole : l’assolement triennal en Russie aux XVIIIe ‑ XIXe siècles (P. : Mouton, 1969) ; N.S. Trusova and O.A. Bliumfel´d, “Iz istorii vozniknoveniia i nachal´noi deiatel ´nosti Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva (1820‑1830 gg.) [From the history of the origin and early activity of the Moscow Agricultural Society (1820‑1830)],” Materialy po istorii sel ´skogo khoziaistva i krest´ianstva SSSR, 3 (1959) : 280‑324. 11. David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600‑1930 : The World the Peasants Made (London : Longman, 1999), 131. 12. Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011). Works on regional economic development include : Heinz‑Dietrich Löwe, Die Lage der Bauern in Russland 1880‑1905. Wirtschaftliche und soziale Veränderungen in der Gesellschaft des Zarenreiches (St. Katharinen : Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1987) ; Edgar Melton, “Proto‑Industrialization, Serf Agriculture and Agrarian Social Structure : Two Estates in Nineteenth‑Century Russia,” Past and Present, 115, 1 (May 1987) : 69‑106. 13. Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia : Science, Patriotism and Civil Society (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2009), 38‑85 ; O.Iu. Elina, “Sel´skokhoziaistvennye obshchestva Rossii, 1765‑1920‑e gody : vklad v razvitie agronomii [Agricultural societies in Russia, 1765‑1920s : Contributions to the development of agronomy],” Rossiiskaia istoriia, no. 2 (2011) : 27‑45 ; M.M. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva i sveklosakharnye zavody A.D. Chertkova [The Moscow Agricultural Society and the sugar beet factory of A.D. Chertkhov],” Voprosy istorii, no. 11 (2011) : 94‑109 ; A.A. Kurenyshev, Sel ´skokhoziaistvennaia stolitsa Rossii : Ocherki istorii Moskovskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva (1818‑1929 gg.) [The agricultural capital of Russia : Essays in the history of the Moscow Agricultural Society (1818‑1929)] (M. : AIRO‑XXI, 2012) ; Colum Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment : The Free Economic Society in Eighteenth‑Century Russia (Newark, DE : University of Delaware Press, 2011) ; David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes : Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700‑1914 (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013).
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14. Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Imperial Russia : Rural Professionals and Self‑organization, 1905‑1930 (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ; S.A. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii v doreformennoi Rossii (tsentral´no‑nechernozemnye gubernii) [Agrarian traditions and innovations in pre‑reform Russia (the central non‑black earth region)] (M. : ROSSPEN, 2002). 15. K.G. Voblyi, Opyt istorii sveklo‑sakharnoi promyshlennosti SSSR [An essay on the history of the beet sugar industry of the USSR] (M. : Pravleniia sakharotresta, 1928), 1 : 114. 16. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power : The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York : Viking, 1985). 17. V.T. Krasochkin, “Iz istorii vozdelyvaniia svekly [From the history of the cultivation of the sugar beet],” Materialy po istorii sel´skogo khoziaistva i krest´ianstva SSSR (1960), 4 : 479 ; Elizabeth Abbott, Sugar : A Bittersweet History (New York : Duckworth Overlook, 2008), 182. 18. Abbott, Sugar : A Bittersweet History ; Ph.G. Chalmin, “The Important Trends in Sugar Diplomacy before 1914,” in Bill Albert and Adrian Graves, eds., Crisis and Change in the International Sugar Economy, 1860‑1914 (Edinburgh : ISC Press, 1984), 9. 19. Krasochkin, “Iz istorii vozdelyvaniia svekly,” 483. 20. Krasochkin, “Iz istorii vozdelyvaniia svekly,” 483 ; Roger Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry in Russia before 1914,” in Albert and Graves, eds., Crisis and Change, 22. 21. Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry,” 24 ; Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 94. 22. “Noveishie otkrytiia i zamechaniia [The newest discoveries and notes],” Kazanskie izvestiia, no. 18 (May 4, 1812) : 1‑2. 23. Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking : The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York : Collier Books, 1984), 389. 24. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 389. 25. K. Lodyzhenskii, Istoriia Russkogo tamozhennogo tarifa [History of the Russian tariff] (SPb. : Tip. V.S. Balasheva, 1886), 279. 26. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 94. 27. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 90. 28. Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 136. 29. Lodyzhenskii, Istoriia Russkogo tamozhennogo tarifa, 279. 30. Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry,” 24. 31. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 103 ; Lodyzhenskii, Istoriia Russkogo tamozhennogo tarifa, 279. 32. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 94. 33. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 128. 34. Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry,” 24. 35. Alison Smith, Recipes for Russia : Food and Nationhood under the Tsars (DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). 36. Walter Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1967), 223‑224. 37. Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 223‑224. 38. Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry,” 22. 39. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 103. 40. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 103 ; Lodyzhenskii, Istoriia Russkogo tamozhennogo tarifa, 279. 41. Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry,” 23. 42. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 393. 43. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 393. 44. Munting, “The State and the Beet Sugar Industry,” 24.
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45. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 103. 46. “Keppen, Petr Ivanovich,” Ėntsiklopedicheskii slovar F.A. Brokgauza i I.A. Efrona (http:// www.vehi.net/brokgauz/index.html). Accessed August 2, 2012. 47. SPF RAN (Sankt‑Petersburgskii filial Arkhiva Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk – St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences), f. 30, lichnyi fond P.I. Keppena [Personal file of P.I. Keppen], op. 3, d. 165, Pis´ma S.A. Maslova k P.I. Keppenu [Letters of S.A. Maslov to P.I. Keppen], l. 11‑11ob. 48. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 101, 103 ; Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 390. 49. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 391‑392. 50. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii [The complete collection of laws of the Russian Empire] (SPb. : Tip. II‑go Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E.I.V. Kantseliarii, 1849), 23 : No. 22024. 51. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 105. 52. Bill Albert and Adrian Graves, “Introduction,” in Albert and Graves, eds., Crisis and Change, 3. 53. Chalmin, “The Important Trends in Sugar Diplomacy,” 10 ; Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar (London : Chapman and Hall, 1950), 2 : 492‑498. 54. James R. Lehning, “Agriculture,” in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to 2000 (New York : Scribner’s, 2001), 2 : 348. 55. Folke Dovring, “The Transformation of European Agriculture,” in H.J. Habakkuk and M. Postan, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1965), 6 : 636. 56. Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World : An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800‑2000 (Princeton, 2005), 108‑109 ; On the Free Economic Society, see Leckey, Patrons of Enlightenment. 57. Federico, Feeding the World, 108‑109 ; Philip J. Pauly, Fruits and Plains : The Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 53. 58. Federico, Feeding the World, 108‑109. 59. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward. 60. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii, 403. 61. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii, passim. 62. I.N. Konovalov, Sel´skokhoziaistvennaia kooperatsiia povolzh´ia v istorii i kul´ture Rossii [Agricultural cooperation in the Volga region in the history and culture of Russia] (Saratov : Saratovskii universitet, 2003), 23‑24 ; S.A. Kozlov, “175 let Moskovskomu obshchestvu sel´skogo khoziaistva : traditsii i novatsii [175 years of the Moscow Agricultural Society : Traditions and innovations],” Nauchnye trudy mezhdunarodnogo soiuza ėkonomistov i Vol´nogo ėknomicheskogo obshchestva Rossii, no. 3 (1996) : 236. For a negative evaluation of the cooperative movement that emphasizes the shared interests and actions of the agricultural societies and the state, see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward. Focusing on parallel structures of thought between cooperative activists and colonizers, Kotsonis’ work is an important early work in the intellectual turn in Russian economic history. For a more positive evaluation of cooperatives, see Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform. 63. A.V. Chaianov, “Osnovnye linii razvitiia russkoi sel´sko‑khoziaistvennoi mysli za dva veka [The foundational lines of development of Russian agricultural thought for two centuries],” in Rikhard Krtsimovskii, ed., Razvitie osnovnykh printsipov nauki o sel´skom khoziaistve v zapadnoi Evrope [The development of foundational principles of agricultural science in Western Europe] (M. : Novyi agronom, 1927), 27‑41. 64. Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie, 73‑75. 65. See Minister of Finances Kankrin’s letter to Gagarin, dated June 30, 1836, printed in Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie. 66. State peasants were owned by the state rather than by nobles. See W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform : Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825‑1861 (DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 1982), 30‑36 and passim.
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67. Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie, 129. 68. Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie, 2nd collation, 77. 69. Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie, 2nd collation, 78. 70. RGIA (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv – Russian State Historical Archive), f. 940, Lichnyi fond A.P. Zablotskogo‑Desiatovskogo [Personal file of A.P. Zablotskii‑Desiatovskii], op. 1, d. 225, Pis´ma S.A. Maslova k A.P. Zablotskomu‑Desiatovskomu [Letters of S.A. Maslov to A.P. Zablotskii‑Desiatovskii], l. 4. I would like to thank Olga Bol´shakova for bringing this source to my attention. 71. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 91. 72. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 92. 73. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 91. 74. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 118. 75. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 110, 381. 76. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 97. 77. “Bakhmetevy,” Russkii biograficheskii slovar´ (http://rulex.ru/01021058.htm) (Accessed July 20, 2015) 78. In 1820, an agricultural school was established in Penza. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii, 149. 79. TsIAM (Tsentral´nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy – Central Historical Archive in Moscow), f. 1845 (semeinyi fond Bakhmetevykh‑Tolstykh), op. 3, d. 82 (Reports of steward of beet sugar factory Porfirii Riabinin to A.N. Bakhmetev on economic questions). The village was also known as Nikol´skoe and Pestrovka. 80. Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie, 258. 81. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 98. 82. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 108. 83. Tikhonov, “Razvitie,” 131. The other was owned by Fedor Vasil´evich Samarin, the father of the Slavophile Iurii Samarin. Slavophiles were involved in sugar beet production, with Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov having a successful beet sugar mill, among others. E.A. Dudzinskaia, Slavianofily v obshchestvennoi bor´by [Slavophiles in the social conflict] (M. : Mysl´, 1983), 65. In this, the sugar beet industry helped them to achieve their goal of being independent gentlemen. Michael Hughes, “‘Independent Gentlemen’ : The Social Position of the Moscow Slavophiles and its Impact on their Social Thought,” Slavonic and East European Review 71, 1 (January 1993) : 66‑88. 84. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 3. 85. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 7. 86. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 6ob 87. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 10 88. Or 5259 chetvert. One chetvert equals .0872611 bushels. 89. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 10ob. 90. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 10ob. Later, Riabinin noted that the finished product did not have saltpeter in it, although the granules, a middle stage product, did. Ibid, l. 13. 91. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 3. 92. TsIAM, f. 1845, op. 3, d. 82, l. 11ob. 93. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 98. 94. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 97. 95. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 98. 96. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 113. 97. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 111‑120. 98. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 109. 99. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 96.
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100. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 114. 101. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 114. 102. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 97. 103. Maslov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie, 122. In the nineteenth century, Russia had two currencies, namely, silver rubles and rubles assignat (paper), which had a varying exchange rate. Silver rubles were more valuable than paper ones. 104. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 121. 105. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 122. 106. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 129, 138. 107. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” 101‑102. 108. David Moon, “The Inventory Reform and Peasant Unrest in Right‑Bank Ukraine in 1847‑48,” Slavonic and East European Review, 79, 4 (October 2001) : 653‑697. 109. Takesi Matsumura, “Transformatsiia derevni na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine nakaune osvobozhdeniia krest´ian i rol´ inventarnykh pravil [The transformation of villages in Right‑Bank Ukraine on the eve of the emancipation of the peasants and the role of inventories],” in Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed., Sotsial´naia transformatsiia i mezhetnicheskie otnosheniia na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine : 19 – nachalo 20 vv. : Sbornik stat´ei [Social transformations and multiethnic relations in Right‑Bank Ukraine] (Sapporo, Japan : Slavic Research Center, 2005), 61‑88. 110. B.V. Tikhonov, “Razvitie sveklosakharnoi promyshlennosti vo vtoroi polovine 40‑kh i v 50‑kh godakh XIX veka (k istorii nachala promyshlennogo perevorota) [The development of beet sugar industry in the late 1840s and 1850s (towards the history of the origins of the Industrial Revolution)],” Istoricheskie zapiski 62 (1958) : 145, 150. Maslov noted that by 1845, Bobrinskoi’s sugar was newly for sale in Romny (Poltava Province), Kharkov and Orel. SPF RAN, f. 30, op. 3, d. 165, l. 11. 111. August von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, ed. S. Frederick Starr and trans. Eleanore Schmidt (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1972), 221. 112. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 134. 113. A.V. Voronina, Pochvennaia karta Ukrainskoi SSR [Soil map of the Ukrainian SSR] (M., 1977) ; “Summarnoe otpravlenie rafinada so stantsii Iugo‑zapadnogo kraia v 1901,” unnumbered plate in M.A. Davydov, Vserossiiskii rynok v kontse XIX – nachale XX vv. i zheleznodorozhnaia statistika [The All‑Russian market in the late nineteenth‑ early twentieth centuries and railroad statistics] (SPb. : Aletiia, 2010). 114. V.M. Fridland et al., eds., Pochvennaia karta RFSFR [Soil map of the RFSFR] (M., 1988). 115. T.I. Derev´iankin, ed., Istoriia narodnogo gospodarstva Ukrainsk´oi RSR [History of the economy of the Ukrainian SSR] (Kiev : Naukova Dumka, 1983), 1 : 244. 116. Derev´iankin, ed., Istoriia narodnogo gospodarstva Ukrainsk´oi RSR. 117. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 138. 118. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 138. 119. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 139‑141. 120. Frolova, “Moskovskoe obshchestvo,” passim. 121. A.S. Borinevich, Sistematicheskii ukazatel´ statei, zametok, protokolov, otchetov i proch., pomeshchennykh v ‘Listakh’ i ‘Zapiskakh’ Imperatorskogo Obshchestva Sel´skogo Khoziaistva Iuzhnoi Rossii s 1830 po 1894 g. [Systematic index of articles, notes, minutes, reports, etc., listed in the ‘Pages’ and ‘Notes’ of the imperial Southern Russian Agricultural Society] (Odessa, 1895), 31. 122. Otchet o deistviiakh imperatorskogo obshchestva sel´skogo khoziaistva Iuzhnoi Rossii [Report on the activity of the imperial Southern Russian Agricultural Society] (Odessa, 1855), 120‑122. 123. G.P. Nebolsin, Statisticheskoe obozrenie vneshnei torgovli Rossii (SPb., 1850), 330‑331. 124. Davydov, Vserossiiskii rynok, 436.
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125. Davydov, Vserossiiskii rynok, 436 ; Gatrell, Tsarist Economy. 126. Elina, “Sel´skokhoziaistvennye obshchestva,” 36. 127. Voblyi, Opyt istorii, 395. 128. V.K. Iatsunskii, “Krupnaia promyshlennost´ Rossii v 1790‑1860 gg. [Heavy industry in Russia from 1790‑1860],” in M.K. Rozhkova, ed., Ocherki ėkonomicheskoi istorii Rossii pervoi poloviny XIX veka [Essays in the economic history of Russia in the early 19th century] (M. : Izd. Sotsial ´no‑ekon. literatury, 1959), 196. These are short tons, converted from the pood. 129. Deerr, The History of Sugar, 491, 493. These figures are converted from metric tons to U.S. short tons (2000 lb). One metric ton is equivalent to 2204.6 American pounds. 130. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 296. 131. Deerr, The History of Sugar, 492‑498. The First World War did not significantly change the trend ; already by 1913, Russia had overtaken France and Austria‑Hungary, two countries that had previously produced more. Ibid., 492‑494.
ABSTRACTS
This article explores how agricultural societies, which were voluntary associations dedicated to improving agriculture, worked with the state and agriculturalists to foster the growth of a new sugar beet industry during the nineteenth century. Using the Moscow Agricultural Society (est. 1818) as the focal point, it argues that although the Society was successful in changing agricultural practices and spreading the cultivation of sugar beets even before the end of serfdom in 1861, the end result was not what the Society had expected. While they had originally envisioned a European Russia dotted with small producers growing sugar beet processed by larger landowners, what resulted was the rise of massive vertically integrated beet sugar production in central and southern Ukraine, which had more suitable soil and wider use of free labor. It thus shows the power of experts to change the environment and the limits of that power.
Cet article étudie comment, au XIXe siècle, des sociétés agricoles, qui étaient des associations bénévoles engagées dans l’amélioration de l’agriculture, travaillèrent avec l’État et les agriculteurs à favoriser l’expansion d’une nouvelle industrie de la betterave sucrière. Prenant la Société agricole de Moscou (fondée en 1818) comme point focal, il démontre que celle-ci, bien qu’elle eût réussi à changer les pratiques et à étendre la culture de la betterave sucrière avant même l’abolition du servage en 1861, n’avait pas obtenu le résultat escompté. Alors que la Société agricole de Moscou avait initialement imaginé une Russie européenne dotée de petits producteurs éparpillés cultivant de la betterave qui aurait été transformée par de grands propriétaires fonciers, elle constata l’augmentation d’une production de masse à intégration verticale en Ukraine centrale et méridionale, dont la qualité des terres était plus adaptée à cette culture et qui disposait plus largement d’une main d’œuvre gratuite. L’article démontre ainsi le pouvoir des experts, et ses limites, à changer l’environnement.
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AUTHOR
SUSAN SMITH‑PETER
College of Staten Island / CUNY Department of History, [email protected]
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Engineering Empire Russian and foreign hydraulic experts in Central Asia, 1887‑1917 L’Empire et l’ingénierie hydraulique : les experts russes et étrangers en Asie centrale, 1887-1917
Maya K. Peterson
1 In 1912 Russian Minister of Agriculture Alexander Krivoshein proposed a pithy formula which encapsulated his hopes for the future development of the imperial province of Turkestan, the southernmost part of the Russian Empire. Cotton plus colonization plus irrigation would create, in Krivoshein’s words, […] an area equivalent to the amount of land currently irrigated in Turkestan, as it were creating a second Turkestan. This new Turkestan, not inferior to the old, native one in magnitude, would surpass it in riches and level of culture, and its new population would be Russian.1 2 Krivoshein’s formula was an articulation of official and unofficial processes that were already underway in Turkestan: privately‑ and publicly‑financed investigations of the possibility for expanding the production of cotton in the region, as well as the legal and illegal movement to the province of thousands of Russian peasant colonists from the overcrowded regions of central Russia. Krivoshein hoped that through greater government regulation and investment, these processes would transform Turkestan from an arid and underpopulated military colony in Asia into a prosperous and fertile corner of the modernizing Russian Empire.
3 Krivoshein was not alone. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Russian officials, along with businessmen, engineers and agronomists concerned with the development of Russia’s “Asiatic” borderlands, had increasingly come to agree that “the whole life, wealth, and future of Turkestan” depended on irrigation.2 The question of financing and undertaking new irrigation projects in Turkestan arose in meetings of engineers and agronomists, as well as in advisory councils from the level of the province up to the State Duma. Since most agricultural products could not grow in Turkestan without irrigation, successful irrigation projects would be necessary to ensure both the expansion of Turkestan’s arable acreage, as well as the viability of Russian agricultural settlements in the region. By promoting the cultivation of cash
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crops such as cotton, irrigation would make Turkestan an indispensable, economically integrated part of the Empire, and by opening up new areas for peasant settlement, irrigation would help to mark this territory as indelibly Russian. That this agricultural transformation was highly desirable was clear, yet the irrigation of Russian Turkestan posed myriad challenges. 4 Agriculture in arid regions requires particular kinds of knowledge. Over centuries Central Asians had developed sophisticated systems for the cultivation of crops in an arid climate, yet many Russian and foreign observers considered indigenous agricultural methods to be unsatisfactory; they instead called for more “correct” and “rational” usage of land and water resources in Turkestan through the introduction of the latest scientific knowledge and technology.3 In order to display the superiority of imported methods of resource management, however, and translate visions of newly “cultured” lands into reality, practical skills were required. A significant component of the political success of Russia’s imperial project in Turkestan was thus seen to depend upon scientific experts who could help realize Russian ambitions in the region. In the following pages I examine figures involved in the irrigation of Russian Turkestan in an effort to uncover both the important roles that hydraulic engineering experts played in Russian schemes for Central Asian development, as well as the roles that such schemes played in Russia’s ongoing quest in the early twentieth century to define itself to the world as a modern and thoroughly European empire.4 5 By participating in—and even initiating—campaigns to bring the latest advances in engineering practices and technology to the Central Asian borderlands, hydraulic engineers in Turkestan were at once agents of empire, representatives of the center in the periphery whose goal was to transform remote spaces on the map into places that were recognizably Russian, while also acting as propagandists for empire, aiming to convince the indigenous population in the borderlands of the benefits of Russian rule and demonstrate to the world that the Russian Empire should take its place among the ranks of European empires. These were men who saw themselves as giving the “the gift of empire”—in the case of hydraulic engineers in Turkestan, the gift of engineering science and technologies for modern irrigated agriculture—even while the imperial projects they undertook deprived indigenous peoples of lands and livelihoods, and set in motion processes that in the second half of the twentieth century would subjugate Central Asians to reliance on a cotton monoculture.5 They also transcended empire, as they engaged with an international network of professional engineers and experts, harnessing the resources of that network to exploit the resources of Russia to the maximum extent possible. In spite of their zeal, however, and in spite of the calls of Russian technocrats for irrigation expertise in the development of Turkestan, inherent tensions between the dual goals of irrigation—cotton and colonization—which stemmed from the uncertain position of the tsarist government when it came to intervening in land and water resources, hindered the imperial mission of reclaiming the Central Asian borderlands. By the time the government began to make a concerted effort to rectify this situation, it was already too late.
The question of expansion
6 According to Alfred Rieber, in the second half of the nineteenth century the Russian state “was forced to acknowledge […] that a strong engineering profession with its own
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ethos was a vital necessity for the maintenance of Russia’s great power status.”6 In the wake of the Great Reforms of the 1860s a mobile group of engineers from increasingly diverse social backgrounds began consistently to exert power at the highest levels of Russian government.7 This growth in political influence coincided with the growth of a newfound professional identity, giving these Russian engineers a particular sense of imperial purpose, alongside a zeal for pushing the boundaries of science and technology.8 In the 1890s, Finance Minister Sergei Witte’s push for the rapid industrialization of the Russian Empire promoted a growing group of “technocrats” in the Russian administration, who began to call for the identification and exploitation of all of the “productive forces” of the empire.9 Such calls created new opportunities for engineers and other specialists to help reshape the lands of the empire.10
7 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, young Russian engineers, trained for imperial careers and assignments in strategic places on the periphery, were confident in the ability of their knowledge and expertise to transform the most intractable spaces of the Empire. Because their expertise accorded with the power ambitions of the Russian state, their confidence came not only from an unshakable faith in the power of “European” science—as opposed to local or “native” knowledge— but also from a self‑image as professionals whose expertise was vital to the processes of empire.11 In a newly conquered region such as Turkestan, engineers could play a crucial role in strengthening Russian control and a sense of legitimacy. 8 Intertwined with the notion of service to the Empire and its subjects was the notion that Russian engineering achievements were taking place on a world stage. After the humiliating military defeat by Japan in 1905 and the resulting unrest on the domestic front, Russians were particularly keen to prove their ability to keep up with European powers. The province of Turkestan, incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1867 as a governor‑generalship under military rule, provided a space where such abilities might be demonstrated. By 1884, the last hostile Turkmen nomads had been subjugated—or massacred—and the Russian Empire ruled over a vast new territory, much of which was desert. In transforming those deserts over the course of subsequent decades, Russian hydraulic engineers in Central Asia might join the ranks of the some of the greatest hydraulic engineers of the time: the architects of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Aswan Low Dam, the Los Angeles‑Owens River aqueduct in California, and the irrigators of the Punjab in northwest India. Certainly any progress Russian engineers made in their Central Asian borderlands would be studied by engineers and governments the world over with interest. 9 The tsarist government initially appeared to support such ambitions. Soon after the surrender of the Merv oasis on the southern edge of the Qara Qum Desert near the border with Afghanistan, an imperial ukase of Alexander III in August 1887 proclaimed the founding of the Imperial Murghab Estate.12 According to this decree, all “empty” [vpuste lezhashchiia] lands suitable for irrigation and cultivation that could be irrigated without doing harm to irrigated territory nearby were now the property of the tsar.13 The estate, situated on the right bank of the Murghab River along the newly constructed Central Asian (Trans‑Caspian) Railway line, was to serve as a model plantation which would produce new varieties of crops—cotton in particular, but also various types of fruit—while simultaneously helping to mechanize and modernize “native” agriculture in the region.14 Though Russian officials had little knowledge of which lands might be suitable for irrigation and cultivation—or, indeed, which lands
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were “empty”—and though there was little government capital to invest in such projects and few men qualified to undertake them, under the direction of a civil engineer named Jan J. Poklewski‑Koziell construction on a dam went ahead in 1888, on the spot where for centuries a dam known as the Sultan‑Bent had already stood.15 10 Through the use of locally made bricks and hydraulic lime mortar, Poklewski‑Koziell hoped to build a dam that was stronger than the previous earthen constructions.16 The first attempt at a new dam, however, ruptured before construction was completed.17 In part because of this initial failure, the dam’s construction costs were ultimately more than twice as high as original estimates.18 The Russian government’s decision to import a British engineer to finish the task also contributed to the expenses. In September 1889, state councilor Stanislav Rauner visited British irrigation engineer Sir Colin Scott‑Moncrieff in person in Egypt to invite him to come to Russia for two months and advise the Russians on the irrigation of the Murghab Estate. Scott‑Moncrieff, who had spent the first part of his career in India and more recently had become head of the Irrigation Department in Egypt, was chosen specifically because of his experience building a barrage on the Nile, a site the Russians believed to be very similar to Merv. Upon arrival in Merv one month later, Scott‑Moncrieff admired Poklewski‑Koziell’s ingenuity and was impressed by the work, but he also noted that Poklewski seemed to know nothing about irrigation—though he clearly thought he did—and that the Estate, in general, was “a vile place.”19 11 The fact that Poklewski‑Koziell, an engineer whose primary experience was working on railroads, and a man who apparently had been exiled for participation in the 1863 anti‑tsarist Polish Uprising, was put in charge of the most important imperial construction project in this sensitive border region, only newly incorporated into the empire, tells us something about the state of engineering in general—and hydraulic engineering in particular—in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century.20 Whereas waterways had originally been the major arteries of transport in the Russian Empire, by the late nineteenth century a railroad boom had shifted the focus of civil and military engineers away from waterways toward railways. Government committees assigned to consider the question of water usage in Turkestan would suggest that “improving the means of water usage has no less importance for Turkestan than the creation of new railroads,” yet there were far fewer specialists who could attend to the former task than the latter.21 Engineers like Poklewski‑Koziell were trained in technical institutes—primarily the St. Petersburg Institute of the Corps of Transport Engineers [Engineers of Ways of Communications]—that covered all aspects of civil engineering, without encouraging specialization. Hydraulic engineering remained focused on the theoretical and made up only a small part of the overall engineering curriculum.22 12 Yet the Murghab Estate also revealed the limitations of the Russian state presence in Turkestan in another way. Not only was there a dearth of the kind of experts who might help to demonstrate the superiority of a Russian way of life to the indigenous people of Turkestan, but the 1886 statute that provided for the region’s governance by its new rulers simply stated: “Waters in the main canals, streams, rivers, and lakes are given to the population for use according to custom.”23 This meant that the Russian state did not have control over one of the region’s most important resources. In 1887, the year in which the Murghab Estate was founded, State Councilor Nikolai Dingel ´shtedt, assistant to one of the Russian military governors in Turkestan, posed a vexing question: “[…][H]ow can we resolve disputes over water according to custom if the
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custom [itself] is not known?”24 Even more damningly, Russian interpretations of “native custom” understood custom as granting land to the person who could bring water to it; unless the Russian government could bring water to new land in Turkestan, reliance on custom threatened to undermine the very legitimacy of Russian rule in the empire’s Central Asian borderlands.25 13 In the case of the Murghab Estate, the tsarist government claimed the “empty” lands of the Merv oasis to be the property of the tsar and thus subject to Russian intervention. Such a claim was much more difficult in the most fertile regions of the province, such as the densely‑populated Ferghana Valley, where agricultural produce grew in abundance, watered by an extensive irrigation system built by the previous rulers of the region, the khans of Kokand. Initially, rather than attempting to irrigate new lands in the Ferghana region, the Russian government took advantage of this existing irrigation system to encourage agricultural development. As on the Murghab Estate, one of the principal crops promoted by the Russian government in the Ferghana Valley was cotton. In the 1880s strains of American cotton were introduced, in order to produce greater yields of higher quality and longer staple cotton than the indigenous varietals already growing there. Through the efforts of agronomists and a series of economic incentives introduced by Witte in the 1890s, American varieties of cotton came to occupy more and more of Turkestan’s irrigated acreage in Ferghana and beyond.26 14 By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Ferghana Valley was feeling the constraints of this intensification of American cotton cultivation without the expansion of the arable acreage.27 Though some Russians argued that cotton production could be increased further without the attempt to irrigate new lands, others disagreed.28 In 1907, at its third session, the newly formed Cotton Committee of the Department of Agriculture of the Main Administration of Land Organization and Agriculture (Russia’s ministry of agriculture from 1905‑15; henceforth Main Administration) discussed the question of importing grain from outside the region in order to convert more of Turkestan’s irrigated acreage to cotton‑growing. Most present, however, felt that the replacement of too much of the region’s grain with cotton was inadvisable.29 Senator Konstantin Pahlen, whom the tsar sent to Turkestan in 1908 in order to conduct a thorough inspection of the province, echoed these conclusions when he stated that “not one step forward” could be taken in the increase of cotton acreage in the region without an extension of irrigation systems.30
Educating engineers
15 Yet on the eve of Pahlen’s arrival little distinguished Russian accomplishments in irrigation from the state of affairs two decades earlier, when Dingel´shtedt had referred to the state of irrigation in Turkestan and the Caucasus as “utter chaos.”31 Though in the 1890s posts were created within the provincial military administration for engineers and technicians to oversee irrigation projects and water management in the region, these officials were occupied more with pushing paper than with the actual work of investigation and oversight, nor was there any central oversight of their activities.32 When it came to practice, decisions about irrigation continued to be made at the level of individual irrigation systems by ariq‑aqsaqals and mirabs, local community officials who formed a hierarchy of water overseers which the tsarist
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government had appropriated wholesale after the conquest of the region. Tsarist irrigation officials, in contrast—many of whom, unlike the engineers employed by the Main Administration, were not even trained as hydraulic specialists—had little knowledge of the details of water management within their vast districts.33 In 1909 the Main Administration’s Resettlement Administration, the bureau charged with overseeing colonization affairs, sent a young law student named Georgii Gins to Turkestan to become familiar with the legal regulations regarding the distribution of water for irrigation. To his surprise, Gins found that although a law had been formulated in 1890 to regulate water distribution in the Caucasus, there was still no such law in Turkestan.34
16 Krivoshein, who became head of the Main Administration in 1908, pleaded with the tsarist Council of Ministers for more money to be allocated to the irrigation of Turkestan, reminding the ministers not only of the Russian Empire’s “political, economic and cultural tasks in Central Asia, but the prestige of the Russian name among the Muslim population.”35 The successful transformation of the deserts of Turkestan into fertile plains could do wonders for legitimizing Russian rule in the eyes of indigenous Turkestanis.36 And yet besides the Murghab Estate, the one government‑sponsored irrigation project, a scheme to irrigate 45,000 desiatinas37 in the so‑called Hungry Steppe near the provincial capital at Tashkent, had progressed only slowly, mostly due to a lack of funding. A commission of the Turkestan Agricultural Society organized in 1907 concluded that the current state of irrigation in Turkestan was dismal, as did the Congress of Hydraulic Engineers that convened in Tashkent at the end of that same year.38 The agricultural commission stated bluntly that irrigation under the Central Asian khans had been more successful than any Russian attempts in Turkestan, a serious blow to Russian pride. Americans, the commission claimed, had irrigated in just three to four decades “what would take us, under the current regime, three to four thousand years.” International observers, moreover, had determined that “Russia lies behind everyone in [the fields of] irrigation technology and the development of irrigation systems.”39 17 Some blamed these failings on the poor state of engineering education in the Russian Empire. In January 1909, the St. Petersburg newspaper Novoe vremia published an article by Vasilii Al´bitskii, distinguished professor at Kharkov Technical University, entitled “The Feebleness of Hydraulic Engineering Knowledge in Russia and the Basic Means By Which to Eliminate It.” In this article, Professor Al´bitskii bemoaned the current state of technical instruction in Russia in the field of hydraulic engineering (though he was somewhat heartened by the fact that in technical institutes had in recent years increased theoretical instruction). Such poor instruction, he argued, was “the main reason for the paucity in Russia not only of prominent hydraulic engineers, but even of mediocre ones.” According to Al´bitskii, Scott‑Moncrieff had been brought to Merv “to Russia’s chagrin and embarrassment,” since the main reason for inviting him had been that “no domestic hydraulic engineers could be found who could build a solid dam […].”40 18 Al´bitskii’s complaints had merit, but they overlooked the fact that by 1909 there did exist a small but eager group of theoretically trained hydraulic specialists who had taken up the challenge of realizing the Russian government’s goals in Turkestan in practice. A group of student apprentices, for instance, wrote from the Murghab Estate to protest Al´bitskii’s characterization and defend Russian hydraulic engineering
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efforts in the region.41 Remote Turkestan was by no means as desirable a place to make a career as the imperial capital at Petersburg; such enthusiastic students were thus easier to attract to the region than more experienced engineers. Yet the challenges of Turkestan and its appeal as a “backward,” “Asiatic” region that could, through the introduction of modern science and engineering, be united with the European heartland of the empire, were such that some fine engineers ended up devoting a good portion of their lives to solving its perceived problems and became some of the region’s most vocal advocates. Engineer Fëdor Petrovich Morgunenkov, for instance, worked on various schemes to irrigate the Caspian region, as well as the Hungry Steppe; he would continue to work in the region after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.42 Georgii Rizenkampf, described by one of his compatriots as “full of energy” and “the most talented” engineer within the Main Adminstration’s Department of Land Improvement, took over the management of the government project in the Hungry Steppe in 1912; he remained its head into the early Soviet period.43 After the revolution he also supervised other irrigation works in Turkestan and briefly served as a professor in the reclamation department of Turkestan University.44 Acting as an enthusiastic “booster” for Turkestan’s Semireche region from 1910 on, engineer Vladimir Alexandrovich Vasil´ev advocated investment in Semireche as both a traditional “colony,” which would provide raw materials for extraction, as well as a settler colony that demanded the input of human and financial capital.45 19 Al´bitskii’s concern about Russian educational institutions also ignores the fact that these hydraulic engineers were not bounded by the Russian Empire; rather, they actively kept up with technological developments and scientific discussions in other parts of the world through their own travels, observations, and research. With the blessing of the imperial government, they not only circulated throughout the empire, but made journeys to various sites associated with science and technology throughout the world. It was typical, for instance, for Russian hydraulic engineers to travel to Europe and to visit institutions of engineering education, as well as sites of practice. Rizenkampf made a journey to Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy when he was still a student studying hydrotechnics and water systems at the Institute of the Corps of Transport Engineers.46 Vasil´ev followed a similar route when he undertook a tour of Europe’s recent achievements in hydraulic engineering before beginning an ambitious irrigation construction project in Turkestan’s Chu River Valley. Vasil´ev’s itinerary included visits to the International Building Exhibition at Leipzig, a reservoir in Silesia that might serve as a model for a planned reservoir in Turkestan, and cement factories in France. He proposed observation of rectification programs on the Danube and Po Rivers, and tours of Milan and Lombardy, to learn about how these regions utilized hydraulic power.47 20 Russian hydraulic engineers in Turkestan, like American and Australian engineers before them, also turned to British India, the training ground of some of the first and greatest hydraulic engineers. In 1906, with the tsar’s approval, S.F. Ostrovskii, a recent graduate of the Institute of the Corps of Transport Engineers, traveled to Punjab, where, with the aid of British engineers, he was able to collect valuable material for use on the Russian government endeavor to irrigate the Hungry Steppe.48 Such trips abroad were expensive, but they facilitated communications and professional ties between Russian and foreign engineers, and no doubt helped to spark interest abroad in Russian schemes for hydraulic construction.
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21 In 1912 the Department of Land Improvement called for the collection of “all the existing international literature” that might help to further hydraulic investigations in Turkestan and the Caucasus.49 An investigation of Vasil´ev’s library at the Chu irrigation project confirms Russian engineers’ ongoing interest in keeping up with developments in hydraulic construction and irrigation technologies worldwide. In 1917 the Chu project library had 281 publications in English, eighty‑eight in German, sixty‑five in French, two in Italian, and three in Swedish. Listings in the index of the library’s holdings include such eclectic titles as “Buckley, The Irrigation Works of India,” “Cooper, Water Power for the Farm Country Home (Albany, 1911),” and the “Official Handbook of Panama Canal (1915).”50 22 Many Russian engineers also wrote their own books and articles to share their findings and observations with an international community of engineers. These works cited the latest international research. In a work on problems of irrigating the Transcaspian region, for instance, Rizenkampf cited several contemporary discussions of irrigation engineering, including Italian professor Luigi Luiggi’s summary of the International Congress of Engineers held in 1915 in San Francisco, as well as a work on irrigation engineering published in the same year by Ray Palmer Teele, irrigation economist at the United States Department of Agriculture.51 One of Russia’s foremost engineers and agronomists in the early twentieth century, Evgenii Evgenievich Skorniakov, inscribed a copy of one of his works to Arthur P. Davis, head engineer of the United States Reclamation Service, most likely given to Davis when the latter visited the Russian Empire in 1911.52 23 An important component of acquiring expertise is “socialization into the practices of an expert group.”53 When Russian engineers made contact with their colleagues abroad, whether through travel or through the exchange of research findings, they were conscious of doing so both on a personal and professional level that would benefit their individual careers as sought‑after experts, as well as on the level of state service, by making use of an international network whose expertise could benefit the Russian Empire. Yet in spite of the fact that Russian engineers felt they had universal knowledge that could be applied everywhere, had careers that took them throughout the empire and the world, and saw themselves as professional men on par with their colleagues around the globe, they did also manage to develop local expertise and attachments. Learning the art of irrigation engineering on the fly required intensive and intimate study of local physical environments and an understanding of conditions that were quite foreign from those in St. Petersburg. 24 Though the theoretical training they received in the technical institutes was intended to give engineers the kind of universal knowledge that could be applied anywhere in the empire, Russian hydraulic specialists in Turkestan faced the problem that different parts of the vast Russian Empire were by no means alike. Russian irrigators, like their counterparts in other parts of the world, believed themselves to be “master technicians whose work realized the inherent potential or purpose of the land,” yet the environs of the imperial capital at St. Petersburg did little to prepare a student for the deserts of the south.54 On recalling his first trip to Turkestan in 1910, Rizenkampf remembered thinking “that the reclamation engineer, landing in Turkestan from Europe, should immediately lose his nerve: these endless deserts and steppes, oceans of sand, naked, treeless slopes of the mountains […].”55
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25 Indeed, though it may be argued that “water shaped the engineering profession in Russia”56—since Russia’s first generation of engineers had emerged in St. Petersburg to deal specifically with local problems such as the flooding of the Neva River—Russian engineers were used to an abundance of water, not a lack thereof. St. Petersburg was a city built on marshes, where water was a constant threat. In Central Asia, in contrast, water was scarce, trapped in high mountain glaciers, large saline lakes, or slow‑moving rivers that dwindled into nothing in the steppes and deserts. Moving from wet, northern environments to the almost diametrically opposed environments of the south posed great challenges to Russia’s newly trained hydraulic engineers. Even Russia’s experiences importing new techniques for reshaping land use and agricultural production on the steppes were not adequate preparation for transforming the arid lands of Central Asia.57 26 Nor did engineers’ travels in Europe necessarily prepare them for the sandy spaces of Central Asia. While European and Russian engineers had long experience with the rectification of rivers, the draining of marshes, and the construction of dikes to hold back the sea, irrigation engineering in an arid region produced a host of new problems. The related problems of swamping and salinization, for instance, due to imperfect drainage systems and the leaching of soluble salts up through the soils to the surface, plagued Russian‑engineered irrigation systems and irrigated agriculture in Central Asia, leading to a decline in soil fertility, as it had for British engineers in India and Egypt.58 Tsarist officials were forced to recognize the difficult work of planning and overseeing irrigation systems in arid regions in comparison with European Russia.59 27 The work of British engineers in India and Egypt was thus an obvious model for the would‑be irrigators of Turkestan.60 Postcards in the Russian archives from Algeria and Tunisia, along with an article on the Sahara desert, indicate that Skorniakov studied North Africa as a case for water management in arid regions.61 But in the first decades of the twentieth century it was the idea of creating a “Russian California” that most captivated enthusiasts for the transformation of Turkestan’s deserts.62 28 California was symbolic of the entire arid region that spanned the western United States. In the 1890s, in a climate of progressivism and a country wracked by droughts and economic depression, the United States federal government had begun to invest more into irrigation.63 Already at that time, the Russian famine of 1891‑1892 had prompted Russians to look to America for ideas on how to improve the steppe and desert lands of the Russian Empire. In an 1892 article in Russkaia mysl´ on “Irrigation in the Western United States,” Aleksandr Voeikov demonstrated the kinds of results that could be attained in Russia through the introduction of “artificial” irrigation on an American model. In 1893 Count Comodzinskii, the Russian Empire’s engineer‑in‑chief and inspector‑general of hydraulic works, attended the Second International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles.64 However, it was not until the Russian government began in the twentieth century to realize the crucial role of irrigation in the development of Turkestan that the United States became the focus of Russian attention in the field of hydraulic engineering. 29 In the early twentieth century the western United States became an important destination for hydraulic specialists seeking a career in Turkestan. Between 1908 and 1910, for instance, Skorniakov made such a journey. At the Seventeenth National Irrigation Congress in Spokane, Washington in 1909, he expressed both his gratitude for the courtesies shown him on his American travels, as well as his admiration for
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American engagement with the “latest engineering methods.”65 He was particularly interested in the hydraulic engineering and resettlement projects initiated under the Carey Act, which introduced private capital to reclamation projects in arid areas of the West, a scheme he believed “could be successfully transferred to Russia for aid in colonizing desert regions of Turkestan and Siberia.”66 30 Engineer Vladimir V. Tsinzerling, who carried out important investigations in the 1910s and 1920s of the irrigation potential of the Amu Daria, one of the primary arteries of Central Asia, seems to have gained valuable hydraulic engineering experience by working on the irrigation of California’s Imperial Valley.67 In 1912, Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture sent Pëtr P. von Weymarn, a 1906 graduate of the Institute of the Corps of Transport Engineers, to spend two years in the United States and Canada studying dambuilding methods, irrigation canal headworks, and the construction of reservoirs.68 Beginning in January 1916, he would serve as Vasil´ev’s assistant on the project to irrigate Turkestan’s Chu River Valley.
Imperial mindsets
31 The similarities between the irrigation of Russian Turkestan and the American West went deeper than scientific exchange, however. Environmental historian Donald Worster has famously argued that the regulation of water in the American West by powerful technocrats, engineers, and large land owners led to the emergence of a hydraulic empire.69 Their visions of the most “rational” use of the scarce water resources of the western United States drove development that favored some at the expense of others, particularly those who lived on and worked that land. The development of some sites over others was often an entirely political decision, rather than a scientific one.70 Proponents for irrigation of Turkestan, therefore, had more than just a scientific language in common with proponents of irrigation in the American West; they, too, spoke a language that expressed ideas about transformation and resource exploitation which privileged one vision of proper land use at the expense of others, a vision that was inherently political.
32 At the irrigation congress in Spokane in 1909, engineer Skorniakov talked about the ways in which the climates and topographies of the United States and Russia were similar. “We have also our arid regions and we have also irrigation,” he said, “and we need reclamation of our immense area of the most fertile, but now desert lands.”71 His statement reveals a common trope among engineers in both the United States and Russia: the idea that “desert” was a condition, a temporary state that concealed a latent fertility that could be restored through “reclamation.” Like their counterparts in the American West, who in the late nineteenth century began to speak more frequently about the reclamation of “waste” land, Russian irrigators and tsarist officials alike also began to use a similar language of improvement to invoke the redemption of lands that currently lay uncultivated.72 In Russian, “arid” can be expressed in several ways, including bezvodnyi (waterless) and besplodnyi (infertile, barren). Both of these descriptions suggest a kind of land that is unfit for cultivation. Thus, while Russian irrigators did on occasion speak of “arid” (i.e., waterless and barren desert lands), it was much more common to talk about “dead” lands that could be brought to life through the process of ozhivlenie, the word most commonly used to describe the process of “greening” the deserts. Ozhivlenie literally means to resuscitate or
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reanimate. Thus “dead” lands were not lands that were infertile or sterile—rather, they were lands in which the potential for life existed. 33 Ian Tyrrell has suggested that the language of reclamation “connoted something more than restoration of natural abundance. Rather, it asserted human claims to primacy and possession that fitted the theme of imperial domination of nature.”73 In the Russian case, the language of ozhivlenie similarly suggested the important human role in the process of bringing deserts to life. This emphasis on human ability to give life to desert wastes assigned a special power to the hydraulic engineer who could set such a process in motion. In Russian, as in English, the word desert (pustyne) contains connotations of emptiness—pustyne and pustoi (empty) share a common root. Deserts were not barren places where no life existed; they were empty places waiting for the “cultured hand of the engineer” to fill them with life.74 The fact that they often were not empty at all was a fact that was not always taken into consideration. 34 Indeed, imperial domination was not confined to domination of nature alone. Like their counterparts in the American West, Russian engineers in Turkestan also “viewed themselves as ‘missionaries of light and progress’ and pioneers of a ‘better and higher degree of civilization.’”75 In Turkestan, traces of vast, ancient irrigation systems seemed proof of both a more glorious past as well as the region’s future potential. As a well‑known nineteenth‑century Russian scholar of Central Asia remarked, in the area of irrigation, “perhaps more so than in others, one feels the close linkage between the study of the past of the region and the work being done for its future.”76 It was the notion of formerly glorious hydraulic civilizations, juxtaposed with a program of improvement, which gave those who were interested in the hydraulic transformation of Central Asia a sense of purpose. The implication was that if “culture” (agricultural settlement) did not yet exist (or no longer existed) in the empty deserts, it was because the indigenous people of the region did not possess a high enough degree of “civilization.” 35 Diana Davis has suggested that French imperialists attempted to justify colonial rule in the Maghreb by “resurrecting the granary of Rome” from centuries of nomadic neglect. 77 Similarly, some Russian irrigators suggested that nomads were in part to blame for the current situation in Turkestan. A Russian irrigation technician named Matisen, for instance, wrote that “nomads, […] not knowing how to profit from the culture of the farmers, sometimes wiped […][agriculture] out completely, destroying the results of many centuries of work by grain growers and merchants and transforming rich oases into desert […]. It is self evident,” he went on to write, “that…the new construction of irrigation systems is not in the power of the indigenous population,” a statement clearly meant to justify the intervention of the Russian imperial government.78 Another Russian observer noted coolly that the American government had managed to deal with the problem of nomadic peoples quite simply, by means of the creation of a system of reservations.79 36 Deciding which regions to transform through irrigation and whose visions would be realized in the transformation was always an inherently political process, driven by those who could convince others that they had the knowledge and power to make such visions reality. The similarities between Russian and American visions of making the rivers flow and making the deserts bloom can help to explain the mutual enthusiasm on both sides when, in December 1910, American entrepreneur John Hays Hammond wrote to Krivoshein that he wished to send experts to Turkestan, “[…] with the view of
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entering into an arrangement […] for the reclamation of these districts.”80 Hammond’s vision of turning “waste land” into productive land resonated thoroughly with Russian visions for the transformation of Turkestan into a prosperous colony of the empire. The Department of Land Improvement quickly agreed to Hammond’s terms—in spite of the fact that Hammond wished to investigate a sensitive border region—reserving the entire Qara Qum desert region of Turkestan for investigation by his team, which consisted of American engineers Arthur P. Davis and William Mackie. Davis was Head Engineer of the United States Reclamation Service, the work of which was “the most important work of this kind being undertaken anywhere in the world,” Hammond reminded the Russians.81 Mackie, according to Hammond, was “considered the number one American authority on the greening of arid lands.”82 37 The American irrigation engineers were enthusiastically received by Russian engineers and officials in Turkestan.83 Davis, for his part, praised the work of Russian hydraulic engineers in Turkestan like Ostrovskii.84 After several weeks of investigation in the Qara Qum, however, Davis and Mackie concluded that, “the facts at hand are sufficient to show that there is no possibility of working out a project here that would be profitable for private capital.”85 When Hammond requested additional rights to investigate the Hungry Steppe, Krivoshein refused. 38 This episode has been interpreted as indicative of the Russian government’s reluctance to involve private entrepreneurs in schemes to irrigate Turkestan.86 However, such an interpretation ignores the fact that official discussions about the importance of irrigation for the development of Turkestan often stressed the importance of attracting private capital. Moreover, the fact that Russian officials were so quick to approve Hammond’s plans, privileging his petition over all other domestic and foreign requests, suggests that American knowledge and experience, in the form of some of America’s best hydraulic engineers, may have been as important as (or even more important than) the input of American capital into the irrigation of Turkestan.87 American irrigation expertise was what Hammond could offer that domestic and even other foreign entrepreneurs could not. Hammond, moreover, offered the expert knowledge and experience with arid regions which Russian engineers and administrators in Turkestan so greatly desired. For Russian engineers, access to American knowledge would also address the uncomfortable situation prevailing in Turkestan, namely the fact that Russian engineers had hardly expanded the amount of irrigated land in Turkestan. Russia may even have hoped to use American knowledge to beat the Americans at their own game and become less dependent on imports of American cotton.88 39 So what can explain this seeming paradox? Why did Krivoshein leap to secure American hydraulic engineering expertise to develop irrigation in Turkestan, only to then reject it? The answer may lie with the second goal of irrigation in Turkestan: colonization. The call by Russian technocrats to “use all of the water reserves of the krai [borderland province] and create a ‘new’ cultured Turkestan” was both literal—a program of action to double the amount of irrigated land—as well as politically symbolic—lands colonized by Russians and planted with cotton to feed the empire’s textile mills would “act as a counterweight to the old, Muslim Turkestan.”89 The problem was that—as Russian officials widely recognized—Slavic settlers from the more northerly lying regions of the empire, unused to irrigated agriculture and unfamiliar with the cotton plant, did not make good cotton cultivators. For this reason, most of
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the expansion of cotton had taken place on the lands of indigenous Turkestani smallholders in the Ferghana Valley. Moreover, unlike in the steppe regions to the north, until 1910 there was no provision in the Turkestan Statute to identify “excess” lands that were not in use by the nomadic populations of the region and thus could be reserved for the tsarist state. This concern was repeatedly raised during discussions of the expansion of irrigation for cotton and colonization.90 Lastly, the area of colonization was one in which the central government desired to have more control; even overenthusiastic regional officials were chastised for trying to interfere in this process.91 40 There was, therefore, an inherent tension in the dual goals of irrigation in Turkestan. Large, relatively unpopulated areas such as the Hungry Steppe that were slated for development for Russian settlement could only grow small amounts of cotton. Regions such as the Merv oasis or Qara Qum desert could be developed for cotton, but the farmers would have to be indigenous Turkestanis, at least until Russians learned more about cotton. And while the Russian government was willing to grant concessions to private (even foreign) entrepreneurs who wished to make the deserts of Turkestan bloom with cotton, it was difficult to imagine major concessions of government land in regions that were to be colonized.92 Krivoshein was quite willing to grant Hammond’s team priority in the deserts—and he encouraged the team to investigate other regions as well—but he could not grant them concessions in the Hungry Steppe; after much discussion, the steppe had been marked as an important region for Orthodox Russian settlers, an important step in the fulfillment of Russian visions of a “new” Turkestan. Even American expertise could not trump the political significance of colonization. 41 As Ian Tyrrell has pointed out, “irrigation is not [only] about drains, pumps, pipes, and dams, but [also] about dreams.”93 Russian hydraulic engineers and technocrats alike shared their visions of filling “empty” deserts with life and bringing “culture” to wastelands with imperialists around the world, including, most significantly, the creators of the hydraulic empire taking shape in the arid American west. Politics, however, were both an empowering and a limiting factor. While Russian hydraulic engineers were suitable agents of the tsarist “civilizing mission” in the Central Asian borderlands, they were also hampered by the tsarist state’s impotence in the region, particularly when it came to the legal right to use the region’s most precious resources, land and water. Though they and other specialists were willing to serve the state by carrying out the scientific studies necessary to clarify the existing patterns of water and land usage and rectify this situation, and though the invitation of Hammond to Turkestan shows that the tsarist government was not above harnessing foreign capital for such investigations, the real problem was time. Though a draft of a water law for Turkestan was finally drawn up in 1916, it was too little, too late. A massive uprising in the region that year signified the beginning of the end for the Russian Empire in Turkestan; a year later, the empire was no more. Though the Bolshevik regime that replaced the tsarist government was in many ways ideologically foreign to irrigation engineers in Turkestan, it embraced visions of a physical transformation of Turkestan’s deserts with a new vigor. Small wonder, then, that many of Turkestan’s hydraulic engineers, like Rizenkampf, welcomed this new era in which, having learned “to love the East in its past and to think about its future,” they might more fully invest their “creative energy [and] physical strength […] in order to awaken Turkestan and bring the region to the tempo of European life.”94 When Rizenkampf wrote these words in
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1921, one phase of imperial engineering in Turkestan had ended, but another era had just begun.
NOTES
1. Aleksandr Krivoshein, Zapiska Glavnoupravliaiushchego Zemleustroistvom i Zemledeliem o poezdke v Turkestanskii krai v 1912 g. [Report by the head of land organization and agriculture on the journey to Turkestan krai in 1912](Poltava, 1912), 30. 2. Vladislav Ivanovich Masal´skii, Turkestanskii krai [Turkestan Krai], vol. 19 of Rossiia, Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva [Russia, complete geographical description of our fatherland], ed. V.P. Tian‑Shanskii (SPb., 1913), vi ; I.S. Vasil´chikov, “Doklad sel ´skokhoziaistvennoi komissii po zakonoproektu polozheniia o pol´zovanii vodami v Turkestanskom General‑Gubernatorstve [Report of the agricultural committee on the draft statute on the use of water in the Turkestan Governor‑Generalship],” No. 116 (IV/4‑16), Prilozheniia k Stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, Chetvërtyi Sozyv, Sessiia Chetvërtaia, 1916 g. [Addenda to the state Duma records, fourth convocation, fourth session 1916], III (No. 88‑173) (SPb. : Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1916), 2 ; 15 ; 51‑52. 3. See, for example, Masal´skii, Turkestanskii krai, vi‑vii ; V.E. Nedzvytskii, ed., Pamiatnaia knizhka i adres‑kalendar´ Semirechenskoi oblasti na 1905‑i god [Agenda and directory for Semireche oblast´ for 1905] (Vernyi : Semirechenskoi Oblastnoi Statisticheskii Komitet, 1905), 186. 4. Unfortunately, biographical information on Russian engineers is difficult to find. Publications covering the graduates of technical institutes in Russia are scarce for the years 1905‑1917, as are memoirs (Harley Balzer, “The Engineering Profession in Tsarist Russia” in Russia’s Missing Middle Class : The Professions in Russian History, in Harley Balzer, ed. (Armonk, NY : M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 55‑88, here 76). For Russians as European colonizers, see Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865‑1923 (Indiana Univ. Press, 2007), and Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient : The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). 5. Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift : Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press, 2009). The disappearing Aral Sea is one of the most visible consequences of the development of a cotton monoculture in Central Asia under Russian and Soviet rule. 6. Alfred Rieber, “The Rise of Engineers in Russia,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 31, 4 (1990) : 539‑568, here 563. 7. Rieber, “The Rise of Engineers in Russia,” 539. 8. Up until the 1860s, the engineering profession had been almost entirely connected with state service (Balzer, “The Engineering Profession in Tsarist Russia,” 55‑56). 9. For more on the “technocrats,” see Peter Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’ : The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, 1 (Spring 2010) : 151‑179. 10. For the case of agriculture, see Katja Bruisch, “Contested Modernity : A.G. Doiarenko and the Trajectories of Agricultural Expertise in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Joris
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Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters, Kaat Wils, eds., Scientists’ Expertise as Performance Between State and Society, 1860‑1960 (London : Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 99‑114. 11. For more on the idea of “imperial careering” and its links to modernization and industrialization, see the introduction to David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives Across the British Empire : Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). 12. William Wood, “The Sariq Turkmens of Merv and the Khanate of Khiva in the Early Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Indiana, 1998), 3 ; Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (New York : Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 96. 13. E.R. Barts, Oroshenie v doline r. Murgaba i Murgabskoe Gosudarevo imenie [Irrigation in the Murghab river valley and the Imperial Murghab Estate] (SPb., 1910), Appendix One. 14. John Whitman, “Turkestan Cotton in Imperial Russia,” American Slavic and East European Review, 15, 2 (Apr., 1956) : 190‑205, here 195. By 1910 the Murghab Estate grew primarily cotton, and that only in small quantities (Barts, Oroshenie v doline r. Murgaba, 13, 15, 24). 15. Sergei Iulievich Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte (New York : M.E. Sharpe, 1990, trans. and ed. Sidney Harcave), 110 ; Sir Colin C. Scott‑Moncrieff, The Life of Sir Colin C. Scott‑Moncrieff, ed. Mary A. Hollings (London, 1917), 241. 16. Barts, Oroshenie v doline r. Murgaba, 39 ; Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, with Other Selected Papers, vol. 121 (London, 1895), 368. 17. “Irrigatsionnyi otdel na Turkestanskoi sel´sko‑khoziaistvennoi vystavke [The irrigation section at the Turkestan agricultural exhibition],” Turkestanskie vedomosti No. 200‑201 (1909) in Turkestanskii sbornik [Turkestan collection] (TS), 513 : 175‑8, here 178. 18. Count K.K. Pahlen, Mission to Turkestan : Being the Memoirs of Count K.K. Pahlen, 1908‑1909 (New York : Oxford Univ. Press, 1964, ed. Richard A. Pierce, trans. N.J. Couriss), 147. 19. Scott‑Moncrieff, The Life of Sir Colin C. Scott‑Moncrieff, 232 ; 242 ; 250. 20. Count Sergei Witte believed Poklewski‑Koziell had been exiled for his participation in the uprising (Witte, Memoirs of Count Witte, 110). For more on Poklewski‑Koziell’s career, see Mémoires de la Société des ingénieurs civils de France (1896), 13‑14 ; 147‑148. 21. I.P. Demidov, “Zakliuchenie finansovoi komissii (zasedanie 1 maia 1914 goda) [Conclusion of the Financial Committee (from the meeting 1 May 1914],” No. 116 (IV/4‑16), Prilozheniia k Stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, Chetvërtyi Sozyv, Sessiia Chetvërtaia, 1916 g., III (No. 88‑173) (SPb. : Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1916), 52. 22. Under Witte the creation of new industry‑oriented technical institutes doubled, from seven in 1895 to thirteen by 1902. Balzer, “The Engineering Profession in Tsarist Russia,” 59. 23. Article 256, Polozhenie ob upravlenii Turkestanskogo kraia, izd. 1892 g. [Statute for the administration of Turkestan Krai, 1892 ed.] (1886 ;1892). http://www.pereplet.ru/history/Russia/ Imperia/Alexandr_III/pol1892.html 24. Emphasis in the original. RGIA (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, Russian State Historical Archive), f. 426, Otdel zemel´nykh uluchshenii Ministerstva zemledeliia, op. 1, d. 19, N. Dingel´shtedt, “Doklad : Pol´zovanie vodoiu po obychaiu [Report : Use of water according to custom] (1887),” l. 34. 25. For debates over a water law for Turkestan, see George C. Guins, Professor and Government Official : Russia, China and California : An Interview Conducted by Boris Raymond, University of California Regional Oral History Archive (Berkeley : Bancroft Library, 1966) ; Vasil´chikov, “Doklad…po zakonoproektu polozheniia o pol´zovanii vodami…” For land as belonging to the person who irrigates it, see the discussion within the Cotton Committee, in Glavnoe Upravelenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledeliia, Departament zemledeliia, Trudy Khlopkovogo komiteta [Proceedings of the Cotton Committee], I (SPb., 1907), 20 ; 23‑24. 26. Cotton was mainly grown by smallholders, who were encouraged to plant American cotton by tax breaks and credit in advance of the harvest. The Russian government also kept American
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cotton prices artificially high ; by 1900 the protective tariff on imported cotton had increased to four rubles and fifteen kopecks per pood (16.38 kilograms) from one ruble fifteen kopecks in 1887. Ezhegodnik Glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledeliia po Departamentu zemledeliia i lesnomu departamentu (1907) [Yearbook of the main administration of land organization and agriculture for the departments of agriculture and forestry (1907)] (SPb., 1908) ; G.G. Lerkhe, “Doklad po zakonoproektu ob ustanovlenii osobogo sbora s khlopka, postupaiushchego iz predelov Sredenei Azii i Zakavkaz´ia na vnutrennyi rynok (Predstavlenie Glavnoupravliaiushchego Zemleustroistvom i Zemledeliem, ot 18 fevralia 1910 g., No. 139) [Report on the draft of a law pertaining to the establishment of a special levy on cotton reaching the domestic market from outside the borders of Central Asia and Transcaucasia (Presentation of the Head of Land Organization and Agriculture on 18 February, 1910, No. 139)]” in Gosudarstvennoe Duma, Prilozheniia k Stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, Tretyi Sozyv, Sessiia Piataia, 1911‑12 g., III (No. 351‑500) (SPb : Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1912), No. 414 (III/5‑1912). 27. By 1907 one‑third of Ferghana’s irrigated land was planted with cotton (Lerkhe, “Doklad po zakonoproektu ob ustanovlenii osobogo sbora s khlopka…,” 3). 28. See, for example, Iu.A. Shpilev, “Kratkaia zapiska o vozmozhnom rasshirenii khlopkovodstva v Turkestane i glavnym obrazom v Fergane, sostavlennaia Komissarom Ferganskoi Poz.‑pod. Komissii k.a. Iu. A. Shpilevym [Short report on the potential expansion of cotton agriculture in Turkestan and in particular in Ferghana, compiled by the Commissar of the Ferghana Land Tax Commission Iu.A. Shpilev],” Glavnoe Upravelenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledeliia, Departament zemledeliia, Trudy Khlopkovogo komiteta, I, 45‑51. For another argument for converting more arable land to cotton production in the Ferghana Valley, see Lerkhe, “Doklad po zakonoproektu ob ustanovlenii osobogo sbora s khlopka…,” 3. 29. Trudy Khlopkovogo komiteta, I, 29‑33. 30. Cited in Krivoshein, Zapiska Glavnoupravliaiushchego Zemleustroistvom i Zemledeliem, 6. 31. RGIA, f. 426, op. 1, d. 19, “Proekt pravil i perepiska s turkestanskim General‑Gubernatorom, s Departamentom obshchikh del, i drugimi uchrezhdeniiami ob otvode gosudarstvennykh zemel´ chastnym litsam i obshchestvam v Turkestanskom krae dlia orosheniia [Draft law and correspondence with the Turkestan Governor‑General, with the Department of Joint Activities, and other authorities on the allotment of state lands to private individuals and companies in Turkestan Krai for the purpose of irrigation]” l. 40ob. 32. N. Sinel´nikov, “Uporiadochenie vodnogo khoziaistva v sviazi s kolonizatsiei oroshaemykh ploshchadei [Normalization of water management in connection with the colonization of irrigated areas]” in TS, 496 : 89‑117, here 112 ; “Uporiadochenie irrigatsionnogo dela [Normalization of irrigation affairs] in TS, 510 : 122‑125, here 122. 33. A. K‑in, “K s´´ezdu gidrotekhnikov [Toward a congress of hydrotechnicians],” Sankt‑Peterburgskie vedomosti, no. 269 (1907) in TS, 450 : 116‑18, here 117. 34. Guins, Professor and Government Official, 67. 35. Cited in Muriel Joffe, “Autocracy, Capitalism and Empire : The Politics of Irrigation,” Russian Review, 54, 3 (July 1995) : 365‑388, here 370. 36. V.N. Zaitsov, “O pereselenii [On resettlement]” in TS, 434 : 51‑53. 37. 1 desiatina is 1.092 hectares. 38. K.A. Timaev, “Turkestanskii irrigatsionnyi otdel [Turkestan irrigation department],” Turkestanskii kur´er, 116 (1909) in TS, 508, 105‑8, here 105. 39. “Zhurnaly soveshchanii komissii, obrazovannoi pri Turkestanskom obshchestve sel´skogo khoziaistva po voprosu ob oroshenii chastnymi predprinimateliami zemel´ v Turkestanskom krae [Journals of the meetings of the commission established within the Turkestan Agricultural Society on the question of private individuals irrigating land in Turkestan Krai]” in TS, 454 : 145‑51.
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40. V. Al´bitskii, “Slabost´ gidrotekhnicheskikh znanii v Rossii i osnovnoi sposob eia ustraneniia” Novoe vremia, No. 11858 (1909) in TS, 502 : 108‑110. Twenty‑one years later, American hydraulic engineer Arthur P. Davis would note that although Soviet engineers were “well up on irrigation literature and theoretical matters generally…[they were] almost devoid of experience with modern irrigation and construction.” (Letter from Davis to A.J. Wiley [8 February 1930], Box 5, Folder 4, Arthur Powell Davis Collection [APD], circa 1865‑1974, Collection Number 01366, American Heritage Center, Univ. of Wyoming). 41. “Po povodu stat´i professor Al´bitskogo o nedostatke gidrotekhnikov v Rossii [Concerning the article by Professor Al´bitskii on the lack of hydrotechnicians in Russia],” Novoe vremia No. 11881 (1909) in TS, 507 : 143‑44. 42. G.K. Rizenkampf, Trans‑Kaspiiskii Kanal (Problema orosheniia Zakaspiia) [Trans‑Caspian Canal (problem of irrigating Transcaspia)] (M. : Vysshii Sovet Narodnogo Khoziaistvo, 1921), 48 ; F.P. Morgunenkov, “Sud´ba Aral´skogo moria [The Fate of the Aral Sea],” Vestnik Irrigatsii, 3‑4 (June‑July, 1923), 15 ; RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no‑politicheskoi istorii, Russian State Archive of Socio‑Political History), f. 62, Sredazbiuro, op. 2, d. 1289, “Sudebnyi protsess nad rabotnikami ‘Vodkhoza’ [Legal Proceedings Against the Workers of ‘Vodkhoz’]” (1928). 43. A.A. Tatishchev, Zemli i liudi : v gushche pereselencheskogo dvizheniia (1906‑21) [Lands and peoples : In the thick of the resettlement movement] (M. : Russkii Put´, 2001), 88. Rizenkampf’s two plans for model towns in the Hungry Steppe before and after the revolution can be found in RGIA, f. 432, Izyskatel´nye partii po sostavleniiu proektov orosheniia v Turkestane Otdela zemel ´nykh uluchshenii Ministerstva zemledelii, op. 1, d. 768a, “Plan i smety stroitel´stva tipovogo goroda Golodnostepska [Plan and estimates for the construction of a typical city Golodnostepska] (1918) and RGAE (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, Russian State Archive of the Economy), f. 4372, Gosplan, op. 27, Vodnoe khoziaistvo (1929‑31), d. 354, “Zakliuchenie chlena Vysshego technicheskogo soveta po skheme orosheniia Golodnoi stepi professora GK Rizenkompfa [sic] [Conclusion of a member of the highest technical council on the scheme of Professor Rizenkompf [sic] to irrigate the Hungry Steppe” (1929). 44. RGAE, f. 282, Kollektsiia dokumentov deiatelei melioratsii i gidrotekhniki, op. 1, d. 4b, Professor Georgii Konstantinovich Rizenkampf, l. 40‑45, here 40‑41. Thanks to Julia Obertreis for sharing her notes on this file. 45. V.A. Vasil´ev, Semirechenskaia oblast´ kak koloniia i rol´ v nei Chuiskoi doliny. Proekt orosheniia doliny reki Chu v Semirechenskoi oblasti [Semireche oblast´ as a colony and the role within it of the Chu Valley. Plan for the irrigation of the Valley of the River Chu in Semireche oblast´] (Petrograd, 1915) ; “Issledovanie Chuiskoi doliny [Investigations of the Chu Valley,” Semirechenskie oblastnye vedomosti, 231 (October 15, 1916), 2. See also TsGA RK (Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Kazakhstan, Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan), f. 19, Zaveduiushchii Pereselecheskim upravleniem Semirechenskoi oblasti, op. 1, d. 230, “Stat´i i zametki, podgotovlennye dlia opublikovaniia v periodicheskoi pechati, o rabote pereselencheskoi organizatsii i drugim voprosam [Articles and remarks prepared for publication in the periodical press on the work of the resettlement organization and other questions],” l. 22. 46. Leonid Korenev, “Voistinu, ‘net proroka v svoem otechestve’ [In truth, ‘no man is a prophet in his own land’]” (http://korenev.org/index.php/ru/ 2011‑04‑07‑13‑55‑37/2011‑04‑07‑14‑16‑28/114‑2012‑02‑13‑20‑30‑39, accessed 28 February, 2015). 47. RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 390, “Perepiska o komandirovanii inzhenera Vasil´eva za granits dlia oznakomlenii s meliorativnymi rabotami [Correspondence on sending engineer Vasil´ev abroad for acquaintance with reclamation works]” l. 1‑3, 15ob, 19‑20. 48. Trudy Khlopkovogo komiteta, I, 60 ; for more on the connections between British, Australian, and American engineers, see Jessica Teisch, Engineering Nature : Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (Chapel Hill : Univ. of North Carolina, 2011).
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49. S.I. Zubchaninov, “Doklad po zakonoproektu ob otpuske sredstv na usilenie gidrotekhnicheskikh izyskanii v Turkestane i Zakavkaz´e (Predstavlenie Glavnoupravliaushchego Zemleustroistvom i Zemledeliem, po Otdelu zemel´nykh uluchshenii, ot 6 fevralia 1912 g., za No. 1354) [Report on the draft law on the release of funds to boost hydrotechnical investigations in Turkestan and Transcaucasia (Presentation of the head of land organization and agriculture, department of land improvement, 6 February 1912, ref. No. 1354],” Gosudarstvennoe Duma, Prilozheniia k Stenograficheskim otchetam Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, Tretii Sozyv, Sessiia Piataia, 1911‑12 (No. 671‑861) (SPb : Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia,1912), No. 785 (III/5‑1912). 50. TsGA KR (Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kirgizskoi Respubliki, Central State Archive of the Kyrgyz Republic), f. I‑54, Nachal´nik rabot po orosheniiu doliny reki Chu Komiteta zemel ´nykh uluchshenii Ministerstva zemledeliia, op. 2, d. 122, “Katalog inostrannykh knig [Catalogue of foreign books],” l. 1‑7. 51. Rizenkampf, Trans‑Kaspiiskii Kanal, 27‑8. 52. The two volumes of Skorniakov’s Oroshenie i kolonizatsiia pustyn´ shtata Aidago v Severnoi Amerike na osnovanii zakona Keri (Carey Act) [Irrigation and colonization of the deserts of the state of Idaho in North America on the basis of the Carey Act] (1911) are now in the United States Library of Congress. 53. Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Univ. of Chicago, 2009), 3. 54. Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden : The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle : Univ. of Washington Press, 2000), 23. 55. G.K. Rizenkampf, Problemy orosheniia Turkestana [Problems of irrigating Turkestan] (M. : 1921), 5. 56. Randall Dills, “The River Neva and the Imperial Façade : Culture and Environment in Nineteenth Century St. Petersburg, Russia,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champaign, 2010), 80. 57. David Moon has written about Russian efforts to improve agriculture in the steppe regions within the context of the establishment of imperial power. As in Central Asia, improvement of steppe agriculture drew in part on America as a scientific and agricultural model and included (limited) experimentation with irrigation (The Plough that Broke the Steppes : Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700‑1914 [Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 2013]). 58. Teisch, Engineering Nature, 33. 59. Vasil´chikov, “Doklad…po zakonoproektu polozheniia o pol´zovanii …,” 16. 60. Vasil´chikov, “Doklad…po zakonoproektu polozheniia o pol´zovanii …,” 18. 61. RGAE, f. 320, E.E. Skorniakov. 62. Rizenkampf, Trans‑Kaspiiskii Kanal, 66. In 1907 German observer Willy Rickmer Rickmers also described the area between Turkestan’s Amu and Syr rivers as the “California of Russia” (“Impressions of the Duab (Russian Turkestan), read March 27, 1907,” Proceedings of the Central Asian Society [London, 1907], 7). See also Sinel´nikov, “Uporiadochenie vodnogo khoziaistva…,” 89‑90. America was also a model for Australian irrigation projects after 1880, when it began to replace references to European and British imperial engineering projects (Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods : Californian‑Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 [Berkeley, CA : Univ. of California Press, 1999],107 ; 121). 63. Teisch, Engineering Nature, 59. According to Teisch, “by the early twentieth century, California engineers were certainly among the most renowned water technicians in the world…” (ibid., 9). 64. Official Report on the 2nd International Irrigation Congress (Los Angeles, 1893), 57. 65. Arthur Hooker, ed., Official Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Irrigation Congress held at Spokane, Washington, U.S.A., August 9 to 14, 1909 (Spokane, WA : Shaw and Borden, 1909), 447.
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66. Skorniakov, Oroshenie i kolonizatsiia pustyn´ shtata Aidago, I, 6. For more on the Carey Act, see Robert E. Bonner, “Elwood Mead, Buffalo Bill Cody, & the Carey Act in Wyoming,” The Magazine of Western History, 55, 1 (Spring, 2005), 36‑51. 67. Vladimir V. Tsinzerling, Oroshenie na Amu‑Dar´e [Irrigation on the Amu‑Daria] (M. : Izdanie Upravlenie vodnogo khoziaistva Srednei Azii, 1927), English title page. 68. RGIA, f. 426, op. 5, d. 289, Lichnoe delo P.P. Veimarna [Personal file of P.P. Veimarn] ; RGIA, f. 426, op. 3, d. 165, “Perepiska s nachal´nikom rabot po izyskanii i sostanovleniiu proektov orosheniia v basseine r. Chu Semirechenskoi oblasti o proizvodstve rabot s prilozheniem spiskov lichnogo sostava [Correspondence with the head of investigations and creation of a plan to irrigate the Chu River basin in Semireche oblast´ on the execution of work with appendix of lists of labor force]” ; Arthur Hooker, ed., Official Proceedings of the Twenty‑First International Irrigation Congress held at Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 5‑9, 1914 (Ottawa : Government Printing Bureau, 1915), 250. 69. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). 70. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert : The American West and its Disappearing Water (New York : Penguin, 1993). 71. Official Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Irrigation Congress, 447. 72. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 107. 73. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 108. 74. “Turkvodkhoz na Vserossiiskoi sel´sko‑khoziaistvennyi i kustarno‑promyshlennoi vystavke [Turkvodkhoz at the All‑Russian agricultural and trade show],” Vestnik irrigatsii, 9 (December 1923), 118‑120 : 119 ; Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 112‑113. 75. Teisch, Engineering Nature, 9. 76. Vasilii Vladimirovich Barthold, K istorii orosheniia Turkestana (izdanie Otdela zemel´nykh uluchshenii Glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledeliia) [Toward a history of irrigation in Turkestan (publication of the department of land improvement of the main administration of land organization and agriculture)] (SPb., no pub. date), 3. 77. Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome : Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ohio Univ. Press, 2007). 78. A. Matisen, “Polozhenie i nuzhdy orosheniia v Turkestane [Conditions and needs of irrigation in Turkestan],” Ch. 12 in Ezhegodnik Otdela zemel´nykh uluchshenii, god pervyi (1909) [Yearbook of the department of land improvement, first year (1909)] (SPb. : G.U.Z.i.Z. O.Z.U., 1910), 274‑301 : 275‑76. 79. Trudy Khlopkovogo komiteta, I, 15. 80. RGIA, f. 426, op. 1, d. 804, “Perepiska po khodataistvu amerikanskogo finansista Dzhona Gammonda ob issledovanii zemel´ v Turkestane, s tsel´iu orosheniia [Correspondence concerning the petition of American financier John Hammond regarding investigating land in Turkestan with the goal of irrigation],” l. 5. 81. RGIA, f. 426, op. 1, d. 804, l. 81‑82 : 81. 82. RGIA, f. 426, op. 1, d. 804, l. 76‑76ob. 83. RGIA, f. 426, op. 1, d. 804, l. 90‑91, Letter from Dubasov to Masal´skii (8 April 1911). 84. Letter from Davis to Hammond (14 March 1912), Box 1, Folder 10, APD. 85. Letter from Davis to Hammond (24 May 1911), handwritten manuscript, 10 (Box 1, Folder 10, APD). 86. Ian Murray Matley, “The Golodnaya Steppe : A Russian Irrigation Venture in Central Asia,” Geographical Review, 60, 3 (July 1970) : 328‑346, here 336‑37. In her excellent article on the Moscow textile industrialists and irrigation (“Autocracy, Capitalism and Empire”), Muriel Joffe does not mention Hammond, but this interpretation supports her general conclusions.
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87. Hammond himself would suggest as much (“Speech on the Russian Passport Question at the Hungarian Republican Club, New York, December 5, 1911,” John Hays Hammond, Sr. Papers [MS 259], Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 11, Folder 1, 22‑31, here 24). 88. The failure in 1912 to renew the Russian‑American trade treaty of 1832 made the Russian desire for independence from expensive imports of American cotton even more urgent. On the treaty and cotton : F.A. Seleznëv, “Konflikt vokrug rastorzheniia Russko‑Amerikanskogo torgovogo dogovora i moskovskaia burzhuaziia (1911‑12 gg.) [Conflict around the annulment of the Russian‑American trade treaty and the Moscow bourgeoisie],” Vestnik Nizhegorodskogo universiteta im. N.I. Lobachevskogo, Seriia Istoriia, 1 (Nizhnyi Novgorod, 2002), 74‑82 ; on cotton and irrigation : Lerkhe, “Doklad po zakonoproektu ob ustanovlenii osobogo sbora s khlopka…,” 3‑5 ; on independence from American imports : ibid., 9‑10 ; Krivoshein, Zapiska Glavnoupravliaiushchego Zemleustroistvom i Zemledeliem, 6‑7 ; Masal´skii, Turkestanskii krai, vii. 89. Masal´skii, Turkestanskii krai, vii ; S. Poniatovskii, Opyt izucheniia khlopkovodstva v Turkestane i Zakaspiiskoi oblasti [Attempt to study cotton agriculture in Turkestan and the Transcaspian oblast´](SPb., 1913), 10. 90. See, for example, the discussions of the Main Administration’s Cotton Committee in 1907, Trudy Khlopkovogo komiteta, I, 12‑23. 91. “Kolonizatsiia Turkestana pri Grodekova [Colonization of Turkestan under Grodekov]” in TS, 417 : 146‑50. 92. This dilemma was discussed in 1907 by a commission of the Turkestan Agricultural Society on the question of irrigation by private capital (“Zhurnaly soveshchanii komissii obrazovannoi pri Turkestanskom obshchestve sel´skhogo khoziaistva…,” 145‑149). 93. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 103. 94. Rizenkampf, Problemy orosheniia Turkestana, 13, 5.
ABSTRACTS
This essay examines hydraulic engineers in Central Asia under tsarist rule and their participation in processes of agricultural expansion and empire-building in the imperial province of Turkestan. This province theoretically provided the perfect space in which Russians, who continually worried about their own “backwardness” in relation to Europe, could demonstrate their ability to be a colonial power on par with European empires, yet the lack of an understanding of irrigation engineering and the difficulties of irrigating arid regions threatened to jeopardize Russia’s efforts at a “civilizing mission.” Still, a growing group of Russian technical specialists was able to participate in scientific dialogue and transnational technological exchanges with other hydraulic engineers in other parts of the world who were similarly enthusiastic about the potential of science and technology to create a more modern future in the Russian Central Asian borderlands. Ultimately, however, even though the zeal of these Russian and foreign hydraulic experts coincided with Russian political ambitions in Turkestan, the political realities of the tsarist government’s position in the region would determine the fate of their grand visions for transformation.
Cet article étudie la participation des ingénieurs en hydraulique en Asie centrale à l’époque impériale dans les processus d’expansion agricole et de renforcement de l’empire dans la
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province du Turkestan. A priori, cette province rassemblait tous les critères pour que les Russes, qui déploraient constamment leur « retard » vis-à-vis de l’Europe, puissent y faire la preuve de leur capacité à être un pouvoir colonial au même titre que les empires européens, mais leur méconnaissance de l’ingénierie en irrigation et les difficultés à irriguer des régions arides menaçaient de compromettre les efforts de la Russie dans sa « mission civilisatrice ». Pourtant, on comptait toujours davantage de techniciens russes capables de participer au dialogue scientifique et aux échanges technologiques transnationaux avec les ingénieurs en hydraulique étrangers, eux-mêmes tout aussi enthousiastes sur le potentiel de la science et de la technologie à créer un avenir plus moderne en Asie centrale russe. Finalement, cependant, même si le zèle de ces Russes et des experts hydrauliques étrangers coïncidait avec les ambitions politiques russes au Turkestan, les réalités politiques de la position du gouvernement impérial dans la région déterminèrent le destin de leurs grandes visions transformatrices.
AUTHOR
MAYA K. PETERSON
University of California, Santa CruzHistory Department, [email protected]
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Privatiser l’agriculture en URSS Économistes réformistes et pouvoir politique pendant la perestroïka From collective to private farm: Economic experts and authorities during Perestroika
Olessia Kirtchik
NOTE DE L'AUTEUR
Cet article s’inscrit dans le cadre du programme de recherche fondamentale de l’université nationale de recherche « École des hautes études en sciences économiques » (Moscou) et a bénéficié du soutien financier du Russian Academic Excellence Project « 5-100 ».
1 La figure du fermer, exploitant agricole indépendant, émergea dans le discours économico‑politique et public soviétique au cours des dernières années de la perestroïka, dans le cadre du mouvement de réforme économique plus général qui marque cette période. L’image du paysan indépendant, persécuté par l’État pendant la collectivisation, redevint l’espoir des campagnes russes et l’un des symboles du mouvement réformateur démocrate. Cette innovation idéologique et sociale alla de pair avec la remise en question du modèle agricole soviétique dominé, depuis le Grand Tournant de 1929, par le dogme d’inspiration marxiste des avantages indiscutables de l’exploitation à grande échelle. L’importation de blé depuis les années 1970, la baisse de la productivité du travail dans les exploitations alors que les investissements centraux dans l’agriculture croissaient, et d’autres expressions d’une défaillance du secteur agroalimentaire constituaient le contexte dans lequel le sentiment d’urgence s’intensifia durant les années 1980 et conduisit en fin de compte à l’abandon du modèle de l’agriculture socialiste.
2 Parmi toutes les interprétations possibles des causes de la faible efficacité de l’agriculture soviétique, la révision énergique des dogmes au moment de la perestroïka s’est fondée sur un constat assez paradoxal de l’aliénation des travailleurs en URSS. L’incurie (beshozjajstvennost´) et le manque d’intérêt de la part des paysans vis‑à‑vis
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du travail dans les fermes et les entreprises d’État (« secteur socialisé ») étaient pensés comme le résultat des politiques staliniennes de collectivisation et de dépossession des paysans. Les politiques d’agrandissement des exploitations et la gestion bureaucratique centralisée avaient fini par transformer la nature des paysans, devenus simples exécutants1. Il fallait alors surtout « redonner un maître (hozjain) à la terre » et « changer la psychologie des travailleurs »2 de telle sorte qu’ils fussent intéressés à produire plus et mieux, à appliquer de nouvelles technologies et à utiliser les investissements de façon rationnelle3. Ainsi, ce n’était plus la « base matérielle », mais les relations de travail, et surtout les rapports de propriété, qui étaient la clef du perfectionnement du socialisme. L’homme était devenu la force motrice de l’économie : cette thèse du « facteur humain », d’apparence banale, mûrie au sein du milieu académique réformiste porté par la réforme de 1965, transforma les termes du débat sur le progrès agricole dans le cadre de la perestroïka4. 3 Comme dans les épisodes antérieurs de mutation politique, la science économique était censée jouer un rôle crucial dans le renouvellement de la mentalité gouvernementale soviétique5. Selon un appel lancé par Gorbačev au XXVIIe Congrès du parti en 1986, les économistes, ainsi que d’autres intellectuels, furent invités à « réviser la base théorique fournie par l’économie politique du socialisme » en vue de former une « mentalité économique moderne ». Des économistes académiques, de réputation réformiste, accédèrent alors à des postes d’experts chargés de la préparation de la réforme économique. Le milieu académique réformiste représentait aussi un réservoir de cadres et un appui important pour le mouvement intellectuel et politique dit informel pendant la perestroïka6. 4 Ce rôle, tout à fait particulier, des économistes dans la formulation et la diffusion des politiques de réforme économique que l’on peut observer en URSS, mais aussi dans d’autres pays socialistes, est conforme à une tendance globale qui dépassait les frontières des blocs politiques, en œuvre dans les dernières décennies du XXe siècle7. L’omniprésence des économistes comme conseillers du prince et faiseurs d’opinion reflète l’importance stratégique et politique de la sphère économique pour les États modernes et consacre la « supériorité » des économistes, fondée sur leur compétence technique, sur les représentants d’autres domaines des sciences sociales. Des évolutions conséquentes dans les modalités de l’élaboration des politiques que l’on critique souvent en termes de pouvoir des experts sont corollaires d’une certaine technocratisation et d’une diffusion de l’idéologie économique mettant l’accent sur les mécanismes autorégulés du marché à partir de la fin des années 1970. Le cas de la perestroïka soviétique, tout en s’inscrivant dans cette tendance, présente une certaine originalité due à l’existence d’une pensée réformiste et d’une tradition technocratique soviétiques distinctes. 5 Ainsi l’appel aux économistes lancé par M. Gorbačev s’inscrit dans une longue tradition russe et soviétique qui assigne une place d’honneur à des économistes, juristes, agronomes et autres spécialistes. Le gouvernement provisoire de 1917, dans un climat de forte incertitude liée à la guerre et aux événements révolutionnaires, en fut l’un des premiers moments forts. Par la suite, dans les années vingt, des spécialistes en sciences sociales, tels que les éminents économistes Aleksandr Čajanov et Nikolaj Kondrat´ev, employés tous deux au Narkomzem, furent associés au gouvernement8. Après une coupure induite par le Grand Tournant stalinien, la participation des intellectuels dans la sphère publique et politique devint plus systématique à partir du milieu des années
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1950. Les années qui suivirent la déstalinisation furent marquées par une institutionnalisation très active des sciences sociales, en premier lieu des sciences économiques, censées répondre en URSS aux besoins de rationalisation de la gestion et de compétition avec le système capitaliste. En conformité avec l’idéologie de la gestion scientifique, les économistes et autres scientifiques purent aspirer à un rôle plus actif dans les affaires publiques en constituant de fait le seul public, c’est‑à‑dire un groupe d’individus susceptibles de produire une opinion et d’être consultés comme tels par les autorités, dans une Union soviétique caractérisée par la faiblesse de sa société civile9. 6 Ainsi, pour comprendre comment la nouvelle image de la profession agricole a été forgée et légitimée vers la fin des années quatre‑vingt, je prends comme angle d’attaque la configuration et la jonction spécifiques du savoir et du pouvoir au cours des dernières années de l’histoire soviétique10. Pendant la période du socialisme mûr, la science académique était indissociable de la gestion du complexe agroalimentaire. Il existait à l’époque de multiples interfaces institutionnelles entre les deux. Des économistes académiques étaient systématiquement associés à la rédaction des discours politiques et des textes officiels (lois, programmes et autres), ils occupaient des postes de consultants et de conseillers auprès de divers départements du Comité central du PCUS, du Gosplan, du ministère de l’Agriculture et autres. Une autre pratique courante, observée tout au long de l’époque soviétique, consistait à envoyer des « notes (zapiski) », sur demande ou pas, aux instances du pouvoir afin de proposer des analyses et des idées. Cette forte complicité s’exprime dans de nombreux cas de carrière mixte (Académie des sciences et haute administration) et des passages entre ces différents milieux parmi les experts en économie agricole. L’existence de ce système techno‑politique englobant peut éclairer la présence et le rôle des économistes agraires pendant la perestroïka. Les années 1989 et 1990 en particulier représentent la grande époque des académiciens. 7 Cependant, la perestroïka se distingue des périodes précédentes en ce que la dernière réforme agraire soviétique fut élaborée et mise en place dans le contexte de changements dramatiques du système politique et économique. Les instances d’expertise, les formes de sa mobilisation dans l’action gouvernementale et publique et les critères de légitimité des experts étaient mouvants. La démocratisation politique et le passage à l’économie de marché, enfin les processus qui ont abouti à la dissolution de l’URSS, ont sans aucun doute déterminé les modalités de la préparation et de la mise en place de cette réforme. Celle‑ci fut compliquée par la présence massive d’une contre‑expertise défavorable au passage intégral et rapide à l’économie de marché. L’absence de consensus sur cette question est une autre particularité du cas soviétique par rapport à la plupart des pays de l’ex‑bloc socialiste de l’Europe de l’Est ou, par exemple, de l’Amérique latine dont les experts libéraux, à peu près pendant la même période, réussirent à acquérir et à maintenir un quasi‑monopole de l’expression politico‑médiatique. 8 Sans prétendre restituer la totalité des acteurs et des aspects de ce processus complexe, j’analyse, dans ce qui suit, la place des économistes, experts auprès des instances du pouvoir, dans la conception de la réforme agraire dans les dernières années de l’existence de l’URSS. Comment le système d’expertise académique en matière d’économie et de politique agraire fonctionnait‑il ? Comment a‑t‑il évolué au cours de la période étudiée ? Qui étaient les économistes qui entrèrent sur la scène publique et politique pour porter la perestroïka à son apogée (et quelles étaient les origines des
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vues réformistes) ? En quoi leur participation au processus de réforme consistait‑elle concrètement ? Enfin, quelles étaient les positions des économistes du courant dit réformiste et de leurs concurrents « conservateurs » , dans le milieu académique, professionnel et politique ? 9 La première caractéristique de cette réforme, que j’aimerais mettre en lumière, est l’omniprésence des économistes agricoles. On les trouve experts auprès du pouvoir et de très hauts fonctionnaires, acteurs politiques parmi les députés du peuple, initiateurs et auteurs de lois, mais aussi porte parole des réformes du monde rural en tant que leaders d’associations professionnelles et auteurs d’articles de vulgarisation et de propagande en faveur de la libéralisation du secteur agricole. La seconde caractéristique est l’extrême polarisation et la politisation du débat sur la réforme agraire, surtout pendant les deux dernières années de l’URSS. Si les premières années de la perestroïka furent marquées par un consensus fragile sur la renaissance du hozjain, les opinions se polarisèrent et les positions se différencièrent sur les moyens de « redonner un maître à la terre » à mesure que s’approfondissait la crise politique et économique. Le spectre très large de solutions proposées par les experts « réformateurs » et « conservateurs » se déployait dans une pluralité d’arènes et de centres de décision. 10 Cette analyse s’appuie sur une enquête menée par entretiens avec des économistes agricoles, experts très visibles pendant la période des réformes, sur un dépouillement systématique des numéros des principales revues d’économie agricole et d’économie politique soviétiques parus dans les années 1989‑1991, et sur une étude approfondie des textes de lois, de programmes, de discours politiques et des transcriptions de débats parlementaires et autres matériaux liés à la conduite de la réforme agraire et foncière en URSS et dans la RSFSR11.
L’évolution de la doctrine agraire de la perestroïka : sources, acteurs et lieux
11 Le terme « d’exploitation paysanne » apparut dans le discours officiel soviétique pour la première fois dans le cadre de la doctrine de la « pluralité des formes d’exploitation » énoncée en 1989, année de transformations politiques importantes et du lancement de la « réforme radicale » en URSS. Celle‑ci reprenait certaines idées de la réforme économique de A. Kosygin, notamment celles de l’autonomie comptable et de la décentralisation, mais elle allait plus loin, annonçant la désétatisation de la propriété et, sinon la décollectivisation partielle, du moins la reconnaissance d’autres formes d’exploitation que les kolkhozes et les sovkhozes, y compris les fermes individuelles et familiales.
12 Comme je le montre dans cette section, cette conception est le produit du travail doctrinal mené dans l’espace relativement clos de la politique agricole composé d’instances gouvernementales et d’expertise académique. La collusion était si forte qu’il est souvent difficile de distinguer clairement les discours politico‑administratifs des discours scientifiques. Le capital symbolique et administratif des experts académiques réformistes en matière agricole leur permit cependant de multiplier les rôles institutionnels et de se dissocier de la position officielle au moment de l’ouverture politique.
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La lune de miel entre la science académique et le parti
13 L’Académie Lenin des sciences agraires (VASHNIL) était l’institution principale d’expertise en matière d’économie agraire et de gestion du complexe agro‑industriel. Un réseau d’instituts de recherche spécialisés fut créé en son sein à partir du milieu des années 1950. Ce renouvellement comblait le vide des années 1930 et 1940, conséquence du Grand Tournant de 1929. La déstalinisation conduisit à une véritable résurrection institutionnelle de l’économie agraire avec, notamment, la création du Département de l’économie et de l’organisation de la production agricole au sein de VASHNIL en 1956. Ses membres étaient représentés dans toutes les instances de décision et de gestion de l’agriculture et étaient associés à l’élaboration de toutes les décisions.
14 L’alliance du pouvoir suprême politique et académique du temps de la perestroïka est symbolisée par le tandem Mihail Gorbačev ‑ Aleksandr Nikonov, le dernier président de VASHNIL. Les deux hommes s’étaient connus à Stavropol´, où l’un était premier secrétaire du Comité régional du PCUS et l’autre directeur de l’Institut agraire. Après le transfert de M. Gorbačev à Moscou en 1978, la carrière de A. Nikonov prit un envol peu commun : il fut élu académicien secrétaire de la Section d’économie et d’organisation de la production agricole, puis premier vice‑président et finalement président de VASHNIL12. Depuis Stavropol´ et jusqu’à la dissolution de l’URSS, A. Nikonov a toujours travaillé en étroit contact avec M. Gorbačev et fut le principal expert de la réforme agraire. Il fut nommé président adjoint pour la science du Comité d’État agro‑industriel de l’URSS (Gosagroprom), puis responsable du secteur agricole dans la Commission pour le perfectionnement du fonctionnement économique près le gouvernement de l’URSS. 15 A. Nikonov dirigea formellement les travaux sur la doctrine de la réforme agraire menés, sous M. Gorbačev, essentiellement au sein du Présidium de VASHNIL. En 1985, il remplaça Vladimir Miloserdov13 en qualité de conseiller principal de M. Gorbačev pour les questions agraires, chargé de rédiger ses rapports, des discours, des articles et des notes de mémoire. De jeunes chercheurs, tels Evgenija Serova, Sergej Kiselev, Aleksandr Petrikov (tous avaient la trentaine), proches collaborateurs de A. Nikonov au Présidium de l’Académie, se souviennent notamment d’avoir travaillé sur l’application des idées de la Nouvelle Politique économique (NEP) à la réforme agraire de M. Gorbačev14. La réhabilitation d’Aleksandr Čajanov en 1987 et la réédition de ses travaux en 1988 dans le cadre des festivités liées au centenaire de sa naissance, toujours sous les auspices de l’Académie, symbolisaient la négation des politiques agricoles staliniennes et poststaliniennes, alors que la référence à la NEP fournissait un cadre idéologique à la réforme agraire. 16 Les propositions pour la réforme agraire, soumises par des économistes académiques de courant réformiste, allaient dans le sens de la décollectivisation partielle et de la décentralisation de la gestion dans le but de stimuler l’initiative et l’intérêt des travailleurs, conformément au slogan qui invitait à mettre le « facteur humain » en avant. De nouvelles formes organisationnelles — telles que les « brigades », petits groupes de travailleurs (brigadnyj, zven´evoj podrjad) et familles paysannes (semejnyj podrjad) sous contrat avec leur entreprise mère —devinrent la principale solution dans la pensée réformiste. Dans les documents officiels de l’époque, le podrjad et le hozraščet sont évoqués comme des « facteurs parmi les plus importants pour
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augmenter l’efficacité de la production ». Ces termes ne sont pas apparus pendant la perestroïka, ils ont connu un long cheminement au cours de l’histoire soviétique. Toutefois ils sont entrés dans le discours politique et sont devenus un sujet privilégié de recherche académique après l’adoption en 1982 du Programme alimentaire de l’URSS, premier fruit du tandem M. Gorbačev – A. Nikonov dans la politique agraire au niveau soviétique. 17 Dans les années 1986‑1987, des chercheurs menèrent de nombreuses expérimentations au niveau de l’entreprise et de la région (naturellement avec l’aval des pouvoirs) afin de prouver que « l’autonomie opérationnelle », c’est‑à‑dire une plus grande marge de manœuvre dans la gestion, garantissait une plus grande efficacité du travail dans les exploitations. Parmi les expérimentations les plus connues, citons les travaux des chercheurs de VASHNIL dans l’oblast´ de Pskov, dans la région d’Orel (avec le concours du premier secrétaire de l’obkom, Egor Stroev), et des collectifs de travail intensif conçus et testés par la filiale sibérienne de VASHNIL. Des formes de contrat individuel ou familial furent expérimentées à côté des contrats collectifs. En 1986‑1987, des exploitations paysannes furent créées avec le concours du ministère de l’Agriculture15. A. Nikonov synthétisa les résultats de ces diverses expériences dans une note adressée en 1986 au Comité central, intitulée « Mesures pour augmenter la productivité du travail dans l’agriculture par voie d’implantation de formes rationnelles d’organisation et de l’autonomie comptable »16. 18 Les différentes formes de contrats collectifs et individuels — permettant à des kolkhoziens et autres citoyens de louer une parcelle de terre et des moyens de production à une entreprise collective — furent en effet popularisées par Mihail Gorbačev à partir de 1988 comme l’une des principales solutions au problème du ravitaillement. Le 13 mai 1988, lors d’une rencontre avec des spécialistes, des élites agraires locales, des directeurs et des collectifs d’entreprises agricoles, il déclara notamment : Nous misons sur l’homme, sur son intérêt, son autonomie, son initiative, sa responsabilité […] et sur sa position de citoyen. Ceci se réalise le mieux dans les différentes formes de contrat collectif, surtout le contrat de bail (arenda) […] Le bail affirme les nouveaux rapports économiques. […] il contribue à la renaissance du hozjain, ouvre la voie la plus sûre à la solution du problème de l’approvisionnement.17 19 Le 15 mars 1989, M. Gorbačev annonça officiellement au Plénum du Comité central une nouvelle politique agraire qui misait sur la « pluralité des formes d’exploitation ». En premier lieu, la création de nouvelles formes d’exploitation devait rénover le droit de propriété socialiste. Tout en mentionnant les formes d’exploitation individuelles et familiales, le plénum recommanda le bail collectif à l’intérieur de l’entreprise comme le meilleur moyen pour « redonner un maître à la terre ». Le contrat de bail offrait l’avantage de distinguer clairement le droit de propriété du droit d’usage. L’économie agricole auxiliaire (lopins personnels des membres de kolkhozes et de sovkhozes et d’autres citoyens, datchas, et autres), tantôt encouragée, tantôt opprimée depuis l’époque de la collectivisation, bénéficia elle aussi d’une certaine libéralisation. La vision du lopin personnel comme vestige de l’économie paysanne non socialisée en voie de disparition persista dans les travaux des économistes soviétiques tout au long de l’époque soviétique. Il fallut attendre le début des années 1980 pour que l’économie agricole auxiliaire devînt un objet légitime de la politique et de la théorie agraire, mais
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seulement comme complément à la production de l’économie agricole socialisée à grande échelle18.
20 Aleksandr Nikonov et ses proches collaborateurs conservèrent leur position d’experts en économie et en politique agraire auprès de M. Gorbačev jusqu’à la dissolution de l’URSS et dans la période des réformes russes. A. Nikonov et son équipe d’économistes agraires, ainsi que d’autres membres de VASHNIL de réputation réformiste (les « marchandistes »), formaient un cercle très restreint d’experts qui occupèrent des postes d’importance dans différentes instances de politique agraire (commissions d’État, du comité central et du parlement, groupes de travail sur les lois et les programmes gouvernementaux) dans les années 1989‑1991. Les formes et les arènes de leur intervention se multiplièrent pourtant avec la complexification du système politique et l’accroissement du nombre des centres du pouvoir.
Les experts économiques au Parlement : le lancement de la réforme foncière
21 La formule de la « pluralité des formes d’exploitation », issue de la mobilisation des économistes agraires en quête de nouvelles formes d’organisation de l’agriculture faisant plus de place à l’autonomie des travailleurs, était de caractère délibérément consensuel. Cependant, les tensions étaient déjà palpables entre les élites agraires traditionnelles et les acteurs économiques qui aspiraient à une plus grande autonomie, entre les factions conservatrices et progressistes de l’élite politique et académique. Cette fracture se creusa avec la transformation radicale du système de gestion du complexe agro‑industriel soviétique et l’apparition de nouvelles instances du pouvoir à partir de 1989.
22 En premier lieu, Gosagroprom, le méga‑ministère créé en 1985 par la fusion de six ministères spécialisés dans l’agroalimentaire pour unifier et intégrer verticalement la gestion du complexe agro‑industriel, fut supprimé. Augmenté du Conseil scientifique et technique dirigé par le Président de VASHNIL, Gosagroprom représentait l’apogée du technocratisme soviétique et symbolisait la symbiose de la science académique avec la fonction publique19. M. Gorbačev le remplaça par la Commission d’État pour l’alimentation et l’approvisionnement auprès du Conseil des ministres. Des arrêtés du gouvernement adoptés à la suite du Plénum du 15 mars 1989 introduisirent de nouveaux dispositifs pour les commandes d’État : les normes et les contrats de livraison remplaçaient les plans directifs. Ces changements reflétaient la réorientation du gouvernement vers la « démocratisation », la « décentralisation » et la « dépolitisation » de son action. 23 La radicalisation du débat sur la réforme agraire (et la réforme économique en général) est liée à l’apparition d’un nouveau centre de décision et de débat, le premier Congrès des députés du peuple de l’URSS (qui siégea du 25 mai au 9 juin 1989). Parmi les députés, de nombreux représentants des cercles radicaux « démocrates » utilisaient le Congrès comme une tribune pour promouvoir leurs opinions. L’aile libérale du Congrès était constituée par le « groupe parlementaire interrégional » (Saharov, Elcin, etc.) qui prônait une réforme politique et économique plus « radicale ». Grâce au nouveau système électoral, de nombreux économistes de tendance pro‑marché furent élus ou nommés députés : Leonid Abalkin, Gavriil Popov, Gennadij Lisičkin, Tat´jana
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Zaslavskaja (en tant que représentante de l’Association sociologique de l’URSS), de même les économistes agraires Vladimir Tihonov, Aleksandr Nikonov, Boljus Poškus (ils représentaient l’Académie des sciences agricoles Lenin qui avait droit à onze sièges), Aleksej Emel´janov (de l’université d’État de Moscou), et d’autres. 24 Les démocrates, pour la majeure partie des intellectuels et notamment des économistes, préconisaient une refonte profonde du système économique qui seule, selon eux, permettrait d’échapper à l’« abîme » au bord duquel se trouvait alors l’URSS. L’arrêté adopté par le Congrès posait l’objectif de passer à un « nouveau modèle économique », ce qui impliquait une transformation radicale des rapports de propriété : un véritable marché socialiste. L’exigence de l’affranchissement de l’État de ses fonctions d’intervention dans la gestion des unités économiques radicalisa les principales orientations de la perestroïka. L’arrêté chargeait notamment le Soviet suprême de « renouveler substantiellement la législation foncière » en vue de « développer, à côté des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes, des formes d’exploitation variées : des firmes agricoles, des coopératives, des collectifs bailleurs, des exploitations paysannes ; de créer des conditions pour leur compétition d’égal à égal »20, conformément au mot d’ordre de la pluralité des formes d’exploitation énoncé lors du Plénum de mars 1989. Pour la première fois depuis le début de la perestroïka, la réforme foncière devenait une priorité politique du pays et les formes d’appropriation de la terre furent explicitement placées au cœur de la réflexion sur l’agriculture. Les députés les plus radicaux, à l’instar de l’économiste Gavriil Popov qui devint peu après le premier maire de Moscou démocratiquement élu, prônaient d’ores et déjà le démantèlement des exploitations collectives et la distribution de la terre aux paysans. 25 Avec le lancement de la réforme politique en URSS, l’initiative législative dans le domaine de la réforme agraire passa sous la compétence du Soviet suprême et, plus spécifiquement, du Comité pour les questions agraires et d’approvisionnement formé en son sein en 1989. Pourtant, ce nouveau lieu de décision représentait un nouvel avatar de l’ancien tandem techno‑politique. Le Comité présidé par Arkadij Veprev (1927‑2006), agronome et directeur du sovkhoze « Nazarovskij » réputé « progressiste », comptait parmi ses membres des directeurs d’exploitations collectives et aussi plusieurs membres de l’Académie des sciences agricoles. Un économiste agraire de renom Aleksej Emel´janov, professeur de l’université de Moscou et membre de l’Académie des sciences de l’URSS, fut élu adjoint du président. La coordination des activités d’un groupe de travail sur la nouvelle loi foncière et d’un sous‑comité pour le foncier et les formes d’exploitation du Soviet suprême créé à cette occasion, fut confiée à… Aleksandr Nikonov, toujours président de VASHNIL. À part quelques juristes, le noyau de ce groupe était composé de jeunes économistes, de ses proches collaborateurs à l’Académie des sciences agricoles, Sergej Kiselev, Evgenija Serova, Aleksandr Petrikov, et de la professeure El´mira Krylatyh, présidente du Conseil pour les problèmes de l’APK près le Présidium de VASHNIL. Des députés membres de VASHNIL, Bolius Poškus et Vladimir Tihonov, participèrent également à ces travaux. La quasi totalité de ce groupe, assez restreint, d’experts entra dans le nouvel Institut agraire, créé à la fin de 1990 sous la direction de A. Nikonov, avec pour objectif d’« assurer des bases scientifiques à la réforme agraire ». 26 Le projet des « Bases de la législation foncière de l’URSS et des républiques » fut adopté par le Soviet suprême le 28 février 1990 après de très vigoureux débats. En premier lieu, la loi déclarait que la terre était dorénavant le patrimoine des populations vivant sur
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un territoire donné, et accordait le droit de disposer de la terre aux soviets locaux. Ceci signifiait effectivement la suppression du monopole de l’État soviétique sur la propriété foncière. En second lieu, la loi déclarait le droit des citoyens soviétiques de posséder de la terre. Conformément aux « Bases de la législation foncière… », les citoyens pouvaient obtenir des terrains à titre d’usage perpétuel, de bail payant, ou de possession à vie transmissible pour les besoins de l’exploitation paysanne, de l’économie auxiliaire, de la construction de l’habitat, du jardinage et de l’élevage. 27 Le titre de possession à vie transmissible permettait de disposer d’un terrain sans possibilité de vente ni d’hypothèque, mais avec le droit de le léguer à ses descendants. Résultat d’un compromis politique et euphémisme inventé par les auteurs de la loi pour ne pas utiliser le terme de propriété privée qui restait encore tabou21, ce titre était cependant considéré par ses auteurs comme un progrès par rapport au contrat de bail (arenda) laissant le fermier dépendant de l’arbitraire du bailleur (un kolkhoze ou un sovkhoze). Pour stimuler le passage des terrains à la propriété paysanne, les auteurs du projet de loi proposèrent de faire sujet de la propriété terrienne non pas le kolkhoze mais le kolkhozien en tant que citoyen de l’URSS doté du droit individuel de possession de la terre. Le fonds foncier d’un kolkhoze serait ainsi divisé en lots (zemel´naja dolja) appartenant à ses membres. Par là même le kolkhoze, selon les auteurs, se muerait en une coopérative réelle où chaque kolkhozien serait libre de rester dans le kolkhoze ou de le quitter avec son lot. Toutefois le Congrès rejeta cette disposition, mais elle fut reprise dans les lois de la RSFSR sur la réforme agraire adoptée en novembre 199022. 28 La majorité des députés témoignaient en effet de positions plus conservatrices que le gouvernement et ses experts économistes sur la réforme agraire. Ainsi, les députés agrariens (qui représentaient une force considérable avec 417 députés) refusaient la réforme foncière, cœur de la réforme agraire. Ils défendaient la « ligne traditionnelle » de l’élite agrarienne, qui réclamait l’accroissement continu des investissements dans l’agriculture et l’augmentation des prix de gros d’achat des produits agricoles. Ils agrémentaient ces demandes, conformément à l’air du temps, de l’exigence d’une plus grande autonomie des producteurs agricoles et d’une diminution de la commande d’État (goszakaz)23. Le même conflit se répéta lors du IIe Congrès (extraordinaire) des députés du peuple de la RSFSR (27 novembre – 15 décembre 1990) qui remit en cause la légitimité des lois adoptées par le Soviet suprême de la RSFSR. Les fractions parlementaires « Communistes de Russie » et les agrariens (notamment Starodubcev, président de l’Union agraire de Russie) se prononcèrent fermement contre la propriété privée. Ils réussirent notamment à imposer un moratoire de dix ans sur la vente libre des terrains et la création d’un marché foncier en Russie.
L’institutionnalisation du mouvement des fermiers indépendants – AKKOR24
29 La discussion sur la réforme foncière initiée par le Congrès des députés du peuple de l’URSS devint l’occasion d’une véritable campagne d’opinion en faveur des formes individuelles d’appropriation foncière et favorisa l’institutionnalisation du mouvement des exploitants indépendants. Les économistes académiques jouèrent un rôle clef dans la promotion de ce mouvement. Ils devinrent son principal porte‑parole au parlement, dans les médias et les principaux acteurs de son institutionnalisation.24
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30 Les premiers exploitants indépendants, connus d’abord comme « coopérateurs » (kooperatory) et « bailleurs » (arendatory), apparurent en URSS pendant la perestroïka par suite des expérimentations économiques évoquées plus haut. La « loi sur la coopération en URSS » (n° 8998‑XI du 26 mai 1988) légalisa leur activité. Elle accordait aux entreprises agricoles collectives et publiques le droit d’affecter des terrains à ses membres ou à des groupes sous contrat, de louer des bâtiments et des constructions, des machines, des équipements, même de vendre des chevaux et des mini‑machines agricoles destinés aux lopins individuels, et de réaliser des travaux sous contrat. Ainsi, vers 1989, ils étaient quelques centaines d’exploitants individuels ou de fermiers semi‑indépendants à travailler sous contrat avec des kolkhozes. 31 L’idée de créer une association des exploitations paysannes pour soutenir cette nouvelle forme d’exploitation était, à l’instar d’autres initiatives, issue de l’alliance du pouvoir politique et de la science académique représentée cette fois par Vladimir Bašmačnikov, expert en économie agraire au Comité central du PCUS25, et Vladimir Tihonov, promoteur fervent de l’exploitation paysanne et président de l’Association des coopérateurs (non agricoles) de l’URSS26. C’est ce dernier, auteur de nombreux articles pour la réforme agraire radicale dans la presse générale, qui fut le véritable moteur de cette initiative. D’après Bašmačnikov, élu président de l’Association, […] à cette époque, il y avait beaucoup d’articles, de débats, d’émissions télévisées au sujet de cette nouvelle forme, privée, coopérative, non kolkhozienne. Lors d’une émission à la télé où étaient invités des coopérateurs et des fermiers […] ils ont commencé à expliquer que l’on manquait de lois, de crédits, etc. […] Deux ou trois semaines après cette émission, je reçois un appel téléphonique de Tihonov, mon directeur de thèse, compagnon de lutte, camarade aîné […] : « Vladimir, tu as entendu parler de cette idée de la création d’une union ou d’une association ? » Il m’a contacté en tant que camarade qui partageait à cent pour cent ses idées, mais aussi en tant qu’homme du bureau (kontora) central, nom informel du Comité central du parti.27 32 L’idée de créer une association était alors soutenue par le département économique du Comité central (notamment, par son directeur adjoint, membre de VASHNIL Vladimir Možin). Ainsi, le 13 juin 1989, le journal Izvestija publia une lettre ouverte qui préconisait la création d’une association d’exploitations paysannes. Les signataires — les académiciens et députés économistes agraires Tihonov, Emel´janov, Bašmačnikov, et quelques autres chercheurs et directeurs de coopératives —, écrivaient : La reconnaissance des exploitations paysannes et des coopératives en tant que producteurs agricoles a enfin eu lieu. Le plénum de mars 1989 a déclaré l’égalité de ces formes de production avec les kolkhozes et les sovkhozes […] Cependant, dans la pratique, la création d’exploitations paysannes rencontre des difficultés importantes. […] L’expérience du peu d’exploitations paysannes qui ont, malgré tout, réussi à commencer leur activité montre que chacune d’elles a besoin d’un soutien juridique et social […] Elles ne sont pas capables de résoudre ces problèmes toutes seules.28 33 Un mois après la publication de la lettre, l’Association des exploitations paysannes et des coopératives agricole de Russie (AKKOR) était fondée, et le premier congrès des exploitants indépendants se tint en janvier 1990. Plus tard, un réseau d’associations régionales fut créé sous l’égide d’AKKOR ou comme organisations indépendantes. Il est à noter que, souvent, ce furent des économistes qui devinrent présidents de ces associations. À titre d’exemple, Rudol´f Praust, directeur de la filiale Pytalovskiy (région natale d’Aleksandr Nikonov) de l’Institut agraire de VASHNIL où, en 1986,
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naquirent les premières fermes familiales, fut président de l’union locale des exploitations paysannes. Par la suite, d’autres organisations de fermiers et d’entrepreneurs agricoles virent le jour (le Parti paysan libéral fondé par l’écrivain Jurij Černičenko, l’Union paysanne de Moscou, etc.). Cependant, AKKOR conserva le rôle de principal médiateur entre les fermiers, leurs associations locales ou régionales et les organes du pouvoir central, le parlement et le ministère de l’Agriculture russe. Dans ce sens, le modèle technocratique de la gestion du complexe agro‑industriel postsoviétique représente une certaine continuité avec le modèle du socialisme mûr.
34 À la même époque, une série de publications dans la « presse démocrate » participa à la promotion d’une nouvelle image de l’agriculteur dans le cadre d’une campagne d’opinion organisée. Ainsi, à la veille de la conférence, les Izvestija publièrent, sous le titre « Les âmes vives », une série d’articles d’A. Puškar´ consacrés au phénomène des nouveaux fermers. Le journaliste citait une lettre adressée à la rédaction par un paysan, V. Lebedev : Je ne veux plus être tâcheron, mais [je veux] recevoir de la terre en possession, même sans droit de la vendre. Rien d’autre ne me donnera l’assurance que mes enfants et petits‑enfants auront leur point d’appui dans la vie et en tirait la conclusion suivante : Voyez‑vous, cher lecteur, les miracles qui se produisent sous nos yeux sous l’effet de la perestroïka. On a pillé, humilié, tué le mužik, pourtant l’âme paysanne s’est réveillée, comme une abeille après un long hiver.29 35 À la même époque, le documentaire Le Mužik d’Arhangel´sk, interdit pour des raisons idéologiques quelques années plus tôt, fit grand bruit30. Il narrait l’histoire de Nikolaj Sivkov, créateur d’une ferme d’élevage indépendant dès 1984 et symbole du mouvement démocrate en sa qualité de « premier fermer russe ». Le lexique empruntait tant au passé (le kulak éliminé pendant la collectivisation) qu’à l’Occident (le farmer américain). Il est notable que les termes russes « hozjain », « fermer » et « kulak » sont souvent employés ensemble dans ce discours31.
36 Des journalistes économiques favorables aux réformes radicales reprirent la campagne en faveur de la réhabilitation de la classe des paysans propriétaires ; de même la principale revue de théorie économique, Voprosy ekonomiki, plaça trois articles sur l’histoire des réformes de Stolypin dans le numéro 10 de l’année 1990. Dans les médias, la formule magique de Gorbačev, « pluralité des formes d’exploitation », fut remplacée par une autre formule magique, « les fermers vont nourrir le pays », attribuée, à tort ou à raison, au Premier ministre de la RSFSR, Ivan Silaev. Le changement de slogan n’avait rien d’anodin. La NEP n’était plus un modèle à imiter, c’était la référence aux réformes de Pëtr Stolypin32 qui était à l’ordre du jour des débats sur la légalité de la propriété privée de la terre et sur l’agriculture individualiste, comme au début du siècle.
Les experts agraires dans l’espace académique et politique
37 L’an 1990, au cours duquel s’élaborèrent plusieurs programmes macroéconomiques du passage à l’économie de marché, marqua une ligne de partage dans la conduite de la réforme agraire. Le gouvernement et le Soviet suprême de la RSFSR prirent l’initiative dans la conduite de la réforme et occupèrent systématiquement des positions plus radicales que les autorités soviétiques (phénomène alors baptisé de « guerre des lois »
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dans les médias). L’introduction de la propriété privée et la promotion de l’agriculture individuelle devinrent l’élément essentiel du passage aux rapports de marché dans les campagnes de la RSFSR et de la mise en place du programme de réformes économiques de E. Gajdar. Le consensus fragile à propos de la « pluralité des formes d’exploitation » et de la « recréation de maîtres à la terre », discours dominant de la perestroïka, fut par là brisé. La polarisation des prises de position se produisit au moment de la crise, qui agit comme un révélateur de divisions latentes33.
38 Si, avant 1990, l’Académie des sciences agricoles et l’appareil de l’État représentaient un espace de discours et d’expertise plus ou moins unifié et continu, le débat entamé dans la presse démocrate et le bouillonnement politique parlementaire qui se prolongeait dans les pages des périodiques spécialisés en économie et politique agraire contribuèrent à une cristallisation de positions incompatibles et antagonistes. La politisation produite par la crise économique et politique divisa l’espace de l’économie et de la politique agraire en camps clairement distincts. On peut répartir ces prises de position en deux groupes : réformiste et conservateur, avec leurs versions radicales et modérées. Les questions qui différenciaient le plus les positions réformistes des conservatrices étaient celles de la propriété privée et de la réorganisation des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes.
Les positions académiques réformistes : l’Institut agraire de A. Nikonov et le gouvernement de réforme
39 Le pôle réformateur au sein de l’Académie des sciences agricoles, autrement dominée par les orientations « conservatrices », est représenté par l’Institut agraire fondé par A. Nikonov en 1990. Le nom de ce nouvel institut faisait référence à l’ancien Institut agraire dirigé par A. Čajanov dans les années vingt. L’essentiel de l’équipe du nouvel Institut était composé des économistes qui avaient participé au groupe de travail dirigé par A. Nikonov sur les bases de la législation foncière au Soviet suprême de l’URSS. Le nouvel Institut agraire était censé se charger de la préparation des propositions et des projets pour la réforme agraire. Cependant ce n’était pas un think tank indépendant à proprement parler (à l’instar des instituts de E. Gajdar ou de G. Javlinskij) puisque, réunissant en son sein à peu près tous les économistes agraires réformistes, il faisait formellement partie de l’Académie des sciences agricoles Lenin. C’était sans doute dû au fait que A. Nikonov était président de VASHNIL au moment de la création de l’Institut (et le demeura jusqu’en 1992). L’antagonisme entre l’Institut agraire et le reste de l’Académie était si fort pourtant que les académiciens tentèrent de fermer l’Institut en 1994, et son activité fut suspendue pendant six mois après la mort de A. Nikonov en 1995.
40 Après l’adoption des « Bases de la législation foncière de l’URSS… », A. Nikonov et ses collègues de l’Institut agraire furent chargés de préparer une loi « Sur la réforme agraire en URSS ». La dissolution de l’Union soviétique interrompit leur travail. Par la suite, certains d’entre eux furent associés à l’élaboration des actes législatifs constitutifs de la réforme agraire pour le gouvernement de la Russie indépendante. Des orientations, déjà présentes dans les premières lois sur la réforme foncière et agraire, furent précisées dans le décret du Président de la Fédération de Russie « Des mesures urgentes de réalisation de la réforme foncière dans la RSFSR » (n° 323, du 27 décembre 1991) et dans l’arrêté du gouvernement « De la procédure de réorganisation des
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kolkhozes et des sovkhozes » (n° 86, du 29 décembre 1991). Les projets de ces actes législatifs avaient été élaborés par une équipe d’économistes agraires, membres de l’Institut agraire : E. Krylatyh, A. Petrikov, E. Serova, S. Kiselev, V. Uzun, I. Buzdalov et plusieurs autres. Ce qui est caractéristique de cette liste, c’est qu’elle incluait les économistes de l’équipe de A. Nikonov ayant les vues les plus « réformistes », mais excluait ceux de la génération aînée liée à la nomenklatura soviétique tels que B. Poškus et A. Nikonov lui‑même34. 41 Cependant, les positions exprimées sur la réforme agraire par les principaux chercheurs de l’Institut agraire étaient plus modérées que celles des économistes libéraux et du « gouvernement des réformes » russe. Ils étaient loin de prôner un démantèlement immédiat des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes, préconisé notamment par des experts étrangers, auteurs de recommandations pour l’économie soviétique. Ainsi, selon un groupe international d’experts, la stratégie du passage du secteur agricole à l’économie de marché, en particulier, devait comprendre la suppression de la commande d’État, la suspension des investissements étatiques et le refus de l’affectation directe des ressources dans l’agriculture, la privatisation des entreprises de transformation et de commerce de gros et de détail et, enfin, la réforme foncière et la réforme des entreprises, à savoir la dissolution des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes et la création d’entreprises, individuelles ou collectives, privées35. 42 La ligne stratégique de la réforme agraire, selon l’Institut agraire, était « la formation d’un secteur de fermiers avec, en parallèle, l’évolution graduelle des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes et leur adaptation à l’économie de marché »36. Pour les réformistes, les fermes familiales représentaient, comme dans les pays développés, la forme d’exploitation la plus efficace, mais dans l’immédiat, en URSS, les kolkhozes et les sovkhozes devaient rester la forme prédominante. « Dans les années qui viennent – écrivait Evgenija Serova –, on ne peut pas espérer que le secteur individuel paysan prenne beaucoup de poids dans l’économie agraire soviétique »37. Cette attitude prudente était justifiée par la structure de l’agriculture soviétique caractérisée par le quasi‑monopole des exploitations collectives, la non‑adéquation des outils (par exemple, les tracteurs) et des infrastructures existantes aux besoins des fermers et enfin par un facteur subjectif : tous les kolkhoziens n’étaient pas prêts à devenir exploitants indépendants, la réforme agraire pouvait être comprise comme un acte de violence de plus envers les paysans. 43 La position « réformiste modérée » était ainsi de mettre l’accent sur la réforme structurelle de l’agriculture, à savoir le démontage du système de gestion administrative et la réforme foncière. D’après Boljus Poškus, membre de VASHNIL et président adjoint de la Commission d’État du Conseil des ministres de l’URSS pour l’alimentation et le ravitaillement (qui, lui aussi, rejoindra plus tard l’Institut agraire), « le problème principal est de liquider le monopole de la propriété d’État à la campagne. Ainsi l’objectif immédiat consiste à transformer la propriété d’État dans des formes plus démocratiques : collectives (sociétés par actions, coopératives) et individuelles (exploitations paysannes) »38. Cependant, la position de principe était de ne pas morceler les exploitations collectives prospères afin de ne pas éparpiller leur base productive et leurs ressources accumulées. 44 Les propositions des économistes de l’Institut agraire consistaient à désétatiser les grosses exploitations publiques, à les transformer en exploitations collectives, c’est‑à‑dire en coopératives de plus petite taille, sinon en sociétés par actions. Cette
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dernière option leur semblait préférable car elle devait permettre d’attirer des investissements non publics dans l’agriculture et de développer l’intégration agro‑industrielle, cette fois‑ci sur une base nouvelle, privée39. Quant aux exploitations collectives non rentables ou déficitaires, leurs biens‑fonds pouvaient être transférés aux collectifs de travailleurs à l’occasion de leur transformation en associations d’exploitations paysannes individuelles et de coopératives. On retrouve ces orientations dans les lois sur la désétatisation et la privatisation et dans le Décret du Président de l’URSS sur la réforme foncière entré en vigueur en 199140. 45 Enfin, la plupart des membres de l’Institut agraire étaient favorables à l’introduction de la propriété privée, question idéologique la plus brûlante de l’époque. Sa nécessité était notamment soulignée par les économistes les plus libéraux de l’Institut : Gelij Šmelev, Ivan Buzdalov (tous deux économistes de courant réformiste, élèves de Venžer, célèbre économiste soviétique « marchandiste »41), et leur collègue d’une génération plus jeune, Vasilij Uzun (né en 1942 en Moldavie). Selon ce dernier, dont les vues étaient probablement les plus proches de celles des économistes de l’équipe de E. Gajdar (qui dirigea la préparation du programme de privatisation de l’agriculture), l’objectif de la réforme était de constituer un marché de la terre et des moyens de production pour favoriser l’exode rural et l’apparition du propriétaire efficace : Sans propriété privée de la terre et des moyens de production, on ne pourra pas retenir les hommes [les plus énergiques, habiles, cultivés] à la campagne […] ; si vente, bail, échange, hypothèque [de la terre] […] sont interdits, l’usage de la terre se révèle moins efficace […], le monopole de l’État sur la terre conduit à la perte de la fertilité, ne contribue pas au transfert de la terre à ceux qui peuvent l’exploiter de façon la plus efficace.42 46 Par la proximité politique de leurs vues et le capital expert accumulé et concentré, les membres de l’Institut agraire, en particulier les plus jeunes d’entre eux, conservèrent leur position de spécialistes majeurs de la réforme agraire et constituèrent effectivement la principale source de cadres pour l’expertise en matière de politique et d’économie agricole au cours des années 1990. Ainsi, Evgenija Serova et Sergej Kiselev furent conseillers du ministre de l’Agriculture Viktor Hlystun, et dirigèrent des think tanks indépendants pour l’économie et la politique agricole. Des membres du VIAPI, outre diverses fonctions expertes auprès du gouvernement et des organismes russes et internationaux (OCDE, FAO, etc.), participèrent notamment au projet d’envergure « La privatisation de la terre et la réorganisation des entreprises agricoles » financé par l’IFC (International Finance Corporation), membre du Groupe de la Banque Mondiale ayant pour mission de « renforcer le secteur privé dans les pays en développement ». Ce dernier projet est surtout connu pour la mise en œuvre du modèle dit de Nižnij Novgorod qui démontra les limites du modèle des fermes individuelles en Russie43. Ils participèrent aussi à des initiatives de soutien postprivatisation à la réforme qui concernaient surtout le développement de l’infrastructure de marché et prenaient la forme d’une assistance technique des organismes internationaux. Cette dernière eut des effets certains sur l’organisation de la science économique, qui se vit obligée de se conformer aux exigences du marché (création de fonds de soutien à la réforme tels que le Rosagrofond financés par des donateurs étrangers, de bureaux d’études et de consulting indépendants, etc.).
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Les positions conservatrices : l’Académie des sciences agricoles et l’establishment agrarien
47 Par ses prises de position, l’Institut agraire représentait une voix solitaire dans l’espace académique dominé par des positions conservatrices, qui eurent cependant moins de poids médiatique hors du milieu professionnel. Sur le plan institutionnel, ces dernières s’exprimaient à l’Académie des sciences agricoles Lenin et dans son réseau d’instituts de recherche et de filiales régionales. Les membres des principaux instituts de recherches en économie agraire étaient les premiers défenseurs de ces positions. En outre, des représentants du système des instituts agricoles régionaux et des chaires d’économie agraire des universités exprimaient souvent des positions semblables.
48 En réunissant les positions des plus modérées aux plus radicales, cet ensemble académique « conservateur » critiquait le programme de réformes économiques dit des « 500 jours », qui prévoyait un passage rapide et intégral à l’économie de marché, préférait très nettement le plan de réforme du gouvernement soviétique (changements graduels, système mixte) et rejetait la réforme foncière, mesure cardinale de la réforme agraire. À l’inverse, il défendait l’agriculture à grande échelle (avec le refus total des exploitations paysannes, dans le cas des « conservateurs radicaux ») et mettait l’accent sur les mesures de protection sociale dans les campagnes. Un éditorial de la revue APK : ekonomika, upravlenie (éditée par l’Académie des sciences agricoles de la RSFSR et par le ministère de l’Agriculture de la RSFSR44) représentait cette attitude académique « conservatrice » par excellence : Il ne faut pas surestimer la signification des formes de propriété, critiquer excessivement la propriété publique et louer la propriété privée, considérer les kolkhozes et les sovkhozes comme des formes sans perspectives et accorder la priorité aux petites exploitations paysannes (fermes).45 49 Les défenseurs des formes collectives d’exploitation agricole (la plupart des responsables du complexe agro‑industriel de différents niveaux, des directeurs et des cadres des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes, ainsi que des économistes agraires, membres de l’Académie des sciences agricoles Lenin) niaient la capacité des exploitations individuelles à concurrencer le système de la production à grande échelle et insistaient sur le fait que les fermes individuelles, pour être efficaces, exigent des investissements importants de la part de l’État46.
50 Les tenants des positions conservatrices radicales s’associèrent au mouvement grandissant des défenseurs de l’exploitation collective. À la veille du XXVIIIe Congrès du PCUS (juillet 1990), le dernier congrès du Parti communiste de l’Union soviétique, se tint le congrès constitutif de l’Union paysanne de l’URSS sous le patronage des plus hautes autorités soviétiques. Le congrès constitutif élut président Vasilij Starodubcev, directeur d’un kolkhoze de la région de Tula, député de l’URSS et futur participant au putsch d’août 1991. La section de politique agraire du XXVIIIe Congrès du PCUS présidée par ce dernier adopta une résolution selon laquelle la « paysannerie se disait outragée par la dérive des dirigeants du PCUS », qui favorisaient les fermers au détriment des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes. La résolution privilégiait l’augmentation des investissements et la « renaissance sociale » du village comme voie première pour résoudre le problème de l’approvisionnement. Ce discours contredisait la position des réformateurs, qui pensaient que les investissements et les subventions à l’agriculture
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étaient déjà excessifs et qui proposaient une « réforme économique radicale », à commencer par la réforme foncière. 51 L’attachement à la propriété publique était aussi une caractéristique majeure des positions conservatrices. Ainsi, les « conservateurs » manifestaient un rejet inconditionnel de l’idée d’appropriation privée de la terre et de la création d’un marché foncier. Comme l’écrivait Sergej Šut´kov47, qui devint conseiller auprès du Parti communiste de Russie (KPRF) : La terre est un moyen de production spécifique créé par la nature et n’est pas le fruit du travail humain, c’est pour cela qu’elle ne peut pas servir de marchandise dans la société soviétique, être objet de la spéculation et du gain (naživa).48 52 La commercialisation de la terre est le point essentiel qui permet de distinguer les positions « conservatrices modérées » des positions « réformatrices ». En fait, ce sont souvent des économistes agraires réputés marchandistes et « réformateurs » de la perestroïka qui se retrouvèrent dans cette catégorie après 1990. Par exemple, Aleksej Emel´janov, député de l’URSS et un des fondateurs de l’AKKOR, parmi d’autres économistes agraires « modérés », prônait une « refonte radicale de l’APK », la formation d’une économie mixte, la désétatisation des kolkhozes et des sovkhozes, mais mettait en garde contre une « représentation simpliste » des réformateurs qui, à l’instar des auteurs du programme des « 500 jours », croyaient possible d’introduire « le mécanisme de marché dans la sphère agraire rapidement et totalement »49. Il s’exprimait également contre la « transformation de la terre en marchandise ». Ainsi, il préconisait l’octroi de la terre en possession aux paysans sans pour autant leur reconnaître le droit de vendre un terrain. Il s’agissait alors de la propriété individuelle de travail censée prévenir la dépossession des paysans50.
53 On pouvait souvent observer à l’époque une hésitation entre ces deux versions des positions modérées, sinon un glissement progressif de l’une vers l’autre. Il semble que c’était le cas de Gorbačev lui‑même51. C’est ainsi que des prises de position qui, deux ans auparavant, se révélaient extrêmement audacieuses et progressistes devinrent, dans les années 1990‑1991, conservatrices modérées, voire radicales. 54 L’Académie des sciences agricoles dans son ensemble (à part l’Institut agraire qui regroupait les forces « réformistes ») perdit sa légitimité experte auprès des nouvelles autorités russes résolues à mener à bien les réformes économiques radicales. Elle devint cependant l’instance d’une contre‑expertise pendant toute la période de la mise en place de la réforme agraire. Ainsi, des économistes académiques servirent en qualité d’experts auprès des fractions des partis communiste et agraire à la Douma et réussirent à bloquer l’adoption du Code foncier, en particulier, la légalisation de la circulation marchande des terres agricoles jusqu’au début des années 2000. Cependant, à la fin des années 1990, des notables académiques, comme Ivan Ušačev, firent leur retour dans la politique agricole au niveau ministériel52.
Conclusion
55 L’analyse des instances d’expertise et des formes d’interaction entre les experts et le pouvoir pendant la perestroïka permet d’apporter un certain éclairage sur la place des sciences sociales dans la gestion des affaires publiques dans l’Union soviétique tardive. L’idéal de la « politique scientifiquement fondée » était très profondément enraciné dans la mentalité des fonctionnaires comme des intellectuels. La perestroïka à ses
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débuts hérita d’un système hautement technocratique caractérisé par la jonction de l’administration, de la science et de la production dans une chaîne unique et strictement hiérarchique. En l’absence de pouvoir législatif et de médias autonomes en URSS, les formes directes d’interaction entre les économistes et les décideurs prédominaient.
56 Cette analyse permet d’affirmer que la conception de la « pluralité des formes d’exploitation » et de propriété, qui fait la place à l’agriculture individualiste, est véritablement une coproduction de la science académique et des hauts fonctionnaires. Elle n’est pas une doctrine imposée de l’extérieur, comme on l’a parfois présentée dans les discours académiques et publics critiques des réformes. Cette alliance des économistes et du parti a été illustrée ci‑dessus par la nature des rapports personnels et professionnels entre Aleksandr Nikonov et Mihail Gorbačev et entre Vladimir Tihonov et Vladimir Bašmačnikov. Même si toutes les initiatives agraires trouvèrent leur origine dans la volonté politique incarnée au plus haut niveau par le Comité central du parti et son secrétaire général, les expérimentations économiques (nouvelles formes d’organisation dans l’agriculture), les changements doctrinaires (« facteur humain », marché socialiste, référence à la NEP), les actes législatifs furent préparés par des groupes d’experts, en premier lieu économistes agraires de tendance réformiste, issus du monde académique et/ou employés par les services du pouvoir (comité central, ministère de l’Agriculture et autres). 57 La réforme politique dans l’Union soviétique complexifia cette situation en mettant fin au monopole du discours officiel. D’abord, le lancement de la glasnost´ permit aux économistes et aux autres intellectuels de sortir du circuit officiel de l’expertise et d’intervenir activement dans les médias pour promouvoir certes la conception officielle de la réforme, mais aussi pour proposer des critiques et des idées alternatives. Avec la libéralisation de la presse et l’affaiblissement du contrôle de l’État sur la production et sur la diffusion des connaissances au cours des dernières années de la perestroïka, les experts purent influencer l’opinion publique à travers les médias, l’enseignement et la publication d’ouvrages, et par le biais du consulting privé. Les experts académiques élargirent leur champ d’action à la société civile et au militantisme politique naissants. En ce sens, les dernières années de l’existence de l’URSS furent peut‑être l’époque de la plus grande influence des experts académiques, notamment des économistes, dans l’histoire soviétique et russe. 58 La crise économique et politique, les luttes pour le pouvoir entre les autorités russes et soviétiques de 1990‑1991 produisirent une forte polarisation entre les positions, des plus « conservatrices » aux plus « réformistes ». À partir de ce moment, la pluralité d’instances du pouvoir correspondit à la pluralité des discours (et d’expertises). Cependant, paradoxalement, la radicalisation du débat et de la politique à la veille de la dissolution de l’URSS subordonna les économistes agraires au principe politique qui prévaut sur n’importe quel autre critère de légitimité en situation de crise et modifia les règles de fonctionnement de l’expertise académique. L’autorité épistémique ne correspondait plus à une place dans l’organisation hiérarchique de l’ancien système techno‑politique. La capacité de se conformer à une demande d’action rapide et efficace devint prépondérante dans la situation définie par l’urgence. Les positions radicales exprimées par le gouvernement de réforme russe (de Egor Gajdar), absentes de l’expertise académique dominée par des attitudes plus modérées, contribuèrent à creuser la fracture dans le milieu politique et de l’expertise rurale. Tout au long des
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années 1990, ces divisions marquèrent la politique et la science économique, qui échouèrent à produire une vision cohérente de la profession agricole, alors que l’image du paysan indépendant, fermer, perdait progressivement de son attraction. En outre, la nouvelle époque imposa d’autres types de contraintes, parmi lesquelles la demande d’une économie de marché, qui marginalisa tous ceux qui ne partageaient pas la nouvelle « idéologie dominante ».
NOTES
1. Voir, par exemple, « Tri dnja v Poltave [Trois jours à Poltava] », Znamja, n° 3, 1987. 2. A.S. Ivanov, éd., Licom k arende [Face au bail], M. : Politizdat, 1990, p. 3‑4. 3. Voir, par exemple, « Tri dnja v Poltave », n° 3, 1987. 4. Le terme « facteur humain », un des buzzwords de l’époque, apparaît dans un article de Tat ´jana Zaslavskaja, économiste et sociologue rurale, membre de l’Académie des sciences de l’URSS. T.I. Zaslavskaja, « Čelovečeskij faktor razvitija ekonomiki i social´naja spravedlivost´ [Facteur humain du développement économique et justice sociale] », Kommunist, n° 13, 1986, p. 61‑73. 5. Voir, par exemple : Pekka Sutela, Economic thought and economic reform in the Soviet Union, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991 ; Natalia Chmatko, « Les usages des sciences économiques en Russie entre les années 1960 et 1990 », Histoire, économie et société, 21 (4), 2002, p. 583‑603. 6. Sur cette question, voir : Carole Sigman, Clubs politiques et perestroïka en Russie : Subversion sans dissidence, P. : Karthala, 2009. 7. Une littérature abondante est consacrée à la participation des économistes à la définition et la diffusion des politiques économiques dans différentes régions du monde après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Pour ne citer que quelques ouvrages de référence : Miguel Centeno, Democracy within Reason : Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, College Station : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994 ; Michael Bernstein, A Perilous Progress : Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth‑Century America, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2001 ; Yves Dezalay, Bryant Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars : Lawyers, Economists and the Transformation of Latin‑American States, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002 ; Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism : The Left‑Wing Origins of Neoliberalism, Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2011 ; enfin, pour le cas français : Frédéric Lebaron, La croyance économique : Les économistes entre science et politique, P. : Seuil, 2000. 8. Sur la question de la participation des économistes et d’autres spécialistes en sciences sociales à l’administration à l’époque tsariste et postrévolutionnaire, voir notamment Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution : Le cas russe, 1870‑1930, P. : Albin Michel, 1998 ; James W. Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside : State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917‑1929, Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 9. Sur la politique scientifique et l’académisation de la politique en URSS après 1956, voir Aleksandr Bikbov, Grammatika porjadka [Grammaire de l’ordre], M. : HSE, 2014, p. 238‑299 ; plus spécialement, sur la participation des spécialistes à la réforme de l’éducation à l’époque de Hruščev, voir Laurent Coumel, « Rapprocher l’école et la vie » ? Une histoire des réformes scolaires en Russie (1918‑1964), Toulouse : PUM‑Méridiennes, 2014.
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10. Ce mode de réforme contraste fortement avec le cas français, où le rôle des syndicats et des organisations professionnelles a été essentiel dans la modernisation de la profession agricole à partir de la fin des années cinquante. La transformation du paysan en entrepreneur capitaliste favorisant l’industrialisation et l’exode rural est devenue une plate‑forme commune pour l’action gouvernementale et professionnelle, reléguant les économistes et les autres spécialistes en sciences sociales à un rôle secondaire. Voir : Pierre Muller, Le technocrate et le paysan : essai sur la politique française de modernisation de l’agriculture de 1945 à nos jours, P. : Éditions de l’Atelier, 1984, p. 55‑86. 11. J’ai réalisé cette enquête dans le cadre d’une recherche pour ma thèse de doctorat. Olessia Kirtchik, « La question agraire en Russie au croisement du pouvoir et des sciences économiques : acteurs et discours (1929‑2005) », Paris, EHESS, 2007. 12. A. Nikonov (1918‑1995), né dans une famille mixte letto‑russe, est un représentant de la nomenklatura qui, tout au long de sa carrière, cumula des positions académiques, politiques et administratives. Secrétaire du Comité central du Parti communiste de Lettonie dans la seconde moitié des années 1940, ministre de l’Agriculture de la république et député du Soviet suprême de l’URSS dans les années cinquante, il tomba en disgrâce et se retrouva au début des années soixante directeur de recherche à l’Institut de la culture du sol de Lettonie. Son transfert à Stavropol´ et sa rencontre avec Gorbačev, dont il dirigea la thèse de doctorat, le portèrent à nouveau aux cimes du pouvoir académique et politique. Sur l’influence des « collègues de Stavropol´ » sur la gestation des vues réformatrices de Gorbačev, voir Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford – New York : Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 42‑47. 13. Vladimir Miloserdov (né en 1930) fait partie des experts les plus hauts placés dans les années 1970 et 1980. Il fut directeur de l’Institut d’économie et d’organisation de la production agricole de la zone des terres non noires de la RSFSR créé en 1977, directeur adjoint du Département général de l’APK (complexe agro‑industriel) du Gosplan de l’URSS (1981), et consultant du département de l’agriculture et de l’industrie alimentaire du Comité central du PCUS (1982‑1987), avant de retourner au Gosplan. Adepte de l’industrialisation poussée de l’agriculture, Miloserdov conseilla Gorbačev pendant trois ans, jusqu’à l’ascension de ce dernier au poste de secrétaire général du parti. C’est avec amertume que Miloserdov parle de la « trahison » de son chef qui, finalement, lui préféra Nikonov, « avec ses idées sur des collectifs de travail intensif et la politique des petits producteurs » (Entretien avec Vladimir Miloserdov, le 17 octobre 2003, Moscou). 14. Entretien avec Aleksandr Petrikov, Moscou, le 7 octobre 2001. Petrikov insiste sur la participation active de Nikonov à la réhabilitation d’Aleksandr Čajanov et d’autres membres de l’école d’organisation et de production, condamnés et exécutés dans les années 1930. 15. Entretien avec Aleksandr Serkov, directeur adjoint du VNIESH (Institut d’économie agraire de VASHNIL), Moscou, le 4 février 2005. 16. A.A. Nikonov, Spiral´ mnogovekovoj dramy : agrarnaja nauka i politika Rossii (XVIII‑XX vek) [La spirale d’un drame multi‑séculaire : la science et la politique agraires en Russie (XVIIIe‑XXe siècles)], M. : Enciklopedija rossijskih dereven´, 1995, p. 396‑397. 17. Arendnyj podrjad — kratčajšij put´ k prodovol´stvennomu dostatku : Vstreča v CK KPSS s rabotnikami arendnyh podrjadnyh kollektivov agropromyšlennogo kompleksa, rukovoditeljami partijnyh, sovetskih i hozjajstvennyh organov, specialistami sel´skogo hozjajstva 13 maja 1988 goda [Le bail est la voie la plus courte vers l’abondance alimentaire : rencontre avec des travailleurs des collectifs de contrat‑bail du complexe agro‑industriel, des fonctionnaires et des spécialistes agricoles au Comité central du Parti communiste de l’URSS le 13 mai 1988], M. : Politizdat, 1988, p. 43. 18. Les questions de la persistance de l’économie agricole auxiliaire (LPH) et de son rapport avec les grandes entreprises redevinrent objet de discussion dans les études portant sur la réforme des fermes collectives et publiques en Russie et dans d’autres pays postsocialistes (Voir, par exemple
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Gavin Kitching, « The Revenge of the Peasant ? The Collapse of Large‑Scale Russian Agriculture and the Role of the Peasant “Private Plot” in That Collapse, 1991–97 », Journal of Peasant Studies, (26) 1, 1998, p. 43‑81 ; Jessica Allina‑Pisano, The Post‑Soviet Potemkin Village : Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008). Voir aussi l’article de Katja Bruisch dans ce numéro. 19. Selon Poškus, membre de VASHNIL et président adjoint de la Commission d’État pour l’alimentation et l’approvisionnement auprès du Conseil des ministres de l’URSS (1989‑1991), qui commente le démantèlement du Gosagroprom, « [Gorbačev] paraissait croire que les ministères étaient si forts qu’ils bloquaient l’avancement vers le marché. Il fallait alors affaiblir leur influence pour donner plus de droits aux régions et aux entreprises », (Entretien avec Boljus Poškus, le 24 septembre 2004, Moscou). 20. « Ob osnovnyh napravlenijah vnešnej i vnutrennej politiki SSSR : Postanovlenie S´´ezda narodnyh deputatov SSSR », Pervyj s´´ezd narodnyh deputatov SSSR : Stenografičeskij otčet [Des principales orientations de la politique intérieure et extérieure de l’URSS : Arrêté du Congrès des députés du peuple de l’URSS], M. : Politizdat, 1989, t. III, p. 417. 21. Serova, membre du groupe de travail sur la loi, et certains de ses collègues évoquent un épisode de leur travail au Parlement : le projet de loi est présenté au Comité législatif par le futur premier maire libéral de Leningrad, Jurij Sobčak, qui déclare que le droit de propriété (privée) ne peut pas exister en URSS. Ce projet est ainsi refusé avant même le débat public (Entretien avec Evgenija Serova, le 11 septembre 2002, Moscou). 22. La loi de la RSFSR du 22 novembre 1990 n° 348‑I « O krest´janskom (fermerskom) hozjajstve [De l’exploitation paysanne (par un fermer)] » ; la loi de la RSFSR du 23 novembre 1990 n° 374‑1 « O zemel´noj reforme » [De la réforme foncière], Vedomosti S´´ezda narodnyh deputatov RSFSR i verhovnogo Soveta RSFSR, n° 26, 1990. Ces lois furent préparées au sein du Comité d’État de la RSFSR pour la réforme foncière créé afin de contrebalancer l’action du ministère de l’Agriculture jugé conservateur. Viktor Hlystun (né en 1946 au Kazakhstan), professeur d’aménagement foncier (zemleustrojstvo), fut nommé à la tête de ce Comité. Il comptait parmi les hommes politiques qui, directement depuis l’université, étaient parvenus dans les hautes sphères du pouvoir en 1990‑1991 sans être passé par les filières traditionnelles de l’administration ou de la politique. Son absence d’expérience administrative a sans doute servi d’atout pour sa nomination. Pourtant, son entrée dans les réseaux de l’expertise et du pouvoir, comme pour beaucoup d’autres, a été rendue possible par sa participation au groupe de travail de Nikonov sur les « Bases de la législation foncière de l’URSS... » (Entretien avec Viktor Hlystun, ministre de l’Agriculture (1991‑94, 1996‑97), Moscou, le 23 avril 2003). 23. « Obraščenie k S´´ezdu narodnyh deputatov SSSR 417 deputatov‑agrariev 31 maja 1989 g. [Appel des 417 députés agrariens au Congrès des députés du peuple de l’URSS le 31 mai 1989] », Pervyj s´´ezd narodnyh deputatov SSSR : Stenografičeskij otčet, vol. 2, Moscou, 1989, p. 10‑13. 24. Associaciia krest´janskih hozjajstv i kooperativov Rossii – Association des exploitations paysannes et des coopératives agricoles de Russie. 25. Vladimir Bašmačnikov (né en 1937) est docteur en économie et professeur à l’université d’État de l’Oural. Il consacra la première partie de sa vie à la carrière académique : il fut d’abord directeur de la filiale ouralienne de l’Institut d’économie, de travail et de gestion dans l’agriculture (VNIETUSH), puis directeur‑adjoint du VNIESH, principal institut d’économie agraire. Dans les années 1984‑1990, il travailla à la Direction économique du Comité central du PCUS. En 1989, il quitta définitivement la carrière académique pour l’action politique et associative et devint président de l’Association des exploitations paysannes et des coopératives agricoles de Russie, puis député de la Duma (1995‑1999). 26. Vladimir Tihonov (1927‑1994) est né près de Sverdlovsk (aujourd’hui Ekaterinburg). Après des études à l’université d’État de l’Oural, il y soutint en 1958 une thèse d’économie politique. Il commença sa vie professionnelle, comme beaucoup d’autres économistes du courant
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« marchandiste », à l’époque du XXe Congrès du PCUS, et s’intéressa aux problèmes de l’efficacité de la production agricole. En 1965, il devint directeur de l’Institut de recherches pour l’organisation et de la rémunération du travail dans l’agriculture de VASHNIL créé la même année. Avec son équipe de chercheurs (dont Bašmačnikov), il fut parmi les premiers en URSS à travailler sur les micro‑collectifs et sur les brigades sous contrat. Directeur d’un laboratoire à l’Institut d’économie de l’Académie des sciences, puis vice‑président de la section sibérienne de VASHNIL, dans les années 1980 il participa de façon active au débat médiatique et à la politique agraire. 27. Entretien avec Vladimir Bašmačnikov, président de l’AKKOR, Moscou, le 18 septembre 2002. 28. « Otkrytoe pis´mo organizacionnogo komiteta Associacii krest´janskih hozjajstv i kooperativov Rossii [Lettre ouverte du comité d’organisation de l’Association des exploitations paysannes et des coopératives de Russie] », Izvestija, le 13 juin 1989. 29. A. Puškar´, « Živye duši [Les âmes vives] », Izvestija, le 24, le 25 et le 26 juillet 1989. Le titre de l’article est un jeu de mots faisant référence au titre du roman de Nikolaj Gogol´ Les Âmes mortes. 30. Le Mužik d’Arhangel´sk (59 mn) fut réalisé par M. Goldovskaja en 1986, mais le département d’idéologie du CC du PCUS interdit sa diffusion. En revanche, en 1989, le film obtint le Prix d’État de l’URSS (et le Prix d’État de Russie en 1999). 31. Le thème de la dékoulakisation et de la nécessaire réhabilitation des paysans qui avaient subi des répressions pendant la collectivisation stalinienne était systématiquement évoqué en lien avec le mouvement des fermiers. Voir, par exemple, N. Sivkov, « Kulak ty, Sivkov, fermer » [T’es un kulak, Sivkov, un fermer], Moskovskie novosti, n° 45, 1988, p. 308‑309 ; G. Šmelev, « Kuda vedet arenda » [Où conduit le bail], Moskovskie novosti, n° 43, 1988, p. 145 : « Qui pouvait croire il y a encore peu de temps qu’un “véritable” fermier puisse prendre la parole lors d’une réunion au Comité central […] un “individualiste (edinoličnik)” dans la représentation courante, ou un “élément de classe étranger” comme à l’époque de la collectivisation totale et de la dékoulakisation ». 32. Sur la question de popularité de Stolypin, voir : David A.J. Macey, « Stolypin is Rising ! The Ideology of Agrarian Reform in Contemporary Russia » in Don Van Atta, éd., The Farmer Threat : The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Post‑Soviet Russia, Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 1993, p. 97‑120. 33. Cette logique de l’action de la crise sur le champ universitaire est notamment analysée et démontrée par Pierre Bourdieu à partir des événements de mai 1968 (Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus, P. : Minuit, 1984, p. 234‑240, 243). 34. Entretien avec Ivan Buzdalov, membre de l’Académie des sciences agricoles, directeur de laboratoire au VIAPI Nikonov, le 23 septembre 2004, Moscou. 35. Il s’agit d’une étude de l’économie soviétique réalisée par un groupe d’experts (du FMI, de la BIRD, de l’OCDE et de la BERD) dans l’objectif de formuler des recommandations de réforme et de définir des critères sur la base desquels l’aide économique de l’Occident pouvait lui garantir un soutien efficace, « Ekonomika SSSR : vyvody i rekomendacii [L’économie de l’URSS : bilan et recommandations] », Voprosy ekonomiki, nº 3, 1991, p. 60. 36. Sergej Kiselev [directeur adjoint de l’Institut agraire], « Formy hozjajstvovanija i zemel´nye otnošenija [Formes d’exploitation et rapports de propriété] », Voprosy ekonomiki, nº 3, 1991, p. 109. 37. Evgenija Serova, « Agrarnaja reforma i mnogoobrazie form hozjajstvovanija [Réforme agraire et pluralité des formes d’exploitation] », Voprosy ekonomiki, nº 5, 1990, p. 73. 38. Boljus Poškus, « Osobennosti perehoda APK k rynočnym otnošenijam [Spécificités de la transition du complexe agroindustriel vers le marché] », APK : ekonomika, upravlenie, nº 8, 1991, p. 60‑65. 39. Voir, par exemple, Serova, « Agrarnaja reforma… », p. 72.
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40. Loi de l’URSS du 1 er juillet 1991 n° 2278‑1 « Ob osnovnyh načalah razgosudarstvlenija i privatizacii predprijatij [Des principes de la désétatisation et de la privatisation des entreprises] » ; Décret du Président de l’URSS du 5 janvier 1991 n° UP‑1285 « O pervoočerednyh zadačah po realizacii zemel´noj reformy [Des tâches prioritaires dans la réalisation de la réforme foncière] ». 41. Pour les biographies des économistes agraires soviétiques de courant réformiste, on peut se référer à : A.V. Petrikov, G.I. Šmelev, éds, Teoretičeskoe nasledie agrarnikov‑ekonomistov 50‑80‑h godov i sovremennaja reforma v sel´skom hozjaistve. Ludi. Idei. Fakty [Héritage théorique des économistes agraires des années 1950‑80 et la réforme agraire contemporaine. Personnalités. Idées. Faits], M. : Academia, 2000. 42. Vasilij Uzun, « Značenie opyta zemel´nyh reform v stranah Vostočnoj Evropy dlja SSSR [La portée de l’expérience des réformes foncières dans les pays de l’Europe de l’Est pour l’URSS] », Voprosy ekonomiki, nº 6, 1991, p. 126. 43. Programma « Privatizacija zemli i reorganizacija sel´skohozjajstvennyh predprijatij v Rossii » : Podvedenie itogov [Programme « Privatisation de la terre et réorganisation des exploitations agricoles en Russie » : bilan], M. : Rosagrofond, 1999. 44. La scission institutionnelle entre les tenants des positions réformistes et conservatrices se manifestait entre autres au niveau du choix des revues de publications : ainsi, les chercheurs de l’Institut agraire (et autres réformistes) publiaient plutôt dans Voprosy ekonomiki, une revue de théorie économique générale, tandis que les autres économistes agricoles préféraient généralement les revues d’économie et de politique agraire éditées par VASHNIL : Ekonomika sel ´skogo hozjaistva et APK : ekonomika, upravlenie. 45. « Po puti stabilizacii [Sur la voie de la stabilisation] », APK : ekonomika, upravlenie, nº 1, 1991, p. 3‑17. 46. Les médias réputés conservateurs leur servaient d’arène. Voir, par exemple, « Najti zemle hozjaina : Kruglyj stol žurnala ‘Moskva’ [Trouver un maître à la terre : table ronde de la revue « Moskva »], Moskva, nº 10, 1989, p. 164‑173. 47. Sergej Šut´kov (né en 1931) est un représentant important du paradigme académique conservateur. Agronome de carrière, il fut directeur adjoint du secteur des sciences agricoles du Comité central du PCUS (1982‑1986), vice‑président de la filiale russe de VASHNIL (jusqu’à la réorganisation de cette dernière après la dissolution de l’URSS), puis vice‑président de l’Académie des sciences agricoles de Russie, héritière de VASHNIL, de 1997 à 2002. 48. Sergej Shut´kov, « Soveršenstvovanie ekonomičeskogo mehanizma v sisteme APK pri perehode k rynku [Perfectionnement du fonctionnement économique dans le complexe agro‑industriel lors du passage à l’économie de marché] », APK : ekonomika, upravlenie, nº 9, 1991, p. 12. 49. Voir, par exemple, Aleksej Emel´janov, « Agrarnyi sektor na puti k rynku [Le secteur agricole en chemin vers l’économie de marché] », Voprosy ekonomiki, nº 6, 1991, p. 68‑80. 50. Emel´janov, « Agrarnyi sektor na puti k rynku », p. 68‑80. 51. Voir, par exemple, « Za novye formy hozjajstvovanija na sele, za prioritet APK : vstreča M.S. Gorbačeva s rukovoditeljami kolhozov, sovhozov, agropromyšlennyh predprijatij, perešedših na novye formy hozjajstvovanija [Pour les nouvelles formes d’exploitation agricole, pour donner la priorité à l’APK : rencontre de Gorbačev avec des directeurs de kolkhozes, de sovkhozes, d’entreprises agro‑industrielles passées aux nouvelles formes économiques] », APK : ekonomika, upravlenie, nº 7, 1991, p. 32. Gorbačev déclarait notamment « [il est nécessaire] de défendre ce cap contre les extrémités. Mais il faut garder la direction principale : c’est la démocratisation, la liberté économique et politique, l’initiative des gens », une formule classique de la perestroïka qui sonnait de manière extrêmement conservatrice en 1991. 52. Ivan Ušačev (né en 1938) est diplômé de l’Institut agricole d’Odessa dont il devint recteur en 1967. Il fut ensuite chercheur, directeur adjoint, directeur du VNIESH (à partir de 1979). À
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l’époque soviétique, Il fut expert auprès du ministère de l’Agriculture de la république de Cuba. Dans la période postsoviétique, il occupa de hauts postes dans la hiérarchie académique et administrative en qualité de vice‑président de la RASHN, adjoint au ministre de l’Agriculture, et membre du Conseil de la politique agraire près le ministère de l’Agriculture et du Gouvernement (Entretien avec Ivan Ušačev, le 24 avril 2003, Moscou).
RÉSUMÉS
Au cours de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, les économistes ont joué un rôle de premier plan dans la définition et la diffusion de recettes de réforme économique partout dans le monde. L’URSS n’a pas fait exception, faisant appel à l’expertise d’économistes académiques au moment des réformes économiques de 1965 et 1985. Cependant, le cas soviétique présente des particularités du fait même de sa propre tradition technocratique et de sa pensée réformiste. Cet article se penche sur les modalités de la conception de la dernière réforme agraire soviétique à la fin des années quatre-vingt, coproduite par des bureaucrates et des économistes agraires de courant réformiste. Cette période est particulière en ce qu’elle modifie les rapports entre les experts académiques et le pouvoir politique et, partant, les formes d’action des experts et d’organisation de la recherche. La crise économique et politique introduit une forte polarisation idéologique, voire une fracture, qui aura un impact sur le déroulement de la réforme agraire au cours des années 1990.
During the second half of the twentieth century, economic experts played a major role in defining and spreading economic reform recipes around the world. The Soviet Union was no exception and called upon academic economists’ expertise at the time of economic reforms in 1965 and 1985. However, the Soviet situation presents specific features due to the country’s very own technocratic tradition and reformist thought. This article addresses the way in which the last Soviet agrarian reform of the late 1980s was worked out. The reform was produced through the joint efforts of bureaucrats and reform-oriented agricultural economists. These were particular times when changes took place in the relationships between academic experts and political power and in the experts’ forms of action and organization of research. The economic and political crisis brought about a sharp ideological polarization, not to say a rupture, which marked the implementation of the agrarian reform in the 1990s.
AUTEUR
OLESSIA KIRTCHIK
Higher School of Economics Moscow, [email protected]
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Conflits et contraintes Conflicts and constraints
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In Single File Russian railroads and the Russian army as environmental protection agencies, 1858‑1917 Les chemins de fer et l’armée russes, des agences de protection de l’environnement en ordre de marche, 1858-1917
Stephen Brain
1 The most effective soil conservation agencies in the Russian south at the end of the tsarist period were the Russian Army of the Don and the Vladikavkaz railroad. These were, to be more precise, the only state institutions implementing soil conservation measures in the Russian south at that time. The army and the railroad had no rivals, aside from the Russian Forest Department, which only maintained experiment stations on the steppe. These experiment stations did not actually carry out the work of propagating forests, but instead studied the best methods for establishing new forests in semi‑arid conditions. (The Agricultural Society of Southern Russia had some success in establishing forests in the Russian south, but only by advising large landowners.1) The work of propagating state forests was left to the Cossack Army of the Don, and to a much lesser degree, the Vladikavkaz railroad. For reasons ideological, practical, and economic, the imperial government chose to work through intermediary groups and private agencies rather than via direct action, with significant long‑term effects on soil conservation efforts in the twentieth century.
2 To the extent that environmental historians have examined Russian agronomy and soil conservation in the tsarist era, they have focused their attention on ideas rather than implementation.2 And with good reason: the knowledge‑building infrastructure was much better developed than the network of agencies tasked with improving soil conditions. A number of very active scholarly debates about human agricultural activity on the steppe percolated in Russia throughout the nineteenth century, and the exchanges occupied prominent places in the publications of the Free Economic Society, the Imperial Moscow Society of Agriculture, the Imperial Forest Institute, and the scientific press. Scores of scientists studied the processes whereby, as Leslie Symons documents, “blowing sands buried over 10,000 hectares of cultivated land between 1843 and 1868” in the Lower Dniepr basin.3 The most famous side of the debate, articulated
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by the pioneering soil scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev, held that inappropriate agronomical techniques had disturbed the ecology of the steppe environment.4 In a report submitted to the imperial government after the Russian crop failure of 1891, Dokuchaev argued that gullies and drifting sand, coupled with dropping ground water level, were the direct consequence of poor land management that desiccated the landscape, which in turn led to chronic crop failure on the steppe.5 According to Dokuchaev, farmers who carelessly stripped the land of its vegetative cover in moister parts of the steppe saw their fields invaded by gullies, which in time washed away the topsoil. Similar practices in dry regions did not create gullies but instead great patches of blowing sand, rendering vast swathes of land useless for agriculture and exacerbating summer dust storms. Dokuchaev’s report, because of its favorable reception and the relatively early date of its publication, occupies a central position in the history of the study of anthropogenic climate change, and scholars have paid due attention.6 However, this is not the case for the implementation of Dokuchaev’s ideas in the tsarist period—or, for that matter, for those of other pedologists—perhaps because the application was much less well organized and much less well documented than the debate. 3 The most commonly prescribed remedy for the disturbed ecology of the steppe in the mid‑nineteenth century, and again after the 1891 drought, was afforestation. Not all Russian soil scientists agreed that the steppe had been forested in the recent past, and Dokuchaev himself believed the steppe had been grassland for a very long time, but there was a significant cohort of Russian agronomists and soil scientists who hypothesized that the steppe had been forested in the years before Russian settlement.7 Accordingly, they blamed the removal of the forest cover for agriculture for the ecological problems. But regardless of the disagreement as to whether forests “belonged” on the steppe, Russian experts, often under the influence of German geographical studies, generally supported the idea that increased forest cover could reverse the drying of the steppe.8 Immediately after the publication of Dokchaev’s report, the Russian government significantly stepped up its long‑standing support of steppe afforestation research via the Forest Department and Imperial Forest Institute, and continued to do so right up until the revolution, an implicit endorsement of the idea that forestry measures were the best solution for environmental degradation. David Moon argues that by the year 1900 or so, a number of Russian scientists had come to doubt the deforestation premise, and began to promote careful agricultural techniques rather than the creation of new forests. However, it remains very uncertain how widespread this position became, and even if Moon is correct about a new consensus, afforestation efforts maintained a very prominent place in Russian agronomical literature after 1900. Afforestation research continued to receive state attention and funding, whereas improved agricultural techniques appeared largely in agronomical journals and experiment stations but not in the fields.9 Indeed, afforestation remained a point of emphasis beyond the tsarist period, most prominently as the focus of the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature, and later as part of extensive afforestation efforts under Brezhnev.10 4 Because afforestation was the most widespread method for Russian soil conservation in the late tsarist period, the system that the Russian government used for its implementation, although generally unstudied, influenced both the outcome of the efforts and helped to form the deeper message conveyed to the Russian public about soil conservation work, and the state‑society relationship more generally. State
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experimental stations carried out the research to determine the best species and methods for steppe afforestation, but the stations themselves did not usually actually perform the work of placing the forests on the steppe, nor did they actively reach out to involve the populace in their work. The Russian government preferred to implement afforestation by employing existing actors rather than by creating dedicated institutions, just as it did when requiring homeowners to maintain the gardens on Moscow’s Garden Ring. Foremost among these agencies were the military and the railroad—specifically the Russian Cossack Army of the Don, and the Vladikavkaz railroad—and the choice to entrust afforestation to agencies with strongly differing primary objectives led to a rigid and impersonal system that fit uneasily with the goals of conservationism. 5 At stake was more than just the integrity of the steppe ecosystem. In a larger sense, soil conservation was only part of a larger and ultimately failed effort to create a modern civil society that integrated government authority and educated opinion with the rural population. A growing trend in the historiography of the late imperial period has drawn attention to the attempt of Russian scientific experts to help forge a cohesive and united modern Russia, with social relations based in cooperation rather than coercion, although a consensus so far has not emerged. Among the first works to explore this relationship was George Yaney’s The Urge to Mobilize, which severely critiqued “capital‑city minds” and the tendency of central authorities to reform the countryside without much understanding of the peasantry.11 For Yaney, agrarian reform in Russia moved more unevenly and more oppressively than it should have, because “administrators and technicians in the countryside were seeking not to bring benefits primarily to peasants but to satisfy their own inner need to force the rural population into conformity with ‘modern’ assumptions regarding human nature.”12 Yanni Kotsonis’ Making Peasants Backward arrived at many of the same conclusions, indicting agronomical experts for their disdainful attitude toward the peasantry, which resulted not in tighter connections between town and village but quite the opposite.13 The same could be said for Judith Pallot’s Land Reform in Russia, 1906‑1917, as Pallot criticizes educated officials for their inability to understand how responsive to external conditions the Russian peasant could be, if approached properly.14 The result, as David Kerans asserts in Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black Earth Russia, 1861‑1914, was “indifference and complacency towards science and agricultural improvement” among the peasants that “generated a wave of despair among the community of agronomic experts.”15 These works serve to explain the social breakdown that ultimately resulted in the calamity of the Bolshevik Revolution and the tragedy of collectivization. At the same time, they describe a very interventionist and overbearing state apparatus, eager to aggressively subdue the population and thereby generating considerable ill will. 6 More recently, historians investigating the urban‑rural relationship have arrived at a different and more positive characterization of agricultural reform. Ol´ga Elina’s Ot tsarskikh sadov do sovetskikh polei: Istoriia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh opytnykh uchrezhdenii XVIII‑20‑e gody XX v. finds much to celebrate in Russian experimental agriculture, and shows that for more than two centuries, beyond the revolutionary period and at least until the eve of the Stalin era, Russian agronomists built a heritage of innovative and fruitful experimentation that definitely improved agricultural productivity in Russia, and indeed throughout the world.16 Ilya Gerasimov’s Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia also tells a story of progress, at the outset implicitly agreeing with Yaney’s characterization of agricultural experts as dismissive
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and condescending, but then illustrating how direct contact with the rural population changed the experts and brought them into a closer alliance with the peasantry against the state.17 These two books provide some much‑needed nuance to a perspective that had become monolithically negative, and moreover, Elina’s discussion about the unique and partially privatized funding method for Russian agronomy, points the way to a fuller understanding of the dynamics in the countryside. And yet Elina and Gerasimov tell stories that would seem to lead toward Russian social integration and agricultural progress. As is true for Moon’s narrative, they describe breakthroughs and trajectories that, even if real, did not alter the practices of Russian agriculturalists appreciably. Put another way, recent works that view the intentions and actions of tsarist elites more charitably provide a basis for optimism that does not accord well with actual conditions. Out on the steppe, at the end of the tsarist period, ecological problems were not improving, but more importantly, the state’s chosen vehicles for environmental amelioration were not capable of delivering unambiguous messages about how to redress the worsening conditions. 7 Much more useful in explaining the limited success of tsarist‑era soil conservation efforts is Ekaterina Pravilova’s A Public Empire, in which Russian society is portrayed as deeply conflicted about the concept of the common good, and the Russian government as hesitant to assert itself when faced with problems of a public nature.18 Pravilova discusses a number of crises in the late‑tsarist era, including deforestation and the deterioration of historical monuments, which resisted easy classification as public or private problems. Russian liberals urged the government to act boldly in defense of the common good as they defined it, hoping that they “could create the nation by giving it a material foundation,” while tsarist practice generally treated private property as sacrosanct and relied upon property owners to find the best solutions.19 And yet the example of emancipation demonstrated that the state recognized a duty to redefine property rights dramatically, provided that the problem merited decisive action. As a result, the tsarist state charted a diffident course when navigating the public sphere, or res publica: facing the difficulties of governing the society of private owners, the state […] preserved different intermediate institutions, such as peasant communes, that facilitated governance and helped the state avoid “face‑to‑face” contact with property holders.20 8 The tsarist state acted in almost exactly the same way when pursuing soil conservation, with similarly ambiguous results. The result of the debate over the common good was a “mission unaccomplished,” with ambivalent tsarist‑era policies producing “fractures in the system of property rights” that grew larger and more problematic during the era of war and revolution.21 Likewise, the decision to work through intermediaries in soil conservation limited direct contact between agronomists and the peasant masses, thereby making soil conservation a province of the powerful.
The creation of military forests
9 From the very beginning of the Russian afforestation project, the state relied on the Cossack Army as a ready source of labor, despite the uneasy fit between its military mission and land reclamation work. In 1835, forty‑nine years after the formation of the Don Military Province, the Irregular Cossack Army of the Don first received the order from Imperial Ministry of the Army to manage its own forests, so as to provide the
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army with supplies of wood.22 These forests, referred to in state correspondence as “military forests“ (voiskovye lesa), also generated wood that was rationed out to soldiers for their personal use.23 In this way, forest products became part of the agreement between the Russian government and the Cossack host, whereby the Cossacks received special privileges, including the right to own land, in return for reliable state service.24 The right to choose the best methods on personal plots of land, including forested plots, was legally guaranteed to the station communes, individual Cossacks and their designees. However, despite the latitude granted to the Host, each Cossack was obligated to plant twenty‑five willow or poplar trees per year on his homestead.25 As time went by, the state’s requirements grew more explicit and codified. Throughout the 1870s, the military command gave more frequent recommendations to the Cossacks about forestry practices, and in 1877, the central military command in St. Petersburg negotiated for the right to issue orders to the local Ataman (usually worded as polite requests) indicating the best methods and best locations for forest propagation.26 As a result, the Cossack Host came to own the task of soil conservation in southern Russia.
Fig. 1 : Ivan Fedorovich, Bogdanovich, Zemli voiska donskago [Lands of the Don Cossack Host], 1833
http://kruglovka.ru/images/maps/podrobnaya‑karta‑zemli‑vojska‑donskogo.jpg.
10 The duty to afforest the steppe fell to the Cossack Army largely for practical reasons. In the early nineteenth century, the southern steppe was a thinly populated borderland with sparse infrastructure, whereas the armed forces represented a ready source of manpower with a well‑established chain of command. No additional state resources were required to create an institutional framework. Private landowners were encouraged to plant new forests, and immigrants were required to do so by Russian
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law, but these two groups were relatively small and achieved very little, given that only Cossacks possessed the right to own land in the Russian south. Beyond these requirements, the state proved very unwilling to insinuate itself in the village commune to improve agronomical methods, leaving the army as the best‑disposed organization to carry out the work.27 Institutional inertia ensured that the arrangement created in the early nineteenth century remained in force until the end of the imperial period. As V.V. Morachevskii, the director of the Informational and Publishing Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture wrote in 1914, the tsarist government accomplished very little in the field of agricultural education in the decades following emancipation, perhaps even less than in the thirty years of Nicholas I’s reign.28 The Russian Empire did not have a Ministry of Agriculture that might hypothetically have directed afforestation efforts until 1894, when the Ministry of State Property was reorganized in response to the famines of 1891 and 1892,29 and even after that the government focused what resources it had on increasing yield rather than combatting erosion.30 By this time, the Cossack system had taken hold.
11 The Cossacks, in response to their new duties, had little choice but to employ professional foresters to manage their forests and established new forests, and as a result, an influential intellectual circuit centered on military forests developed. Work on the military forests became a rite of passage for students at the St. Petersburg Forest Institute, and a tour of duty in a Cossack military forest enabled many of them to advance from Forester Second Class to First Class, thus helping to shape their later professional outlook.31 As Georgii and Nina Red´ko discuss in Istoriia lesnogo khoziaistva Rossii, a very small percentage of foresters remained in the south permanently, and for the foresters in training who made up the bulk of the experts, steppe afforestation work took on the quality of a post in an imperial hinterland.32 Foresters from the various army forests frequently held conferences to compare notes, evaluating and refining successful afforestation techniques developed by the Forest Department at a time when no one did aside from the scholars.33 As a result, an integrated space of knowledge, dominated by professionally trained experts, emerged. But the method of knowledge production and knowledge transfer among the foresters took on a hermetic quality, with expertise most often taken back to the metropole when the cadet left after a year or two. The foresters did not work with the public, but only with the experimenters at the test plots of the Russian Forest Department, and with their supervisors in the Cossack Army. 12 In the first decades after 1835, the Cossack authorities sometimes displayed an indifferent or antagonistic attitude toward their forestry duties, but over time they appear to have embraced the teachings of their forester employees, and increasingly took the lead in pursuing its conservationist responsibilities. During these earlier years, the Cossack administration assigned their troops to forest guard duty for only one year at a time, although multiple years were required to learn the job. In 1851, the Ataman issued his own rules for violations of the 1835 regulations, eliminating the threat of dismissal for violators. In 1877, false rumors about the transfer of Cossack woodlands to the oblast government (as punishment for failing to observe best practices) resulted in a fury of unauthorized logging.34 But there was steady movement in the other direction; in 1879, the Don Army Administration had taken to complaining about the shortcomings of its own forest department, noting in its annual report that the forest department, by the way, has expressed its agreement that until now there has been too little attention turned to the highly important cultivation work
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for afforestation, occupied often by flying sands, and the securing of which, in our opinion, presents an urgent need.35 13 The number of forest guards slowly drifted upward, from four in 1869 to 180 in 1890 to 263 in 1914.36 Toward the end of the tsarist era, the Cossack Army administration began to award prizes, with funds drawn from their own resources, to local citizens and communes for afforestation work and success in securing sands. Those who established 10 desiatins of new forest on sands received a first‑class prize, and received a silver medal and a two hundred ruble cash prize; those who planted 5 000 seedlings or more won a second‑class prize, consisting of a silver medal. These prizes were awarded annually until 1914.37
14 At the same time, there is evidence that the military method of administration influenced the practice of forest management on the southern steppes in a negative way, especially with respect to regimentation and rigidity. For instance, foresters had to file annual reports about their proposed methods and scale of work, with budgets down to the kopeck and areas to be afforested down to the square sazhen.38 There were instances when foresters had to ask permission to cut as few as five cubic meters of wood in order to create boundary fences.39 Foresters were obligated to follow planting patterns exactly; from 1858 until 1879, for instance, army foresters were ordered to follow the instructions of the guberniia governor, H.G. Mal´gin, and to plant willow trees in rows, strictly alternating with rows of pine, oak, birch, and white acacia in a predetermined pattern. In 1879, this pattern was altered in an official decree issued by the Ataman to feature a precise ratio of fifteen ash trees, five white acacia, five maple, and five of yellow acacia, planted to a depth of half an arshin and at a density of 14,400 seedlings per hectare.40 These prescriptions, issued for entire regions regardless of local variation, brought poor results: in 1880, for instance, 99.5% of seedlings in the Orekhovaia forest district died, because, according to the responsible forester, the instructions were designed for black earth soils, whereas those in his area were of the chestnut type.41 In 1897, a new plantation established on a patch of sand between the Medveditsa and Ilovaia Rivers completely perished because the instructions were better suited to the northern section of the steppe.42 Another negative aspect of the militarized nature of the project was the reluctant if not resentful attitude of ordinary Cossacks toward the afforestation effort who did not see forestry as properly part of their duties; authorities often complained about the failure of Cossacks to report for duty, or the habit of sending underage children to do the work.43 15 Despite these serious impediments, the Cossack Army was by far the agency responsible for establishing the most new forest on the southern steppe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the first five years of the army’s efforts, four million trees were planted, and almost fifteen million by the year 1849.44 Given a standard density of 14,400 trees per hectare, this would mean that the Cossack Army established more than a thousand hectares of new forest by 1850, although ostensibly not all survived. Efforts greatly accelerated in the 1870s, in response to the growing scientific consensus about ecological degradation, and by the end of that decade, each of the ten Cossack forest districts was planting between 30 and 50 desiatins of new forest each year (roughly 35 to 55 hectares), or 300 to 500 hectares per year, at an expense of 3 000 rubles per year.45 By the 1890s the annual expenses reached 35,000 rubles.46 By 1890, the Cossack Army had established 24,418 desiatins of forest, and by 1900 that number had grown to 29,534 desiatins. On the eve of the revolution, the Army had succeeded in cultivating 36,799 desiatins, nearly all of which were near rivers (to control gullies) or drifting
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sands, whereas it is estimated that before the afforestation work, these ten districts had 27,306 desiatins of forest.47 Although these numbers pale in comparison with those achieved by the Soviets in the 1920s and 1930s, the population base and the infrastructure were much more extensive in the twentieth century. A million settlers arrived in the region between 1860 and 1900, and another seven hundred thousand in the fourteen years after that. When compared with the accomplishments of contemporary institutions, the results of the army’s efforts are more impressive. Comprehensive totals for forests planted by private landowners do not exist, but other agencies achieved essentially nothing. The Appanage Department of Samara and Stavropol´ provinces, succeeded in establishing only 8.1 desiatins by the year 1885.48 Likewise, the zemstva succeeded in establishing almost no new forests despite frequent encouragement to do so, although there was some success in encouraging peasant communes to plant shrubs near their fields.49 16 Thus the tsarist government devised, in an improvised manner, an enlightened plan to ensure that the Cossacks were supplied with sufficient timber, which then slowly transformed into a program to safeguard the southern steppe from ecological degradation. The conflicting interests produced notable results, but nonetheless only partial success. Choosing to remain hidden behind other institutions, the state did not create an agency able to establish the millions of desiatins of forest that experts suggested would be needed to produce any macroscopic change. The most salient counterexample here is France, which in 1859 passed laws about forest‑centered erosion control and in 1882 initiated active campaigns of pasture improvement and erosion abatement under the direction of the French Forest Service; Austria‑Hungary then emulated French methods in the late nineteenth century.50 This is not to say the forests built in the Russian way, planted by the Cossack Army and the Vladikavkaz railroad, did not help combat soil erosion, the spread of gullies, and drifting sands.51 The American forester Gifford Pinchot visited Russia in 1902 and reported being told that the forests were designed exclusively to combat erosion, and that they appeared to be succeeding admirably.52 The archival record corroborates Pinchot’s claims about the rationale for the forests or their beneficial influence. However, in spite of the positive effect that these forests may have had, the area of blowing sands at that very time was nevertheless increasing by 6 000 desiatins annually.53 17 It would seem that choice to use the army as the primary soil conservation agency in the Russian south was successful in limited terms, in that the program launched successfully and annual targets were met. However, it is also clear that from a larger perspective, the military, with its other responsibilities, its internal conflicts and its limited authority over the civilian population, was unable to address the problem systematically. There is no evidence that the Cossacks were instructed to adopt more careful agricultural practices to alleviate erosion, and thus no thoroughgoing or integrated program for soil conservation materialized. In addition, the Cossack Host, unlike the French Forest Service, had no authorization to address the problem systematically, and therefore the total amount of eroded land grew regularly on lands not under their control. Furthermore, the decision to “outsource” conservation work through a sometimes unwilling bureaucracy had long‑term effects on attitudes about environmental work in the Russian south, which will be discussed below.
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The creation of the railroad forests
18 A second institution that played a prominent and perhaps unexpected role in conservation work was the Vladikavkaz railroad. Its participation took two forms. The first form was directed at reversing the damage done during the creation of railroads. The cutting of roadbeds, like the creating of plowed fields, stripped the upper layer of vegetation from large swathes of land, which in turn often formed patches of sand and gullies capable of spreading and threatening agricultural zones. In addition, the gullies and drifting sands destabilized the railbeds and gave rise to serious dust storms that interfered with the regular travel of the trains. When this occurred, and the oblast government received complaints from farmers, the railroad officials received orders from the government to hire foresters and afforest the land themselves.54 The number of hectares afforested in this way annually numbered in the dozens—small perhaps, but roughly equal to the amount established by the zemstva. This arrangement remained in place well into the Soviet era.55
Fig. 2 : 100 ruble note issued in 1918 by the administration by the Society of the Vladikavkaz Railroad depicting the routes under its control
19 The railroads played a second, less direct but more important role in disseminating soil conservation information among the rural population, but their message contradicted itself at its foundation. The Vladikavkaz railroad supplied the funding without which public agricultural education would not have taken place on the steppe in the tsarist era. Although deforestation was identified as a leading cause of environmental degradation, Russian experts also recognized, as described in The Plough That Broke the Steppes, that the predominant agricultural methods of the Russian peasant had evolved at a time of plentiful land and ample opportunity for extensive areas of fallow. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the population density no longer allowed for the extended resting of land. The increased population density was exacerbated by the loss of some land to exhaustion and abandonment. In 1872, the oblast administration conducted a survey indicating that there were 7,953,672 desiatins of arable land in the oblast, but a subsequent survey conducted in 1896 revealed that this number had fallen to 7,443,052, a decrease of six percent in only one generation.56 Another survey, conducted in 1907, showed that fertile land had decreased by 60%
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when compared with the 1850s, and in some places in Don okrug, the losses reached 90%.57 A vicious circle had developed, wherein the pressure to exploit the land more intensively, and the growing orientation toward market crops, forced more land out of production, which in turn greatly reduced the pressure on the remaining area. Agronomists suggested new methods, including more careful plowing, snow retention measures, and complex crop rotations, but the imperial administration was legally bound by the 1835 agreement with the Cossacks to not interfere with their preferred methods of management. Education was the best alternative, but as was true with afforestation, the imperial administration chose to route the efforts through an intermediary body with its own resources and its own support base—as well as its own economic prerogatives. The railroad sponsored efforts to increase the agricultural acumen of the citizens and reverse these trends, but the method of delivery ultimately undercut the conservationist message.58 20 In this case, the state worked through the Don Agricultural Society, a voluntary and private association of noble landowners and industrialists, chartered in 1888 by the Ministry of the Army, to formulate prescriptions and improve agricultural production and profitability in the south.59 By 1914 there were thirty‑eight branches throughout the Russian south, and the largest, centered on Rostov, had 116 members and published its own journal.60 The Agricultural Society was in its own right an important, indirect conduit for conservationist activity, since it maintained staffs of agronomists, agricultural economists and educators. But because a significant part of the Society’s budget came in fact from the Imperial Department of State Property, the Society was essentially a vehicle for state efforts, albeit one with its own priorities. The society applied for government approval for specific projects, which were most often approved. Indeed, the Society even requested reimbursement from the government when its agronomists on staff traveled between the society’s experimental stations.61 By 1917, the Society received almost 60,000 rubles a year from the imperial treasury, much more than half its annual budget. The Agricultural Society used these funds to administer on the state’s behalf an enormous agronomical infrastructure: an extensive network of experimental fields, a seed inspection station, seventy seed production centers, a meteorological department, a model farm for silk and silkworm production, a research center for technical and medicinal plants, a research center for the botanical study of wetland meadows, a center for visual aids, a technical school for repair of agricultural implements, a wineries laboratory, a beekeeping research station, a vegetable packing factory, and a correspondence school for agricultural education.62 The society received specific approval for all of these projects, so the government explicitly or implicitly agreed with the need for all of them; yet the Russian government preferred to employ a private institution to oversee their implementation. 21 In 1913, the administration of the Vladikavkaz railroad first contacted the Don Agricultural Society to inquire about the possibility of creating a traveling agricultural exposition and education center and asked for assistance in creating the displays.63 The project thus involved a semi‑governmental body, and thus had at least tacit consent of the state, but the cost of the project was financed by the railroad, a private enterprise. The Russian agronomicheskii poezd, or “agrotrain” resembled the promotional trains operated by American railroad companies in the late nineteenth century, and indeed the inspiration for the train was the American version, but the goals differed subtly. Whereas the American trains sought to spur interest in land sales along the railroad, the Russian agrotrain did seek to improve agricultural methods, only so as to raise
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yields and increase freight traffic for the railroad.64 The train consisted of between eleven and fourteen cars, six of which were museum cars with exhibits featuring improved agricultural methods, two cars which were organized as stores selling seeds and books, plus a car with an electric generator, offices, a cafeteria, and a sleeping car. Lectures were given at every stop, where the train remained for a few days at a time. Sixty thousand people met the train in 1913, twenty thousand in 1914, more than forty‑one thousand in 1915, and fifty‑two thousand in 1916, when the train was discontinued because of the war, and was revived for a short time in the early 1920s.65 According to its proponents, the train aimed to advance conservationism by “cultivating in the younger generation a love for nature and for knowledge, and inspire in them a desire for agronomical action among the backward mass of the population,” and at least 177,000 people participated in the attempt, but exhibits presented a mixed message.66 Although the planning materials stressed the love of nature, by the time the exhibits reached the stations, the displays focused relentlessly on maximizing gross output, in line with the railroad’s hope of increased levies on freight, rather than ameliorating the worsening soil conditions. The railroads, then, directly undercut soil conservation efforts by encouraging the very practices that had produced increased erosion on the steppe in the first place.
Conclusion : Steppe forests in single file
22 The Russian government’s decision to rely upon semi‑civil, semi‑state agencies with primary duties far removed from conservationism to carry out agronomical improvements had both beneficial short‑term effects on the conduct of conservation work in tsarist Russia, and ambivalent long‑term effects upon subsequent environmental work in Russia. On the one hand, the Russian choice to work toward conservationism indirectly lent the efforts immediate prestige and stability, since they reached the average citizen through the auspices of a recognized and well‑established external institution. Delegating responsibility to institutions with well‑established chains of command obviated the need to mold the attitudes of subjects or rely upon their actions. The chosen vehicles were able to achieve moderate levels of success, well before most other countries had developed anything comparable. This is especially remarkable when contrasted with the somewhat traditional view, expressed by Lazar Volin, that the tsarist government had little interest in improving agronomical practices in the countryside; in fact, the tsarist government showed prescient interest in the problem of erosion, and acted on this interest.67
23 On the other hand, conservation work was, from the very beginning, conceptualized and implemented with an inherent imperial logic, through a pre‑existing hierarchy. It is noteworthy that both the railroad and the army share a connection with the “high modern project” of straight lines, schedules, and regularity, which at least in the case of afforestation, resulted in an inflexibility about methods. A number of environmental historians, as well as the political scientist James C. Scott, have condemned environmental initiatives that run roughshod over local conditions in pursuit of an idealized and modernized landscape.68 Forest workers frequently complained about the inapplicability of their instructions to local conditions, but the militarized setting made departing from orders a form of insubordination. Beyond the problems that stemmed from inflexibility, centralized decision‑making, and oversimplification, the decision to
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entrust conservationism to institutions with pre‑existing priorities meant that the pre‑existing priorities colored the new auxiliary efforts. In both the case of the army and the railroad, soil conservationism was linked with duty or profit rather than with the common or public good. Profit motives shaped the content of the agrotrain exhibits, which were oriented toward the increase of agricultural output first and toward ecological sustainability only rhetorically. Doing so also reflected a tendency to “muddle through” rather than fashion thoroughgoing solutions regarding the public sphere; this is also reflected in the fact, noted by Catherine Evtuhov, that even “the notoriously centralized Russian state […] had not by the end of the nineteenth century managed to execute [a] uniform and centrally‑driven investigation of its territories.”69 The Russian “agrarian question” eluded easy solution because, as was true for the soil conservation program, the problems required a refashioned relationship between state and society that the regime was simply not disposed to pursue. Both ecological degradation and rural traditionalism, as experts at the time recognized, had deep causes, rooted in economics, politics, and history. Only comprehensive reforms could hope to reverse the damage, but the tsarist government was not prepared to implement changes that altered the existing structures of power.
NOTES
1. This society maintained its own journal, Imperatorskoe obshchestvo sel´skogo khoziaistva Iuzhnoi Rossii [The imperial society of agriculture of Southern Russia], beginning in the 1820s, although its focus did not fall on public outreach. 2. For instance, a recent survey of Russian environmental history mentions the progress made by tsarist‑era agronomists, but when discussing implementation, mentions only that Russia lacked an extension service like that found in the United States. See Paul Josephson, An Environmental History of Russia (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46. 3. Leslie Symons, Russian Agriculture : A Geographic Survey (New York : John Wiley & Sons, 1972), 294. 4. Dokuchaev, because of his position as founder of a soil classificatory system subsequently adopted around the world, features prominently in many histories of Russian science and has been the subject of numerous biographical studies. Dokuchaev’s theoretical contributions figure prominently in works including (but not limited to) : L.A. Chebotareva, “Vasilii Vasil´evich Dokuchaev, 1846‑1903 : Biograficheskii Ocherk [V.V. Dokuchaev, 1846‑1903 : Biographical Essay]” in V.V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia [Collected Works], 9 Vols. (M. – L. : Akademiia nauk, 1949‑1961), ix, 49‑153 ; I. Krupenikov and L. Krupenikov, Vasilii Vasil´evich Dokuchaev (M. : Molodaia gvardiia, 1950) ; S.V. Zonn, Vasilii Vasil´evich Dokuchaev, 1846‑1903 (M. : Nauka, 1991) ; I. Krupenikov and L. Krupenikov, Puteshestviia i ėkspeditsii V.V. Dokuchaeva [The travels and expeditions of V.V. Dokuchaev] (M. : Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo geograficheskoi literatury, 1949), 5‑30 ; E.S. Kul´pin‑Gubaidullin, “Vasilii Dokuchaev kak predtecha biosferno‑kosmicheskogo istorizma : sud´ba uchenogo i sud´by Rossii [Vasilii Dokuchaev as precursor of biospheric‑cosmic historicism : the fate of a scholar and the fate of Russia],” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost ´ [Social science and the contemporary era], no. 2 (2010) : 109‑110 ; Catherine Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions : Cadastral Soil Mapping and Agro‑Environmental
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Issues,” in B.P. Warkentin, ed., Footprints in the Soil : People and Ideas in Soil History (Amsterdam : Elsevier, 2006) ; David Moon, “The Environmental History of the Russian Steppes : Vasilii Dokuchaev and the Harvest Failure of 1891,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 15 (2005) : 149‑174 ; Denis J.B. Shaw and Jonathan D. Oldfield, “Landscape Science : A Russian Geographical Tradition,” Annals of the Association of American Geography, 97 (2007) : 111‑126 ; V.A. Bushakov and N.E. Drogobich, “O proizkhozhdenii landshaftnogo termina ‘step’ [About the origins of the landscape term “steppe”]” in A.A. Chibilev, ed., Stepi Severnoi Evrazii : ėtalonnye stepnye landshafty [The steppe of Northern Eurasia : models of the steppe landscape] (Orenburg, Russia : Gazprompechat´, 2003) ; Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993). 5. David Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013). 6. Dokuchaev actually held a rather moderate position in the debate about anthropogenic ecological disturbance on the Russian steppe. Some observers, such as Ivan Palimpsestov, went much farther than Dokuchaev ever dared, and argued that the disturbances to the steppe environment had not only dried the land, but had changed the steppe climate. This point of view, although at the extreme end of the debate’s spectrum at the time, received official support in a state investigation led by the Valuev Commission in 1873. See Moon, The Plough that Broke the Steppes, 122. 7. The best evidence from current palynological analyses suggests that forests were not widespread on the steppe in the centuries before Russian colonization, but even in the nineteenth century, many analysts suspected that perceptions of vegetative changes were essentially a form of nostalgia. Maria Loskutova goes so far as to contend that no reputable forester took the idea seriously in the nineteenth century, Moon’s claims not withstanding. See Marina Loskutova and Anastasia Fedotova, Stanovlenie prikladnykh biologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii : vzaimodeistvie nauki i praktiki v XIX – nachale XX vv. [The establishment of applied biological research in Russia : The interaction of science and practice in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries] (SPb. : Nestor‑Istoriia, 2014), 7‑40. 8. As both Loren Graham and Alexander Vucinich have noted, the influence of the German example in the development of Russian science can scarcely be overestimated. For just one example related to biological science, see Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union : A Short History (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993), 237. 9. Agricultural journals of the late imperial period are filled with articles by frustrated agronomists and confused farmers, lamenting the failure of agronomical methods to penetrate the peasant consciousness. To take but one example, a peasant named Alexander Nazarov wrote to the journal Khoziaistvo na Donu [Management on the Don] in 1907 that his village was surrounded by one thousand desiatins of sand, which previously were luxurious meadows, but that “the commune refuses to take any kind of measures.” The editors of the journal suggested that he plant grapevines on these lands himself. A.I. Nazarov, “Voprosy A.I. Nazarova o peskakh [A.I. Nazarov’s questions about sands],” Khoziaistvo na Donu, no. 9 (18 February 1907) : 120. Another peasant wrote in the same journal that he “heard that abroad, agricultural management goes differently than it does with us, and they grow twice as much grain as do we, but as for who is to blame for this, I do not know.” Vikhliantsev, “Pis´mo podpischika Vikhliantseva Oblastnomu Agronomu o nuzhdakh khoziaistva [The letter of subscriber Vikhliantsev to the Oblast Argronomist about the needs of management],” Khoziastvo na Donu 14 (1 April 1907) : 214. 10. See N. Sredinskii, “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk lesorazvedeniia v iuzhno‑russkikh stepiakh [A short historical essay about forest cultivation in southern Russian steppes],” Lesnoi zhurnal [Forest journal], no. 17 (1887), 741 ; N.T. Mirov, “Two Centuries of Afforestation and Shelterbelt Planting on the Russian Steppes,” Journal of Forestry 33 (1935) : 971‑973 ; Peter Rostankowski, “Transformation of Nature in the Soviet Union : Proposals, Plans and Reality,” Soviet Geography,
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no. 6 (June 1982) : 380‑389 ; Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest (Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 142‑167. 11. George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize (Urbana, Chicago, London : University of Illinois Press, 1982). David Macey’s Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861‑1906 : The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press, 1986) also visits this theme. Deserving mention here is also Alexander Gerschenkron, “Russian Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 1861‑1917,” in Continuity in History and Other Essays (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1968), 140‑256. 12. Gerschenkron, “Russian Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 1861‑1917,” 5. 13. Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward : Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861‑1914 (New York : St. Martin’s, 1999). 14. Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906‑1917 : Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford, Eng. : Clarendon Press, 1999). 15. David Kerans, Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black Earth Russia, 1861‑1914 (Budapest : Central European Press, 2001), 132. 16. Ol´ga Elina, Ot tsarskikh sadov do sovetskikh polei : Istoriia sel´skokhoziaistvennykh opytnykh uchrezhdenii XVIII‑20‑e gody XX v. [From tsarist gardens to soviet fields : The history of agricultural experimental institutions from the eighteenth century to the 1920s], (M. : Egmont Russia, 2008). 17. Ilya Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia : Rural Professionals and Self‑Organization, 1905‑30 (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 18. Ekaterina Pravilova, A Public Empire : Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2014). 19. Pravilova, A Public Empire, 16. 20. Pravilova, A Public Empire, 79. Pravilova also writes that the Russian state “proved to be very reluctant” in using its power to the fullest, ibid., 93. 21. Pravilova, A Public Empire, 270‑271. 22. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii [The full collection of the laws of the Russian Empire], 2, x (No. 8163, 26 May 1835), article 36, 78 ; article 46, 88 ; articles 209‑17. 23. GARO (Gosudarstvennyi archiv Rostovskoi oblasti – State Archive of Rostov Oblast) f. 301, op. 27, d. 5, l. 4. 24. For works that discuss the relationship between the Russian state and the Cossack Host include Shane O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants : The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (New York : St. Martin’s Press, 2000) ; Peter Holquist, “From Estate to Ethnos : The Changing Nature of Cossack Identity in the Twentieth Century,” in Nurit Schliefman, ed., Russia at a Crossroads ? Historical Memory and Political Practice (Portland OR : Frank Cass, 1998) : 89‑123 ; Thomas Barrett, At the Edge of Empire : The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700‑1860 (Boulder, CO : Westview Press, 1999) ; Brian J. Boeck, Imperial Boundaries : Cossack Communities and Empire‑Building in the Age of Peter the Great (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2009) ; Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier : The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500‑1800 (Bloomington, IN : University of Indiana Press, 2002) 25. A.A. Pushkarenko, G.P. Dolzhenko, and Ia.A. Perekhodov, Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo (vtoraia polovina XIX‑nachalo XX v.) [The protection of nature in the Don military oblast´ (the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century)] (Rostov‑on‑Don : “Terra”, 2000), 38. 26. GARO f. 301, op. 27, d. 41, l. 4. 27. Even in the case of the Stolypin reforms, which represent the most thoroughgoing tsarist attempt to remake agricultural patterns, the Russian state concentrated on matters of external organization rather than management practices, and generally shied away from specifying agronomical techniques. See Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize ; Pallot, Land Reform in Russia,
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1906‑1917 ; David Macey, Government and Peasant ; Richard Hennessey, The Agrarian Question in Russia 1905‑1907 : The Inception of the Stolypin Reform (Giessen : Wilhelm Schmitz Verlag, 1977) ; and Corinne Gaudin, “‘No Place To Lay My Head’ : Marginalization and the Right to Land during the Stolypin Reforms,” Slavic Review, 57, 4 (Winter 1998) : 747‑773. 28. V.V. Morachevskii, Agronomicheskaia pomoshch´ v Rossii [Agronomical aid in Russia] (SPb. : Izdatel´stvo Departmenta zemledeliia, 1914), 74‑80. 29. Lazar Volin reports that such important policymakers as Minister of Interior Pyotr Durnovo and Minister of Finance Ivan Vyshnegradskii “opposed the idea of the rumored creation of a ministry of agriculture and even ridiculed the idea.” See Lazar Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1970), 66. 30. Ihor Stebelsky, “Agricultural Development and Soil Degradation,” in Fred Singleton, ed., Environmental Problems in the Soviet Union & Eastern Europe (London – Boulder : Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1987), 76. Although the Ministry of Agriculture theoretically made agricultural education possible, the Ministry, in the words of David Kerans, “had no local organs” and “was so pitifully funded that it could not even dream of supporting any agronomic aid programs.” See Kerans, Mind and Labor, 391. 31. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 103, l. 17o. 32. G.I. Red´ko and N.G. Red´ko, Istoriia lesnogo khoziaistva Rossii [The history of forest management in Russia] (SPb. – M. : MGUL, 2002), 153. 33. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 103, l. 4, 83. 34. Pushkarenko, et al., Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo, 42‑43. 35. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 41, l. 90. 36. Pushkarenko, et al., Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo, 45. 37. Pushkarenko, et al., Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo, 98 ; GARO, f. 44, op. 1, d. 1, l. 10. 38. GARO, f. 301, op. 27. d. 55, l. 10‑35. 39. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 41, l. 97. 40. The arshin is an old Russian unit of measurement equal to 71 centimeters. 41. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 41, l. 159o. 42. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 158, l. 1. 43. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 259, l. 3. 44. GARO, f. 301, op. 1, d. 531, l. 62‑63. 45. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 41, l. 4o. The desiatin, like the verst, is an obsolete Russian unit of measurement almost equal in size to its modern metric equivalent. A desiatin is just a bit larger than a hectare, and a verst closely approximates a kilometer. There were five Cossack stations in Ust´‑Medveditskii okrug, two in Khoperskii okrug, two in Donetskii okrug, and one in Miusskii okrug. 46. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 81, l. 1. 47. GARO, f. 301 op. 1, d. 3164, l. 83 ; f. 301, op. 1 d. 3276, l. 100o ; f. 301, op. 1, d. 3510, l. 91‑93. It is very important to note that these gains were more than offset by the aggressive deforestation on the lands privately controlled by the soldiers. A commission established in 1907 to study the reasons for deforestation in the Russian south charged that “the destruction of the station forests is an unfortunate fact, which no one can doubt,” and that the forest “is being destroyed without remorse, without compassion, and mainly, without a discussion about the consequences of this pitiable phenomenon.” It was calculated that the Cossacks had cut more than 99,000 desiatins of forest since the organization of the region in 1835. 48. N.K. Genko, Razvedenie lesa i ustroistvo vodosbornykh plotin na udel´nykh stepiakh [The сultivation of forest and organization of drainage dams on the demesnial steppe] (SPb., 1896), 13‑15. 49. Moon, The Plough That Broke The Steppes, 194.
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50. Hugh Bennett, Soil Conservation (New York – London : McGraw‑Hill Book Company, 1939), 906‑907. See also J.Y. Morris, “Soil Conservation Practices in France,” New Zealand Journal of Forestry, VII, 2 (1955) : 12‑25, and ibid., Part II,” VII, 3 (1955) : 87‑95. 51. The Soviets maintained their belief that afforestation improved agricultural yields until the fall of the USSR, and produced statistics showing the advantage gained. See Stephen Brain, “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” Environmental History, 15, 4 (October 2010), 24. 52. Pinchot Papers, Library of Congress, Box 715, “Notes taken by Mr. Pinchot on his trip through Russia and Siberia,” p. 49‑61. 53. Pushkarenko, et al., Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo, 27. 54. GARO, f. 26, op. 1, d. 248, l. 3. 55. GARO, f. 1902, op. 2, d. 18, l. 3. 56. Pushkarenko, et al., Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo, 60. 57. A. Samokhin, “Tekushchiia zadachi melioratsii [The present tasks of amelioration],” Severo‑Kavkazskii Biulleten´ [The North Caucasus Bulletin], no. 1‑2 (January‑February 1917), 62. 58. GARO, f. 521, op. 1, d. 2, l. 3. 59. GARO, f. 79, op. 1, d. 9, l. 1. 60. GARO, f. 301, op. 27, d. 103, l. 8. 61. GARO, f. 79, op. 1, d. 7, l. 2. 62. GARO, f. 1902, op. 2, d. 22, l. 25. 63. “Agronomicheskii poezd KOPS’a [The agronomical train of KOPS],” Iugo‑Vostok [The Southeast], no. 2‑3 (February 1923), 208. 64. “K rabote agronomicheskogo poezda KOPS’a [On the work of the agronomical train KOPS”],” Iugo‑Vostok, no. 5‑6 (May‑June, 1923), 77. 65. GARO, f. 1902, op. 2, d. 18, l. 3. 66. “K rabote,” 88. 67. Volin, A Century of Russian Agriculture, 66. 68. See James Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to improve the Human Condition have failed (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1999). Fernando Coronil, in contrast, argued that Scott’s framework was too simple, and contended instead that “states embody both the abstract logic Scott associates with high modernism and also the practical knowledge he identifies with metis [practical knowledge].” See Fernando Coronil, “Smelling Like a Market,” American Historical Review, 106, 1 (February 2001) : 127. 69. Evtuhov, “The Roots of Dokuchaev’s Scientific Contributions…,” 131.
ABSTRACTS
A deep suspicion haunted Russian agronomists throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth: agriculture on the steppe would never be sustainable until farmers learned to restore the balance of nature in the Russian south. The region appeared to offer agricultural plenty if only the damage caused by thoughtless exploitation could be repaired. But scientists did not agree about the best methods for reestablishing the balance, and the one measure that gained state acceptance—afforestation—was routed through the Cossack Army and the Vladikavkaz railroad, agencies with other, higher priorities. The state’s decision to remain aloof
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from the peasantry with the soil conservation initiative ensured that the gap between educated society and the rural citizenry remained deep and wide.
Tout au long du XIXe et assez avant dans le XXe siècle, les agronomes russes furent tourmentés par un doute profond : l’exploitation de la steppe ne deviendrait durable que lorsque les exploitants agricoles sauraient comment rétablir l’équilibre entre les écosystèmes dans le sud russe. La région semblait riche en possibilités sur le plan agricole si seulement les dommages causés par une exploitation irréfléchie pouvaient être réparés. Mais les scientifiques n’étaient pas d’accord sur les meilleures méthodes à adopter pour rétablir cet équilibre. La reforestation fut la seule des mesures à recueillir l’approbation de l’État et sa mise en œuvre fut confiée à l’armée cosaque et aux chemins de fer de Vladikavkaz, qui avaient des priorités plus importantes. La décision de l’État de rester distant de la paysannerie dans le cadre de l’initiative de la conservation des sols ne fit que maintenir l’existence du fossé, large et profond, qui séparait la société éduquée de la population rurale.
AUTHOR
STEPHEN BRAIN
Mississippi State University, [email protected]
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Why did the attempt under stalin to increase agricultural productivity prove to be such a fundamental failure ? On blocking the implementation of progress in agrarian technology (1929‑1941) Pourquoi, sous Stalin, la tentative d’augmenter la productivité agricole s’est-elle révélée un échec désastreux ? Du blocage de la mise en œuvre du progrès dans la technologie agricole (1929-1941)
Stephan Merl
EDITOR'S NOTE
Translated from German by Bill Templer
1 The Marxists harboured great expectations of a revolutionising of agricultural productive forces in the transition to a “Socialist” agriculture, which in their conception would be characterized by large‑scale enterprises.1 The external prerequisites for a rapid increase in hectare yields and a lasting improvement in the output of Soviet agriculture were very good at the end of the 1920s. The Russian experts by then had come to play a leading role in international agrarian research. They had investigated the regional peculiarities of farming in Russia and were in a good position to draft sweeping programmes for agrarian reform.2 Economic planning promised to translate new agricultural knowledge more rapidly into production, thus facilitating a substantial rise in hectare yields and animal performance.3 Small‑scale production was still predominant and displayed a range of serious defects, including strip positioning, numerous border furrows, remoteness of land under cultivation, strip farming (cherespolositsa), primitive technology and a lack of adequate knowledge
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among the producers. The prospect of overcoming these weaknesses promised significant growth in yields, and this also was in evidence in the second half of the 1920s.4
2 This paper seeks to examine why a country with such excellent agronomists in the 1930s did not prove able to implement much of their knowledge in practice in a bid to achieve the rapid rise in per hectare yields which policy desired. The focus here is principally on the measures which had been introduced and pursued with notable success since the 1906 Stolypin agrarian reform: land consolidation, the introduction of progressive crop rotation and the use of a selected seeds. Until now research had paid little attention to the fact that the regime under Stalin continued with these measures and consistently accorded them great importance. Just in the 1930s alone, four large‑scale campaigns were launched to implement them. Why then did they fail? What informal institutions acted to prevent the agricultural producers, those in responsible positions in the kolkhozes and in the local party and Soviet state bureaucracy, from introducing the necessary crop rotations? Why did the agricultural producers under Stalin lose interest to such a marked degree in increasing their yields? The investigation of these questions sheds revealing light on the contradictory nature of Stalin’s agrarian policy. It highlights the specific structure of this policy and its long‑term consequences. The increase in yield per hectare and in animal performance remained comparatively modest in the Soviet Union even after Stalin’s death. Poor harvests under Brezhnev would shake the regime anew.5 3 The present essay addresses first the question as to whether agriculture under Stalin can be termed “industrialised agrarian production,” as it is sometimes called in the contemporary literature on development policy (section 1). Then it deals in a strictly chronological way with the reaction of the regime in the 1930s to catastrophes in agriculture it had itself created: the loss of control over the soil by forced collectivisation (section 2); the neglect of agricultural technology causing weed infestation in the fields and decreasing yields (section 3); the total neglect of crop rotations in the agricultural enterprises and the blocking of the transition to useful crop rotations by linking the obligatory delivery of grain to the land sown (section 4); the extensive loss in selected seeds undermining the “life in prosperity” that Stalin had promised due to the poor harvest of 1936 (section 5); whom to blame of sabotage for the failure to increase agricultural production and the spread of animal epidemic diseases (section 6); the desire among the agricultural producers to elude “bonded labour” by leaving the kolkhoz and returning to private farming after the good harvest of 1937 (section 7). Finally the paper examines the attempt by the People’s Commissar Ivan Benediktov in 1939 to take stock of agricultural policy and development (section 8) and explores the grandiose regional plans for the transformation of nature (section 9). A concluding section discusses the paradoxical character of state action in Soviet agricultural policy (section10).
1-Did collectivisation mean a transition to “industrialised agrarian production” ?
4 Before the onset of collectivisation, the party had always described Socialist agriculture as fully mechanised large‑scale enterprises based on tractor power. In connection with the First Five‑Year Plan, the first initial projects were worked out on an experimental
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basis for establishing model large‑scale agrarian enterprises. Especially ambitious were plans to bring together agricultural and industrial production in the form of agro‑industrial combines and to equalize the divide between living conditions in urban areas and the countryside by means of “agro‑cities.”6 The agro‑industrial combines, such as those drafted by Ia. Nikulikhin at the beginning of the 1930s, were designed to encompass an area of ca. 20,000 hectares.7 Ambitious plans were worked out to settle the nomads in Kazakhstan.8 Huge state investments would have been required to realise each of these projects in anticipation of the envisioned future structure of agriculture. At the end of the 1920s, the planners were convinced that the prerequisites to move on to “industrialised” agriculture in a larger‑scale framework were not yet given. Consequently, the First Five‑Year Plan, even in its “optimal variant” adopted in April 1929, expected that small‑scale farming would still remain dominant over the longer term.9 Only after industrialisation had created the proper prerequisites would the general transition to large‑scale enterprises in agriculture then also gain traction in the mid‑1930s.10
5 As is well known, the forced collectivisation torpedoed all these plans. It was based in the winter 1929‑30 on the massive use of force against the peasants. Collectivisation now no longer aimed at creating well‑structured large‑scale agrarian enterprises. Rather, with the “struggle for grain,” it sought solely to subjugate the peasants, who supposedly were sabotaging Socialist construction. The “dwarf kolkhozes” that arose in the transition to the 1930s usually brought together only a small number of peasant communities, and with approximately 400 hectares of land, had only one tenth of the minimal land area originally planned for the large‑scale enterprises at their disposal. In addition, the kolkhozes only possessed equipment for small‑scale farming, since mechanised technology from 1930 on was supplied exclusively to state farms or machine‑tractor stations. The ambitious projects of individual planners such as Nikulikhin thus came to nought. In view of the striking lack of agricultural technology and the necessity of concentrating the available means for investment in industry, beginnings were made locally to establish some “kolkhoz giants” and to sell off the inventory of the peasants. But since the state did not provide any funding, the enterprises existed solely on paper, and already in the spring of 1930 they reverted once more into individual farmsteads.11 6 To date the literature has paid scant attention to the fact that the regime reacted to the famine in 1932/33, which had been caused by the brutal expropriation of the agricultural produce, by introducing a fundamental reform in their agrarian policy. This points up just how dangerous Stalin regarded the situation that had developed.12 In order not to jeopardise his rule, he was unable to admit publicly that forced industrialisation and collectivisation had caused a famine with its millions of victims.13 The forced collectivisation had been driven solely by the interest of the state to subjugate and expropriate the peasantry. The now established “kolkhoz system” was meant to put an end to the arbitrariness that the agricultural producers had formerly been subjected to. In substance, this was a compromise between the interests of the state and those of the peasants. With the return to the principle of tax in kind through obligatory delivery of agricultural products per hectare or animal to the state, it ensured the state a very high proportion of agricultural produce without having to completely cover the costs of production. In addition, it took the interests of the kolkhoz members (kolkhozniki) into account: with the granting of the right to private
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plots (and the temporary furthering of maintenance of private productive animals) and a “prepayment of natural goods” during the threshing based on achieved labour days (trudodni) as a basis for the income distribution at year’s end, it secured the kolkhozniki the possibility to survive.14 7 The “kolkhoz system” was in existence from 1933 until the forced enlargement of the kolkhozes between 1949 and 1953. From its inception, it put an end for the next two decades to all experiments in the direction of an “industrialised” agricultural production. By separating private plots from kolkhoz production, it conserved primitive forms of agricultural production. Under Stalin, the kolkhoz economy remained largely limited to a small number of plant cultures. The production of potatoes, fruit and vegetables and livestock farming was principally on the private plots. The inclusion of cattle breeding within the kolkhozes would have required large investments, inter alia in livestock stables. Since the prices paid by the state did not cover production costs, any increase in production or involvement in new production branches necessarily had to augment the losses of the kolkhozes (and thus the unpaid compulsory “bonded labour” demanded of its members).15 With collectivisation, the enterprises lost control over the quality of field cultivation, since that was increasingly taken over by the machine‑tractor stations (MTS). Tractors were supplied solely to the MTS and remained state property. Mechanisation served principally for purposes of control, and in conjunction with the political departments established in 1933, functioned additionally as a means to discipline the kolkhozniki, but did not assist in modernising agriculture. From the mid‑1930s on, grain was thus expropriated directly on the fields, circumventing the kolkhoz storage barns.16 For the most part, both the MTS directors and the kolkhoz chairmen lacked even elementary knowledge of agriculture production. Their function was mainly to execute what the party ordered while intimidating their workforce.17 In many areas of work, manual labour predominated. There were no new approaches to making the heavy work, performed principally by females, any easier.18 Only after Stalin’s death was the project of “industrialised agricultural production” given new life, revived in the 1960s.19 8 At the end of the 1920s, per hectare yields in plant cultivation and animal performance were still very low in the Soviet Union in comparison to other European countries. Instead of rising, they even worsened in the 1930s.20 This presents a devastating picture of the performance of the large‑scale Soviet agricultural enterprises. In the case of grain and potatoes, the hectare yields were on average some 15% gross below those of the small‑scale farmsteads. In the case of sugar beet and cotton cultivation, the yields in the first half of the 1930s declined even further. From 1935 on, they recovered and quickly rose, although not reaching the pre‑1914 levels. Rising yields of sugar beets and cotton were based on a drastic increase in producer prices, which then covered the production costs incurred. In the case of sugar beet cultivation, small work teams were organised; these units were responsible for all working operations. In the cotton kolkhozes, the kolkhoz members received cash payments from 1935 on large enough to enable them to cover their food needs by purchases in the marketplace.21 By contrast, in the case of potatoes and grain, the prices paid by the state for the compulsory delivery of produce ultimately covered only some 20% of production costs.22
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2-The forced collectivisation 1929‑1932 : Loss of control over the soil
9 It was counterproductive to commence with the desired acceleration of the development of agricultural technology by compulsory making an extensive change in agrarian structure. The abrupt replacement of small‑scale farming by kolkhozes and state farms stripped all previously achieved success in land settlement (zemleustroistvo) and land consolidation of its basis. It was necessary to start all over again from the beginning, and even that could not be done unless the situation with land for the new enterprises had been stabilised.
10 The party leadership was initially convinced that tractors and large‑scale farming would guarantee progress in agricultural technology: the tractor was expected to solve all agricultural‑technological questions.23 They consciously accepted the concomitant destruction of peasant means of production, because that loss would be “compensated a hundred times over by the huge advantages that we shall gain through the new Socialised forces of production.”24 Speaking before the November plenary in 1929, Molotov explained that financing would be achieved through the expropriation of the peasants during collectivisation.25 However, he did not explain how investments could be financed from this, since peasant inventory would necessarily lose its total market value. In practice, land consolidation and settlement constituted the prerequisites for achieving improved working of the fields through the use of tractors. In addition, development in the agricultural sector was burdened by the fact that the party did not return to the principle of “one‑man leadership”, as it had done in 1931 in the case of industry. Rather, given its profound distrust of the peasantry, the party interfered constantly in the agricultural production process. It sought to control each and every activity. Furthermore, until his death, Stalin resolutely adhered to the idea of demanding a “tribute” from the peasants for the industrialisation.26 11 Agrarian experts such as Moisej Vol´f, who was among the designers of the first Five‑Year Plan for agriculture, publically expressed their reservations regarding hasty collectivisation and their fears about dramatic consequences due to rural overpopulation. Under Stalin’s regime, which did not countenance critical suggestions, they had to pay a high price. At the highpoint of the famine in early 1933, Vol´f was arrested and executed soon thereafter.27 In actual fact, the introduction of forced collectivisation in the winter of 1929/1930 was implemented without any organisational preparation. The party leadership did not articulate its initial ideas on elementary questions, such as how in their view a kolkhoz should function, until March 1930 with the publication of the Agricultural Artel Statutes. The fact that some peasants refused to join the collective enterprise despite continuing pressure28 increased the confusion as to what land the kolkhoz could have at its disposal. 12 With forced collectivisation, the decisive prerequisite for the introduction of crop rotation was lost for a long period. To achieve that goal, the land would have had to be allotted to clearly designated enterprises for at least the duration of three crop rotations. Due to their virtual obsession with the aim of breaking the resistance of the recalcitrant peasants, the party leadership initially failed to recognise the dangerous side effects of their policy. The local authorities were no less arbitrary in allotting land to the kolkhozes than in dealing with individual peasants. In their eyes, the dwarf kolkhozes enjoyed no protection, since they were not in keeping with the large‑scale
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enterprises that were the primary goal. For that reason, local authorities resorted to applying pressure in order to force the merging of kolkhozes. In 1932 and 1933 they tried to merge all enterprises served by a single MTS into a large kolkhoz.29 Since the actual development of hectare yield depended on the available tractive power, the phasing out and demise of work horses exacerbated the situation even further: agricultural productivity slumped and the poorly cultivated croplands were covered in weed. In the 1930s, the supply of tractors did not compensate for the loss in animal horse power. It was not until the 1950s that the level of tractive power of 1928 was reached again and subsequently exceeded on a lasting basis.30 13 In practice, taking grain for delivery to the state had unconditional priority. The law “On the Protection of Socialist Property,” drafted by Stalin personally in August 1932, extended the property claim by the state on grain already in its stage of growth ripening on the fields. Consistent with this, in 1933 the statistical harvest survey was revised. Instead of being classified as “barn harvest,” now the term “biological harvest” was applied to everything that had matured in the fields up to the point of harvesting.31 As a consequence, all harvest losses were now at the expense of the kolkhoz members. Depending on climatic conditions, the losses ranged between 20 and 30%. In the summer and autumn of 1932, some starving kolkhozniki were shot in accordance with the new law, because they had stolen ears from the fields. The local state authorities quickly understood that they were obliged to deliver grain to the state under all circumstances. For that reason, they had neither interest in nor understanding for the measures of land consolidation. The only thing that mattered to them was a short‑term demonstrable success. Short‑sighted, they thought just as little as the party leadership about the foreseeable long‑term consequences and ultimate costs of their actions.
3-Kolhhoz system and crop rotation : The first campaign for land consolidation 1932‑1935
14 In the autumn of 1932, the party and government endeavoured to bring some order into the arbitrary practices of land allotment. They accused the local authorities of having acted on their own in channelling off kolkhoz land for setting up state farms or other state purposes, and of having changed the boundaries between the kolkhozes without their approval. Boundary changes from now on were only to be permissible if at least three‑fourths of the members of the kolkhoz affected had agreed and changes had been subsequently approved by the Oblast´ Land Department.32
15 The party leadership became aware that improvement in cultivation techniques constituted a prerequisite for increasing hectare yields. This recognition made them dependent on the experts who alone could work out scientifically grounded crop rotation schemes. However, they also mistrusted these experts.33 In 1932, the party leadership ordered a land settlement campaign and the introduction of crop rotations. However, in an atmosphere still marked by measures of brutal compulsion against the peasants, they neglected to create the conditions for the successful implementation of their directives. The brief deadline they stipulated ignored the fact that land consolidation together with the reaping of crop rotation fields inside the enterprises was labour‑intensive and associated with various expenses. However, the party leadership sought to curb the local authorities in their arbitrary approach to the
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existing kolkhozes and to grant the latter a conditional guarantee of continuance in regard to the land allotted to them. 16 The “kolkhoz system” made it more difficult to introduce crop rotations. Since a tax in kind on the land sown had to be paid, the interest of the local authorities and the party leadership in the struggle for grain now concentrated on the area of land sown in grain. However, every introduction of crop rotations designed to increase yield necessarily presupposed some reduction in the area of land for grain cultivation. Hectare yields and thus the grain harvest as a whole would have indeed clearly increased. Yet this correlation was too complicated for a control based on compulsion. For that reason, in practice every crop rotation that limited the area of land for sowing grain was deemed a crime against the state. As a result, the professional execution of their work locally became a challenge fraught with incalculable risks for the agrarian experts. 17 The first campaign to introduce crop rotation was carried out solely on paper. The compulsion exerted by the party did result in 1935 that for some 80% of the kolkhozes, “crop rotations” were registered in the files of the agricultural authorities. But in practice they were not heeded. In many instances, enterprises were not even aware of such registered rotations and they were not in keeping with the plans for sowing. Since in many areas kolkhoz members were going hungry and there was a lack of any order whatsoever in the kolkhozes, land surveyors (zemlemer) had initially not even gone to the kolkhoz enterprises. Given the pressure under which they worked themselves, they rather immediately reported to their superiors about the successful implementation of the measure. 18 In May 1933, at the very highpoint of the famine and death by starvation, the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture (NKZ) criticised that when arranging the crop rotation fields for the kolkhozes, the “hunt for quantity was proceeding apace at the expense of quality.” Work was being done sitting at office desks. They were not ensuring any increase in yields, because they did not proceed from the differing fertility of the individual land plots, and in many cases even included land that could not be sown and cultivated at all.34 A report in 1935 sketched a bleak picture of the quality of work performed. As a rule, the crop rotation fields were registered on antiquated file cards, in part stemming from the 1860s, without any local check of the actual situation on the ground. The areas of land registered frequently did not jibe with the actual boundaries of the kolkhozes and took neither meadows nor grazing land into account.35 Surveyors described the situation as follows: the kolkhozes were not masters over their own land. The plan for sowing was worked out in the raion centre at someone’s desk, the machinery from the MTS arrived when it was the respective kolkhoz’s turn, and the machines employed were often too heavy for the soil.36 Pictures of soil conditions in the Sofanovo Raion (West Oblast´) taken by staff workers of the Research Institute for the Organisation of the Territory document that in many instances, grain was planted on boundary soils that permitted only very low hectare yields. Cultivation of this land was nothing but a sheer waste of seeds and labour power.37
4-The transfer of land to the kolkhozes “for unlimited use, i.e. in perpetuity”
19 In 1935, times appeared favourable for stabilising conditions likewise in the countryside. Collectivisation had been concluded, aside from a few “retirees” who
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restricted themselves to self‑support.38 After a phase of severe social upheaval and heavy repression during forced industrialisation and forced collectivisation, a certain level of stabilisation emerged. Naum Jasny speaks of the “three good years” 1934-1936, in which a high level of industrial growth was achieved and the standard of living, which had declined markedly in the early 1930s, was again on the rise.39 With his encouraging appeal: “Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous!,” Stalin sought to bolster up the population, infusing them with renewed courage, and invited them to hope for a “prosperous” life in the foreseeable future.40 The actual achieved current state in the building of “Socialism” was formalised in the “Socialist” 1936 Constitution of the USSR.
20 At the 2nd All‑Union Congress of the Kolkhoz Shock‑Workers in February 1935 in Moscow, Mikhail Chernov, the People’s Commissar for Agriculture, reminded his audience that Stalin in 1933 had set the goal of making the kolkhozniki prosperous.41 In the Kolkhoz Statutes passed by the Congress, he now combined this goal directly with improving cultivation techniques and the introduction of crop rotation fields.42 Iakov Iakovlev, who had advanced to Central Committee Secretary for Agriculture, noted that there was still a substantial lack of clarity as to what land belonged to what kolkhoz, and he castigated the illegal changing of kolkhoz boundaries, a practice still widespread, in which land was allotted to other kolkhozes or to state farms.43 21 The new Kolkhoz Statutes included precise regulations for land use. The land should be assigned to the kolkhoz as a closed area of usable agricultural land, while excluding any elements that might give rise to a conflict situation. The land remained state property, but the kolkhozes were now to receive it “for unlimited use, i.e. in perpetuity.” The state certificate concerning its land was to be presented to the kolkhoz in a special ceremony. This certificate should specify the size and precise boundaries of the land assigned. After that, any reduction in the surface area was not permissible, but enlargement was possible by means of land from the state fund or land from individual peasants. The Kolkhoz Statutes demanded that the land be divided into crop rotation fields and that specified sections be allocated to each field brigade for the entire duration of a crop rotation.44 22 It becomes clear to what extent this spectacular decision to hand over the land to the kolkhozes “in perpetuity” was born out of necessity to finally overcome the continuing chaos in the allotment of land and the definition of its boundaries. This is evident when we note how distant actually existing kolkhozes were from what experts had regarded in 1929 as the ideal Socialist large‑scale enterprise (“agro‑industrial combines”). Many of the dwarf kolkhozes that had emerged were too small to employ tractors and combine harvesters in an optimal manner. 23 The fact that it was not until the mid‑1930s when the external boundaries of the kolkhozes were established at all underscores the level of chaos created by the forced collectivisation. In part, the land of the kolkhoz was located ten or more kilometres from the economic centre of a given kolkhoz. The schematic drawings on land available to the raion land authorities indicated too great an area of land for many kolkhozes. The sowing plan then demanded to cultivate more land than they actually had available, and also to deliver grain from that (non‑existent) land area as well. 24 Management, planning and control over land settlement were now transferred to the NKZ. The departments for farmland arrangement in the local land authorities were assigned the task of drafting the concrete measures for local land consolidation and the
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introduction of crop rotation.45 The official state certificates were to be issued only after conclusion of the land consolidation and the elimination of all deficiencies. The external boundaries of the kolkhoz had to be clearly marked by boundary posts and confirmed by the assembly of the kolkhoz members.46 25 In conjunction with the new survey of land between mid‑1935 and mid‑1937, there was also a handover of non‑utilised land of the state farms to the kolkhozes. Smaller and in particular non‑profitable state farms were totally dissolved.47 In this way, the state rid itself of such state farms that previously had only incurred losses, and at the same time forced the kolkhoz members to assume the cultivation of these largely exhausted and leached out areas of land. The kolkhoz was obligated to deliver grain as a natural tax “in kind” to the state. This was a good arrangement for the state: it continued to receive the grain, but because the kolkhozniki were now producing it, the state no longer was required to cover the costs of production. In addition, the state extorted money from the kolkhozniki, because they had to pay for the valuables of the dissolved state farms which they had taken into possession: the conventional price had to be paid for mother animals, and in the case of buildings, the carrying value of the property, while deducting for depreciation.48 The archival material is silent about the prevailing mood among the kolkhoz members under this dispensation. 26 Work on surveying the land and the associated issuance of state certificates dragged on far longer than originally planned, since now there was actually an attempt to carry out farmland arrangements locally. The evident contradictions in policy were not discussed publically: namely that crop rotations could only be successfully implemented if the enterprises were left certain freedoms for action, and that in grain cultivation, the state was demanding unpaid forced labour from the kolkhozniki. 27 A more primitive technology was employed in 1936 on the kolkhoz land in the West Oblast´ than before in the small‑scale farmsteads. The loss of horses had scarcely been compensated by the supply of tractors in the non‑Black Earth Region. As a result, the capacities for implementing fieldwork had declined dramatically.49 In other regions as well, there were encroachments on the kolkhozes in order to force them to greater deliveries of grain after the poor harvest of 1936. According to Iakovlev, the Central Committee Secretary for Agriculture, the sowing plans in Krai Saratov inter alia violated the crop rotations in many places. Several raions forced the kolkhozes to sow grain in soil that was evidently unsuited for cultivation. It was said they were for that reason chronically in arrears with their deliveries to the state.50 In the Leningrad Oblast ´, in the autumn of 1936 the area of land registered as a kolkhoz sowing area exceeded the actually existing land by some 10%.51 28 The experts on the spot locally were very dissatisfied due to the contradictory nature of the central directives issued at the same time. At the Kolkhoz Department in the Research Institute for the Organisation of the Territory, a consultation was convened in early February 1937.52 Mikhail Semenov, Senior Engineer in the Leningrad Department for Land Settlement, criticised the introductory lecture that had been given: he thought it was too abstract, divorced from reality and had not dealt with the problems in the north. He noted that he had been assigned the task of introducing crop rotations in 1937 for 4,500 kolkhozes on 1.2 million hectares. He stated that this was impossible if scientific requirements were to be met. In addition, he stated that no kolkhoz was prepared to pay the fee of six to seven roubles per hectare for this.53 Maslov (Saratov) pointed out that crop rotations had already been introduced in 1935. He noted that the
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material in the raions was based on that. Maslov stressed that to that extent, the question of what crop rotation the individual kolkhoz should receive had already been decided on in advance. Moreover, the Raion Land Department was proceeding on the assumption that the area of land registered for the individual kolkhozes actually existed. Now it was evident, he added, that the agronomists in 1935 had decided on the crop rotations without knowledge of the quality of the soil, and that many of their calculations were incorrect. A substantial portion of the land declared in 1935 to be suitable for grain could, he noted, be used in the best case only for grazing pasture. His farmland arrangement team now had to transform 50‑60% of the land area allotted for growing wheat into crop rotation areas for forage grass instead, because the soil structure was not suitable, and the team had to correct the specialisation of the kolkhozes. “We just don’t know at the moment how we can solve these problems.” He asked: did the NKZ have to issue the permit? If they classified too much land as unsuitable for grain cultivation, that move would be viewed as an “anti‑state activity.” 54
5-The extensive loss of selected seeds after the poor harvest 1936
29 The poor harvest of 1936 served to spotlight a second unsolved problem alongside the introduction of crop rotation: how could selected seeds be protected if after every harvest, delivery of grain to the state had absolute priority? As a result of the rigorous amassing of grain by the state, in 1936 a substantial proportion of the selected seeds ended up in the state grain mills.55 The party’s attention was called to this during preparations for the spring sowing campaign in 1937.56 In customary style, it blamed scapegoats for the problem. In June 1937, the Central Committee (TsK) plenary strongly criticized the chief administration for grain within the NKZ. It alleged that this administrative body had sabotaged the task of the Five‑Year Plan and opened a door to the possibility of introducing poor seed varieties. It stated that for all practical purposes, good peasant seeds had disappeared. The TsK claimed existing selected seeds had been partially ground in the mill due to insufficient marking and had been mixed with other seeds in the state warehouses. It argued that the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of the Interior) and the courts would have to clarify now where bureaucratic error ended and criminal “wrecking” appeared.57
30 From 1939 on, all kolkhozes and state farms were permitted only to use selected seeds that were adapted to the local conditions. In 1937, the state was finally prepared to assume full financing of the state selection stations.58 In addition, material incentives were created: beginning in 1937, selection stations and plant breeders were to be given a special award by allowing them to participate in the profits gained by varieties they had helped to breed or improve. Several penalties were instituted to put an end to their misuse of selected seeds. Misuse for an unintended purpose would be punished by two years forced labour, while mixing of selected grain seeds would even entail a penalty of up to three years forced labour.59 The rigorous penalties came into effect already in the autumn of 1937. Kolkhoz chairmen, weight recorders and bookkeepers were sentenced to imprisonment and forced labour because they had declared simple seeds to be selected seed varieties.60 The seed‑ producing kolkhozes would also be rewarded by paying them double the state price for grain.61 Yet this was unable to spur an incentive
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for production. Even if this compensated the kolkhozes for 40% of production costs instead of just 20%, the bottom line here was still that the kolkhozes were not being totally paid for what they were producing. 31 The disconnect with reality is underscored by the fact that the “quality standards” for seed lowered in November 1935 by the NKZ became the target of sharp critique. By that move, the NKZ had sought to bring standards more into line with the actual condition of the selected seeds, and had therefore increased permitted weed infestation to 0.5‑1%. It had even increased the permitted level of infection with grain blight by a factor of 20. From now on, the grain distributed by the State Fund for Selected Seeds was once again supposed to be totally free of blight and weed seeds.62 Many leaders of the State Fund were dubious about the prospects of adhering to these norms. In numerous instances, “selected seeds” provided to kolkhozes in the obligatory exchange were actually inferior to the seeds which the kolkhozes had to deliver in exchange.63 32 The decree did not improve the selected seeds available. Large amounts continued to lose their germination capacity due to poor storage conditions in the State Fund facilities. At the end of 1937, 67% of the wheat seed in the kolkhozes in Ukraine were contaminated.64 A substantial portion of the seed for sowing in 1938 was infested with mites or contaminated, in many cases it had but a very low germination capacity.65 In early 1939, Benediktov pointed to a further cause of the calamity: there was a lack of proper sheds for storing the selected seeds. He accused the State Planning Commission of not having provided sufficient investment funding for construction of storage space. 66
33 After the poor harvest in 1939, the party and government once again rescinded their threats of penalties in connection with the protection of the selected seeds. This more easy access to seed enabled the local organs of authority to fulfil their obligation to deliver grain to the state.67 In 1940, the MTS units even encouraged their tractorists not to adhere to the regulations of agrarian technology, so as not to endanger the full implementation of the plans for sowing in view of the reduced norms instituted for fuel consumption.68
6-The execution of the cautioners : Agronomists as scapegoats
34 Many agrarian experts were murdered in 1937 and 1938 because the party leadership blamed them for the miserable production results. The poor harvest of 1936 had once again set back the agricultural sector. The “prosperous life” that Stalin had promised thus receded into a seemingly distant future. The transition to terror in agriculture was also based on the contradictory directives for the issuance of state certificates: on the one hand, they were intended to formalise and codify crop rotations grounded on solid science, while on the other, the surface area for grain cultivation was not permitted to be reduced in the sowing plans. It was impossible to achieve both aims simultaneously. This contradiction in the dictatorship could not be discussed publically and thus could not be resolved. In order to deflect attention from the responsibility of the party leadership, concrete individuals in the state bureaucracy were scapegoated, accused of wrongdoing.69 The failure to increase yields was portrayed as the failure of experts in the land authorities and the NKZ. Only after almost all the experts had been executed in 1938 and the hectare yields nonetheless had not increased was there in 1939 a
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half‑hearted change of direction in policy, yet policy continued to adhere to state compulsion against agricultural producers.
35 The terror had specifically targeted those individuals who had tried to implement the party directives of 1935 on the introduction of scientifically grounded crop rotations. The fact that the West Oblast´ was chosen to be made an example had to do with the poor suitability of soil there for agriculture and the spread of small kolkhozes as a consequence. Many kolkhozniki in the West Oblast´ still lived on individual farmsteads, so‑called khutory. The introduction of crop rotation threatened a drastic reduction in the grain cultivation area. This would have decreased the obligatory delivery of grain to the state, but would have nonetheless caused local grain production to increase due to higher hectare yields. The First Party Secretary in the West Oblast´, I.P. Rumiantsev, was now portrayed to be a “wrecker.” He was pilloried and charged with total blame before the eyes of the population. There is no reason to give credence to these charges and to make a purported “weakness in the rural bureaucracy” responsible for the mistakes.70 In April 1937, the paper Izvestiia sounded an alarm regarding these “anti‑state practices” rife in the West Oblast´: it alleged that the soil was “disappearing” there in numerous raions. It charged that “wreckers” were active, seeking to sabotage the state plan of grain sowing using all means available, and to that end, they were falsely describing “fertile farmland” as grazing pasture, swap or thick brush land.71 Rumiantsev and many staff members in his Oblast´ administration were relieved of their duties on 17 June 1937, subsequently arrested and soon thereafter executed.72 The Moscow party leadership pilloried these individuals, making an egregious example of them across the Soviet Union, supposedly responsible for the exceptionally poor production results in the kolkhozes. In local show‑trials, the population was presented with their “activity as parasites” in the issuance of state certificates. The West Oblast´ party leadership was accused of having artificially caused unrest by having rejected (for formal reasons) complaints against the establishing of fixed boundaries for kolkhozes and separating off land from kolkhozes set up for various nationalities. The Oblast´ leadership was also accused of having allotted land to kolkhozes which was located at a great distance from the kolkhoz centre or had been assigned to other kolkhozes. It was claimed that many kolkhozes had lost their meadows, original private plot land and gardens.73 36 In view of the evident priority that the party leadership accorded land for grain cultivation, comments by the People’s Commissar for Agriculture Chernov speaking before the TsK plenary in 1937 caused some dismay. He could not mention in particular that this demand was incompatible with the order for introduction of genuine crop rotations. Consequently, he simply acted as if this contradiction did not exist at all, and subsequently paid for that with his life.74 Before the plenary, Chernov criticised that economically efficient kolkhozes were still being excessively overburdened and for that reason did not develop any interest in increasing yields per hectare: “If a kolkhoz does not fulfil the sowing plan, its obligation is transferred to the other kolkhoz.”75 He cited many examples where the sowing obligations assigned exceeded the actual fields cultivable after crop rotation by up to 30%. In individual cases, the sowing obligation assigned to kolkhozes even exceeded their entire available land area. In the West Oblast ´, kolkhozes had been required to sow grain for four consecutive years, in areas for cotton cultivation they had been obliged to plant cotton for seven to eight years in succession. This, he stressed, could explain the low yields per hectare. Consequently,
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Chernov raised the demand that every official should be brought to trial who had imposed a sowing plan on the kolkhoz that violated the crop rotation.76 The issue of the inherent contradiction between the central instructions for introducing crop rotation and requirements for grain delivery to the state was solved by means of state terror: Chernov was arrested soon after the plenary on 7 November and later executed as an “enemy of the people.” 37 A long report by the NKVD on “Wrecking in Agriculture” assigned the experts blame for the fact that productivity in agriculture had not risen. They were charged, as “wreckers,” with having intentionally brought about the catastrophic conditions.77 The report peaked in the assertion that the head of the NKZ Department of Finance had confessed that the agronomy experts had intentionally devised and introduced a harmful system of crop rotation. In 1937, he noted that the Planning Finance Department had been cleansed of enemies of the people, but that Chernov had actually only replaced former “wreckers” by new ones drawn from the Research Institute for Agroeconomy.78 Those individuals had intentionally spread animal epidemic diseases in a bid to sabotage the construction of large‑scale livestock breeding. The dissolving of state farms in 1936 was now likewise classified as the result of “activity by wreckers.” The “enemies of the people,” it was alleged, had especially targeted the land authorities, and to that end had taken over the direction there from the People’s Commissar all the way down the ladder into the land departments at the level of oblast´ and raion.79 The regime concentrated its total energy on exposing the “human parasites” that it could present to the population. This was in keeping with the ideology, according to which the class enemy was seeking to undermine Socialist construction by all available means. The animal husbandry enterprises set up on orders from the state proved to be an ideal breeding ground for epidemics. In 1936, in 44 of the 66 state farms for livestock breeding that were inspected, animals were found suffering from brucellosis or other livestock epizootic diseases.80 With the transfer to the kolkhozes of infected animals as breeding animals, the diseases spread to animals not yet infected. The livestock specialists were accused of having intentionally conspired to spread the epidemics. 38 The terror against top‑echelon functionaries initially targeted the head of the Department of Agriculture in the TsK, the former People’s Commissar for Agriculture Iakovlev. He was arrested on 12 October 1937. This was followed a few weeks later by the arrest of the incumbent People’s Commissar for Agriculture, Chernov. Already earlier, his decrees, such as the attempt to reduce the difference between the actual concrete harvest and the officially registered “biological” harvest, had been declared to be “parasitic wrecker activity.” His successor Robert Eikhe was likewise targeted after but a few months in office. On 29 April 1938, Eikhe was arrested. All three were shot and the authorities for land were “cleansed” of their experts in a bid to suggest to the population that they had been responsible for the fact that the “prosperous life” Stalin had promised had not yet materialised. The only one of the People’s Commissars for Agriculture surviving the terror was Benediktov, who succeeded Eikhe in April 1938. He was to die a natural death at the age of 81. Benediktov had remained in office down to the death of Stalin, some 15 years.
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7-Bonded labour : Why the kolkhozniki did not want to stay in the kolkhozes
39 After the good harvest of 1937, several kolkhoz members, for the first time since the forced collectivisation, received sufficient grain for their “labour days” to cover their own needs. Their reaction shocked the party leadership. A substantial number of them wished to use this possibility as a door to escape from the forced institutional framework of the kolkhoz and the “bonded labour” demanded there by the state. A return to individual farming held out the promise once again to be able to determine their own fate. The prerequisite for that consisted in the ownership of a horse, denied to the kolkhozniki. It made the former kolkhoz member in the Soviet village under Stalin into an independent small‑scale entrepreneur, opening up excellent possibilities for new income. That was because many in the countryside, including state enterprises, were badly in need of transport services. The fact that families with many children also declared their formal resignation from the kolkhoz, because as kolkhozniki they were unable to feed their children, should have put the state to shame.81 In 1938, the party leadership reacted with alarm to these reports.82 It shifted the blame for the low payments given to the kolkhozniki to the local party and Soviet state officials.83 Stalin was upset that the kolkhozniki were able to escape from the seemingly total blanket of state control by means of resignation.84 In his provocative manner, he asked the TsK members in 1939 whether they actually desired to return to small‑scale private farming, and at the same time accused them of bearing responsibility for this trend through their own attitude of indifference. He called for putting the brakes in proper time on the rush back to private small‑scale farming: Stalin noted that if the kolkhozes were to collapse, the individual peasant would no longer need a tractor or combine harvester to work his small plots of land. In his quasi‑natural private enterprise, he would be “reigning as the king on his farmstead.”85 In addition, Stalin recommended that the “do‑nothings,” kolkhozniki who earned only a few or no “labour days” in the kolkhoz, should be transferred to other kolkhozes.86
40 Instead of asking about the underlying causes for the catastrophic living conditions in the kolkhozes, the party reacted in 1938 and 1939 by resorting to renewed measures of compulsion. A campaign against the “exclusions” of kolkhoz members was launched and the horse tax was jacked up so much that no private person could any longer maintain a work horse.87 In particular, in 1939 the party began with two large‑scale inhumane campaigns that worsened once more the living conditions of most kolkhozniki. In May 1939, they launched the struggle against the “illegal extension of the private plots.” All areas of land that exceeded the size permitted by the statute were separated off. At the same time, the animals maintained in personal ownership that exceeded the regionally permissible number of productive animals were requisitioned. However, under the pretext of land consolidation, the campaign targeted in particular the 821,000 individual farmsteads (khutor), particularly in the westerns areas of the Soviet Union. They were to be resettled by force into the central locality of the kolkhoz.88 A forced resettlement into the cotton kolkhozes based on similar pretexts targeted millions of mountain peasants in the irrigations zones in the Caucasus and Central Asia.89 This meant that millions of people were deported into the central locality of the kolkhoz in an attempt to finally eliminate the still extant remainders of individual small‑scale farm holdings. The resettlement was carried out in
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1939/1940 with unimaginable brutality. Its implementation concentrated on elimination of the khutors. Those persons affected had to deal by themselves with reconstructing housing in the central settlement of the kolkhoz. The funding promised to help build up the new settlements was never paid.90 41 The totally insufficient pay, aggravated by the highly seasonal nature of their labour, caused many kolkhoz members to seek paid employment outside the kolkhoz, or also to revert to their private plot and concentrate on that.91 As nominal “co‑owners” of their kolkhoz they only received so‑called “labour days” in the registry. These were worthless dashes on paper marking their proportion in “income distribution” at the end of the year, while in the neighbouring kolkhoz, they were paid in cash for the same work as day labourers. Since most of the non‑cotton‑growing kolkhozes did not earn any profit, they were unable at the year’s end to distribute anything to their members. Exemplary for the situation in the kolkhozes was remuneration in Artel Grechiskino near Starobel”shchina in Ukraine. A “labour day” in the fields in 1940 earned the labouring kolkhoznik just 64 kopeks. Even the 1.14 roubles per work day in animal production was scarcely more than a sorry pittance. Only in viticulture was their labour actually worthwhile, earning 8.40 roubles for a “labour day.” All annual reports of the kolkhozes reveal similar data. Rural dwellers achieved most of their income qua kolkhoz by means of small sales in the bazaars and open markets. A day working on the small farmstead resulted as a rule in a clearly higher income than a formal “labour day” in the kolkhoz.92
8-Benediktov’s sober assessment of the failure to increase yields
42 Work on the Third Five‑Year Plan was delayed and begun late, due to the considerable losses in trained workers within the planning bureaucracy as a consequence of the terror. Government policy adhered to introducing crop rotations in an effort to increase yield per hectare. Benediktov, the new People’s Commissar for Agriculture, also wanted to quickly improve agricultural production. He appeared to be more concerned to ensure that the state programmes did not just remain words on paper and that crop rotations would actually be implemented in the kolkhozes. Since the state sowing plans prevented the kolkhozes in practice from adhering to their crop rotations, it is initially impressive that Benediktov managed to arrange that no state sowing plan would be set up for 1940. Rather, it was decided that the kolkhozes would themselves determine their sowing arrangement in keeping with their crop rotation. The law stated: [...] to promote the initiative of the kolkhozniki in conjunction with the further bettering of grain yields, to strengthen the responsibility of the kolkhozes for planning the sowing of individual grain cultures, and to include the broad mass of the kolkhozniki in planning.93 43 It was possible to interpret that as a concession by the party leadership to the position of the agrarian experts. The latter were convinced that success in raising yield levels was dependent largely on the producers themselves. Yet even now the actions by the party remained ridden with contradiction. The plan for delivery to the state was not altered, and it continued to order the kolkhozes in detail as to what set quantities of
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the individual cultures they were obliged to deliver to the state, no matter whether their crop rotation made provisions for their actual planting or not.94
44 Benediktov’s memo on the Third Five‑Year Plan submitted by Gosplan in March 1939 sketches the vision of a new beginning, because for the first time it openly addressed the lack of material incentives for the agricultural producers and the insufficient state investments as problematic issues.95 Moreover, the memo, in its blunt stocktaking of the failures of the past decade, suggested cautiously what the actual causes behind this were, springing from the state system of compulsion.96 Benediktov evidently considered the lack of material incentives for the agricultural producers and the burdens placed on the largely insolvent kolkhozes as a major problem for the implementation of agro‑technical progress. He demanded that at least the basic costs for agrarian modernisation should be covered and borne by the state budget. There is a hint at more realism in Benediktov’s suggestion that there should be more extended deadlines for completing work. But in the memos and papers available, he did not comment on the actual problems, namely the state‑determined producer prices that did not cover production costs, especially for grain and potatoes, and the state measures of compulsion that had turned the kolkhozniki into veritable bonded labourers.97 45 Benediktov also called for resolute measures to strengthen work discipline in the kolkhozes. He demanded the creation of small work teams responsible for the entire production process in dealing with technical cultures, pointing to the successes that had been achieved since 1935 in this way. He noted that material incentives were important in order to better motivate the kolkhoz members, as the government was indeed providing, as a bonus in connection with sugar beet cultivation.98 He stressed that in this way the high degree of labour fluctuation could also be countered and labour productivity increased. In this, Benediktov’s ideas recall to some extent Stalin’s recommendation on struggling against fluctuations in industry, conceptions he had put forward in his speech to economists in 1931 on “new tasks in economic construction.”99 Benediktov insisted that the state had to cover all costs associated with land consolidation within the enterprises. In his view, in order to end the substantial level of fluctuation due to low wages, the land surveyor had to be put on an equal footing with the agronomists in the land departments at the raion level, and their salary had to be increased from 200 to 700 roubles.100 His report, especially prepared for Stalin and Molotov in March 1939, underscored the importance that Benediktov accorded to the introduction of the correct crop rotations.101 He stressed that land consolidation and working out of the crop rotations had to be carried out with active hands‑on participation in the process by the kolkhoz management and the kolkhoz activists. This was to occur under the responsible leadership of the agronomist together with the land surveyor, the livestock and other specialists.102 He criticised the fact that between 1932 and 1934, the kolkhozniki had not participated in the drafting of the crop rotation plans, and that the land authorities had often issued obligations for sowing that violated the crop rotation of the kolkhoz. Benediktov announced that the crop rotations for individual branches of the economy would be regulated by special directives.103 Noteworthy is the fact that Benediktov laid down a comparatively long final deadline of seven years for concluding with the enterprise‑internal farmland arrangement. Only at the end of 1944 would it be possible, he reasoned, to finish work likewise in the peripheral areas. This underscores that this time, action would not only
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be verbal: rather, people would also actually take up the task at the local level, taking into account the existing financial capacities and capacities in personnel. 46 M.P. Kogtikova states that for the first time, only with this survey operation in 1939 were various complicating factors and distance of the land from the kolkhoz actually eliminated, noting that before 1939 only a very small number of kolkhozes in the non‑Black Earth Region had had crop rotation available. At the beginning of 1941, these then numbered 32,531, yet this was even less than 15% of the total number of kolkhozes. All work activities during the transition to the 1940s were aimed at introducing grass‑field systems. A fundamental improvement failed to materialise, because the grasses sown achieved only very low yields per hectare. Thus, the hoped‑for positive effect on animal husbandry also failed to materialise, nor was there much improvement in soil fertility.104 47 Difficulties arose from 1938 on in the employment of farming technology. The supply of news tractors flagged from 1937 on due to the upturn in armaments production, and the supplying of trailed implements and combine harvesters slowed from 1938 onwards. This impacted on the performance capability of agriculture, and fieldwork was significantly compromised. Now the wasteful way in which the sparse resources had been handled, the result of an absence of strict budgetary restrictions, took its revenge.105 It drastically limited the service life of the farming technology that had been supplied in comparison with Western agriculture, and forced Soviet agriculture to rely on constant inputs. As a result of poor maintenance and the extremely high rate of fluctuation among tractorists and drivers of harvester combines, even the number of serviceable tractors and land machines declined from 1938 on. The rationing of fuel was an additional factor that served to exacerbate problems. 48 Eikhe had already warned in early 1938 about the growing discrepancy between supply of tractors and provisioning of service facilities for their repair. Of the 5,819 MTS, 2,088 had no workshop, and only 1,200 were equipped to carry out larger‑scale repairs. Eikhe noted that while Stalin had given priority in 1934 to regular and smaller‑scale repairs, “wreckers” had sabotaged the regular continual maintenance. Many tractors were now in need of fundamental repairs.106 By contrast, Benediktov in 1939 regarded the insufficient provision of investment funds by Gosplan as the main reason why the construction of economic and residential buildings for the MTS had fallen far behind in the past several years. He stated that there was still a lack of 1,400 MTS workshops for regular repairs, and 3,500 MTS had no heated parking areas for their cars. Some 40% of the tractors and harvester combines also had to be left out in the open during the winter, since no shelters were available. He also noted that there had been just as little concern when it came to the living conditions of the tractorists and harvester combine operators. The MTS were very poorly equipped with apartments and facilities for the everyday needs of the workers.107 In addition, Benediktov noted, many MTS units had no storage tanks for fuel. This was causing huge losses. Consequently, Gosplan would have to at least double the projected budget allocation for the Third Five‑Year‑Plan.108 49 The poor maintenance condition of the tractors and the delayed delivery of fuel and seed material resulted in numerous accidents and long periods of idleness. This impacted on the quality of the seeding: in many instances, the required measures for agro‑technology were not adhered to and low‑quality seed material was used. The seeding norm was lowered, and in poorly cultivated fields, sowing was regionally done by hand.109 Corresponding problems beset the harvest. Thus, in the summer of 1938, the
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NKVD reported on difficulties encountered in deployment of harvester combines due to their poor state of repair, the absence of spare parts and a high level of fluctuation among the drivers. The report noted that transport of the grain from the fields was also poorly organised.110 Grain spoiled because it was left to lie unprotected along the railroad tracks.111 Gosplan pointed to another cause for the high level of harvest losses in 1939, namely that the harvester combine drivers bore no material responsibility for the quality of their work. Moreover, they were even given a special prize while they caused high levels of losses. Thus, a driver was granted a special award at the All‑Union Agricultural Exhibition because over the span of 22 days, he had harvested 717 hectares. But the actual harvest loss on his fields had amounted to 3.2 dt/ha grain (and thus almost half of the “biological” harvest).112
9-The plans for reshaping nature, 1940/1941
50 In a phase when investments were concentrated on the armaments sector, between 1939 and 1941 extensive measures were launched across a broad area to reshape nature. They entailed inter alia the draining of huge swampy areas in the west together with a new “non‑Black Earth Region programme.” In the east, there were efforts centred on turning the steppe into a fertile oasis.113 In all regions, forage production was to be placed under state regulation in order to develop livestock farming in the kolkhozes. German agrarian experts noted for posterity, after German troops had invaded Belorussia, that these plans had begun to be implemented. They were clearly impressed by the work done in the previous months there in the draining of swamps.114 Thus, immediately prior to the German attack in June 1941, an extensive programme to reshape agriculture had been launched. As a caesura, it is certainly comparable with collectivisation. After ten years, the structures that had arisen were to be reshaped in such a manner that hectare yields and animal performance levels would be able to increase. The directive that land areas were to be designated for planting forage guaranteed that the area for grain cultivation would remain an embittered political contentious issue, because every such reduction also lowered the amount of grain that was to be delivered to the state by the kolkhozes as a tax in kind.
51 The regional more precise crop rotations announced by Benediktov were instituted in 1940 and 1941. The decrees leave no doubt that the initially promised shifting of the freedom of decision to the kolkhozes did not materialise. Rather, the crop rotations continued to be centrally stipulated and controlled. The respective regional total area for the individual cultures was prescribed mandatorily by law. From 1942 on, there were once again central plans for sowing that would serve simultaneously as the basis for the obligatory deliveries to the state for the individual kolkhozes. Thus, once again the need for control triumphed over the freedom of decision by the enterprise, which was deemed absolutely essential by the experts for increasing per hectare yield. 52 The first corresponding decree was issued on 5 March 1940 for the Ukraine.115 It formulated as its goal to create a “solid forage basis,” to fulfil the prerequisite for a complex mechanisation, and to increase the land areas under garden cultivation, viticulture and perennial plantings. In the dry areas, it prescribed the planting of forest protection strips to guard against wind erosion. The introduction of crop rotations was to proceed hand in hand with land improvement and breaking new ground.116 The law stipulated centrally the extent of cultivation area according to cultures for Ukraine.
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After a very brief transition period for the introduction of their crop rotations, the kolkhozes were ordered to achieve these goals already in 1942. For that reason, the sowing plan 1942 for the entire Ukraine was immediately appended to the law as an enclosure.117 The archival material indicates that behind the scenes once again, the principal issue of contention was the extent of the area for sowing grain. Here the party achieved a “compromise”: namely that the area for grain cultivation from 1942 on should reach the extent it had attained in 1937. By that point in time, the total area should be expanded through newly reclaimed land.118 The crop rotations of the individual kolkhozes had to be accommodated into the framework of the plan for cultivation. In keeping with this, the local authorities continued even in 1940 to dispose over the kolkhoz land ad libitum and to separate it off for diverse and sundry purposes. It was only the bureaucratic path that had now become somewhat more complicated. The local violation of law now had to be brought to the attention of the NKZ and then be approved by the government.119 The law prescribed the relocation of important private plot production branches into the kolkhozes. In order to accomplish that successfully, the state would have had to make substantial funding available for these highly labour‑intensive spheres – including animal husbandry, fruit and vegetable production – and would have had to offer the kolkhozniki material incentives for their additional labour. Yet Stalin was as little ready to do that in 1940 as he had been at the beginning of forced collectivisation in 1929. The elevation of agriculture and increasing of per hectare yields would continue to be based principally on state measures of compulsion. To the extent that in individual cases, “material incentives” were promised, those incentives could not become effective due to adherence to the “calculation of the biological harvest.” Under the most favourable circumstances, the losses of what had matured on the “stalk” and was thus registered as “official harvest” amounted to 20% of what was brought in from the fields and ended up in the kolkhoz barns. But it was impossible to distribute what had not been gathered in from the field. For that reason, a natural distribution “in kind” of the “additional yields” did not as a rule occur, neither for potatoes nor for grain.120
10-General findings : The paradox of state action in the field of agricultural policy
53 From the time of the 1906 Stolypin agrarian reforms on, the state had interfered actively in production in order to decrease the level of backwardness that had existed at the starting point baseline vis‑à‑vis Western Europe. The Soviet Union was thus able to build on a policy of state intervention to increase yields and improve agricultural technology. In 1929, a serious shift occurred in this relation. Now emphasis was placed principally on measures of state compulsion for pressing ahead with agrarian modernisation instead of offering incentives and credits to spur change. The state issued directives without desiring any longer to bear the costs for creating the material prerequisites for the realisation of those orders. It neither provided the required investment funding under Stalin nor did it pay the agrarian enterprises the producer prices required to cover costs of production—money with which the enterprises might have been better able to remunerate their workers and generate funds for further investment. Rather, the party demanded “tribute” from the peasant farmers for industrialisation. In Stalin’s eyes, they scarcely differed from class enemies. It was not
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until Brezhnev’s era that the state commenced with its crucially necessary material support for increasing yields per hectare and bettering animal performance.
54 From 1929 on, in a paternalising manner, the Soviet state decided over the heads of the agricultural producers in every respect. In so doing, it stripped them of the latitude to decide for themselves about the improvements in cultivation technology deemed necessary. The state was unconcerned here about the consistency of its directives from on high. Consequently, it insisted on a substantial proportion of the cultivation area devoted to grain, even though the transition to scientifically grounded crop rotations necessarily had to actually diminish the area for grain cultivation. The kolkhozes did not achieve any independence as enterprises nor did they attain any degree of self‑responsibility. The loss of their own tractive power due to the demise of the work horses brought about by state decree rendered them totally dependent in field work operations on the farming technology of the machine‑tractor stations (MTS). They thus lost control over the time scheduling and quality of their work in the fields; in addition, the effectiveness of that work declined. A rapid increase in yields would have presupposed autonomous agricultural enterprises that, working under the local conditions, could decide themselves about the optimal use of improved agricultural technology and crop rotations. Moreover, in 1929, the decisive bond between wages and quality of work performance was ruptured and lost. The agents of the state often punished good‑quality work by repeatedly imposing additional burdens on the kolkhozes that were performing better, and did this despite the extant prohibition on that introduced in 1932. In effect, the incentive system generally rewarded poor work in the fields, because the fulfilment of the MTS plan was evaluated according to area, speed of completion and economising on fuel, but not according to actual yields per hectare on the fields under cultivation. The kolkhozes were required to make the deliveries of natural produce in kind to the MTS independent of the quality of the work. Thus, all the informal institutions of the Soviet command economy in the countryside required violation of the demands for agricultural technology officially articulated by the party and the state. 55 At the end of the 1920s, there were certainly a notable number of well‑qualified agrarian experts. In their eyes, the interventions of the state seemed particularly absurd, since they were able to judge the negative consequences. Since in its official documents, the state adhered to the goals of improving agricultural technology and the introduction of crop rotation, the state was dependent on the agronomists. Only those experts were able to develop the downright “bacchanalian” plans behind which the party leadership managed to conceal its dilettantism in the practical management of agricultural production. The discrepancy between the optimistic images of the future sketched in the plans and the realities in the enterprises on the ground could not have been greater. In the 1930s as well, many experts adhered to their conviction that any improvement in agricultural technology and the introduction of crop rotations presupposed the active involvement of the agricultural producers themselves. But to the extent that locally on the ground they bore the responsibility for implementing agrarian modernisation, they stood confronting a dilemma. Either they followed their conscience as agrarian experts and introduced crop rotations, which would have led to a notable increase in yield per hectare, while concomitantly disregarding and thus violating the state order for a large area of grain sowing. Or they violated their professional honour in their work on the spot in order to avoid state measures of
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repression. Given their deplorable situation, most appear to have deserted the village. The party under Stalin misused the agricultural experts, branding them as scapegoats for the failure of the “revolutionising of the agricultural productive forces” to materialise. After the poor harvest of 1936, which exposed Stalin’s promise of a “prosperous” life as a lie and revealed the weaknesses of “Socialist agriculture,” the party leadership chose in 1937 to denigrate the agrarian experts before the eyes of the population as “wreckers” and “enemies of the people,” who intentionally had sabotaged their directives. Many agronomists became victims in 1938 of the “great terror,” including all the previous People’s Commissars for Agriculture of the USSR: Iakovlev, Chernov and Eikhe. Just like their more fortunate successor Benediktov, they all shared, at least in their basic approach, the conviction of the experts: namely that an increase in per hectare yields presupposed the active participation of the agricultural producers in the agrarian enterprises. 56 The Soviet project under Stalin resulted in a negative spiral that led to a lasting blockage of any increase in yields. The major factor here was that the motivation of the agricultural producers was lost, gambled away. Under Stalin the state demanded of the peasants that they should work seemingly as serfs in the field, performing bonded labour that went largely unpaid. An increase in work input in grain and potato cultivation increased only their own self‑exploitation, but not their income. For the kolkhozes, the expansion of grain cultivation entailed an increase in losses for the enterprise. The assessment of the radical reformers at the end of the 1980s that the collectivisation had turned the farmers into agricultural labourers who had lost interest in the results of their work thus leads to the crux of the problem.121 In Soviet agriculture, there definitely was no lack of labour. The striking lack of efficient farming technology under the Soviet command economy has already been taken into due account in this statement. The supposed “felt” lack of labour can be explained by the absence since 1930 of any real motivation to work. This had a lasting formative impact on Russian economic culture and has still not been overcome today. 57 In 1939, Benediktov, like the experts of the Organisation Production School before, spoke once again about the necessity of bringing in the agricultural producers themselves as active participants, and carrying out agricultural modernisation supported by and relying on them. Why then was there so little of this in evidence in his own practical actions? That probably can only be explained by the peculiarities of political communication under the dictatorship, so‑called “regressive learning.”122 Benediktov’s words contradicted his deeds. Evidently he had been granted the mercy of not having to consciously recognise that. A crop rotation from the bottom up, determined by the enterprises, excluded the possibility of setting exact figures in advance for the total cultivation area of the economic region. It was reserved to young researchers after Stalin’s death, such as the later prominent sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaia, and the agrarian economist Gelii Shmelev, who likewise garnered national recognition in the era of Perestroika, to state that by their labour, the kolkhozniki evidently extracted value from the agricultural products, because through their labour these products became cheaper!
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NOTES
1. See Stephan Merl, “Handlungsspielräume und Sachzwänge in der sowjetischen Wirtschafts‑ und Sozialpolitik der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Wolfram Fischer, ed., Sachzwänge und Handlungsspielräume in der Wirtschafts‑ und Sozialpolitik der Zwischenkriegszeit (St. Katharinen : Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1985), 175‑229 ; Stephan Merl, “Hat sich der landwirtschaftliche Großbetrieb bewährt ? Zum Vergleich von Agrarentwicklung und Agrarproblemen in der Sowjetunion und der DDR,” in Hannelore Horn, Wladimir Knobelsdorf and Michal Reiman, eds., Der unvollkommene Block : Die Sowjetunion und Ost‑Mitteleuropa zwischen Loyalität und Widerspruch (Berlin : Berlin‑Verlag, 1988), 139‑170. 2. See Katja Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war : Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Cologne et al. : Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 179‑257 ; George L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize : Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861‑1930 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1982) ; Merl, “Handlungsspielräume und Sachzwänge.” 3. See Stephan Merl, “Einleitung,” in idem, ed., Sowjetmacht und Bauern : Dokumente zur Agrarpolitik und zur Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft während des “Kriegskommunismus” und der Neuen Ökonomischen Politik (Berlin : Duncker & Humblot, 1993), 15‑78. 4. Cf. Stephan Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion : Der Übergang zur staatlichen Reglementierung der Produktions‑ und Marktbeziehung im Dorf (1928‑1930) (Wiesbaden : Otto Harrassowitz, 1985), 166‑213. 5. See Merl, “Hat sich der landwirtschaftliche Großbetrieb bewährt ?” 6. See R.W. Davies, “The Soviet Rural Economy in 1929‑1930. The Size of the Kolchoz,” in C. Abramsky, ed., Essays in Honour of E.H. Carr (London : Macmillan, 1974), 255‑280 ; Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion, 331‑369. 7. Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion, 365‑369. 8. On the “kolkhoz giants” in connection with the settlement of nomads in Kazakhstan, which resulted in many victims, see Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden : Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan (Hamburg : Hamburger Edition, 2014) ; Niccolo Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe : The collectivization of agriculture and the Kazak herdsmen 1928‑1934,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 45, 1‑2 (2004) : 137‑192. 9. Piatiletnii plan narodnogo‑khoziaistvennogo stroitel´stva SSSR [Five‑year plan for the construction of the national economy of the USSR], vol. 2 (M. 1930), 338. 10. See Ibid. ; Merl, “Handlungsspielräume und Sachzwänge,” 184‑211 ; Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion, 237‑241, 370‑400. 11. Cf. R.W. Davies, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, vol. 1 : The Socialist Offensive. The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture 1929‑1930 (London : Macmillan, 1979) ; Stephan Merl, Bauern unter Stalin : Die Formierung des sowjetischen Kolchossystems 1930‑1941 (Berlin : Duncker & Humblot, 1990), 61‑128 and 199‑221 ; Davies, “Rural Economy” ; Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion, 331‑400. 12. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 128‑140 ; on Stalin’s sense of insecurity as a result of the severe economic crisis of 1932, see also R.W. Davies and Oleg Khlevnyuk, “Stakhanovism and the Soviet Economy,” Europe‑Asia Studies, 54, 6 (2002) : 867‑903. 13. See Otto Schiller, “Die Hungersnot in der Sowjetunion,” in D. Zlepko, ed., Der ukrainische Hunger‑Holocaust : Eine Dokumentation (Sonnenbühl : Wild, 1988), 189‑204, here, 203. 14. See Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 129‑140, 260‑280, 360‑371, and 453‑476 ; Stephan Merl, “Bilanz der Unterwerfung – die soziale und ökonomische Reorganisation des Dorfes,” in Manfred Hildermeier, ed., Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg : Neue Wege der Forschung (Munich : Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 119‑145.
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15. Merl, “Bilanz der Unterwerfung,” 140‑141 ; Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 327‑417. 16. Cf. Robert F. Miller, One Hundred Thousand Tractors : The MTS and the Development of Controls in Soviet Agriculture (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1970) ; Stephan Merl, “Agrarpolitik und Bauernschaft im Nationalsozialismus und im Stalinismus,” in Matthias Vetter, ed., Terroristische Diktaturen im 20. Jahrhundert : Strukturelemente der nationalsozialistischen und stalinistischen Herrschaft (Opladen : Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 118‑156. 17. Stephan Merl, Sozialer Aufstieg im sowjetischen Kolchossystem der 1930er Jahre ? Über das Schicksal der bäuerlichen Parteimitglieder, Dorfsowjetvorsitzenden, Posteninhabern in Kolchosen, Mechanisatoren und Stachanowleute (Berlin : Duncker & Humblot, 1990). 18. Merl, “Agrarpolitik und Bauernschaft,” 153‑156. 19. See Merl, “Hat sich der landwirtschaftliche Großbetrieb bewährt ?” 20. See Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 40. Likewise from a long‑term perspective, the evaluation of the performance of the large‑scale Soviet enterprises is unfavourable. 21. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 371‑390. 22. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 377‑383. 23. See Muralov, “Deputy People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the RSFSR,” Sotsialisti _cheskoe zemleustroistvo, no. 1 (1932) : 1. 24. M. Holendo, “Die Politik der KPdSU im Dorf,” Kommunistische Internationale, 12‑13 (1930) : 674 ; see also Merl, “Handlungsspielräume und Sachzwänge,” 184‑211. 25. Merl, Die Anfänge der Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion, 391‑397. 26. Merl, “Bilanz der Unterwerfung,” 131‑137. 27. Moisei Vol´f (1880‑1933) was from 1930 Deputy People’s Commissar for State Farms. On his reservations, see Pravda, 6 June and 11 July 1928, in Merl, ed., Sowjetmacht und Bauern, Dok. 57, 487‑493. 28. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 199‑256. 29. A.V. Negadin, “Mobilizuemsia na razvertyvanie zemleustroitel´nykh rabot 1933 goda [Let us mobilise for the expansion of land settlement activities in 1933],” Sotsialisticheskoe zemleustroistvo, no. 1 (1933) : 1. 30. Negadin, “Mobilizuemsia na razvertyvanie zemleustroitel´nykh rabot 1933 goda,” 43‑48 ; Miller, One Hundred Thousand Tractors. 31. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 36‑37. 32. “Decree, Council of the People’s Commissariats (SNK) and the Central Committee (TsK), 3 Sept. 1932, Sobranie zakonov o rasporiazhenii (SZ) [Collection of laws and instructions] 1932, no. 66, art. 388. 33. Cf. on this likewise Bruisch, Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war, 224‑257. 34. ”Resolution of the NKZ, RSFSR, 14 May 1933 on the “Preliminary Results of the Introduction of Crop Rotations in Kolkhozes,” Sotsialisticheskoe zemleustroistvo, no. 13‑14 (1933) : 10‑11. 35. F.P. Zelenin, “Ocherednye zadachi po vnutrikolkhoznomu zemleustroistvu i vvedeniiu sevooborotov [The next tasks for land settlement within collective farms and the implementation of crop rotations],” Sotsialisticheskoe zemleustroistvo, no. 10 (1935) : 5‑9. 36. RGAĖ (Rossiskii gosudarvennyi arkhiv ėkonomiki – Russian State Archive of the Economy), f. 9490, op. 1, d. 58, l. 86‑106. 37. RGAĖ, f. 9490, op. 1, d. 63. 38. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 247‑256. 39. See Naum Jasny, The Soviet Industrialization : 1928‑1952, (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1961). 40. J.V. Stalin, “Rede auf der Ersten Unionsberatung der Stachanovleute am 17.11.1935,” in idem, Fragen des Leninismus (Berlin 1970), 603‑604 ; Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades : Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2000).
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41. Vtoroi vsesoiuznyi s´´ezd kolkhoznikov‑udarnikov 11‑17 fevralia 1935 g. Stenograficheskii otchet [Second All‑Union Congress of Kolkhoz Shockworkers, 11 – 17 february 1935 : Stenographic report] (M, 1935), 5‑6. 42. Vtoroi vsesoiuznyi s´´ezd kolkhoznikov‑udarnikov 11‑17 fevralia 1935 g., 9‑39. 43. Vtoroi vsesoiuznyi s´´ezd kolkhoznikov‑udarnikov 11‑17 fevralia 1935 g., 11‑13. 44. SZ 1935, no. 11, Art. 82. The 2nd Kolkhoz Congress included the addition “i.e. in perpetuity”. 45. Decree, SNK and TsK, 25 Feb.1935, SZ 1935, no. 18, art. 139. 46. Decree, SNK SSSR of 7 July 1935, SZ 1935, no. 34, art. 300. 47. See SZ, 1935, no. 37, 48 and 65 ; 1936, no. 10, 15, 16 and 40 ; 1937, no. 16. 48. SZ 1936, no. 40, Art. 346 ; for Kazakhstan : 1937, no. 4, art. 7. 49. Report, 28 Sept. 1936 to the Commission for Party Control (KPK) in the Central Committee regarding the Implementation of the resolution by the TsK and SNK of 19 Dec. 1935, written by Alekseev, Deputy Representative of the KPK at the West Oblast´, WKP (National Archives, Washington, Smolensk Party Archive), WKP 390, l. 327‑350. 50. Ia.A. Iakovlev, “Iz praktiki raboty partiinogo kontrolia [From the work experience of party control],” Bol´shevik, no. 6 (1936) : 64‑77, here : 66‑68. 51. M. Snegirev, “Zadachi i metody ucheta zemel´ kolkhozov [The tasks and methods of kolkhoz land accounting],” Sotsialisticheskoe sel´skoe khoziaistvo, no. 10 (1939) : 32‑42, here 34. 52. RGAĖ, f. 9490, op. 1, d. 115 : Stenogram of the consultation session, Kolkhoz Dept. 53. RGAĖ, f. 9490, op. 1, d. 115, l. 1‑3. 54. RGAĖ, f. 9490, op. 1, d. 115, l. 4‑9. 55. Speech by Iakovlev before the June 1937 plenary of the Central Committee, “On Measures to Improve the Seed of Grain Cultures,” Bol´shevik, no. 13 (1937) : 11‑19, here 17‑18. 56. See, for example, Sotsialisticheskoe Zemledelie, 24 and 28 Feb. and 21 April 1937. 57. Iakovlev, “On Measures to Improve the Seed of Grain Cultures,” 11‑12 ; Decree, SNK SSSR, 29 June 1937, SZ 1937, no. 40, Art. 168. 58. SZ 1937, Art. 168. 59. SZ 1937, Art. 168. 60. See Sotsialisticheskoe Zemledelie, 22 and 28 Sept. 1937. 61. Decree, SNK SSSR, 26 April 1938, SZ 1938, no. 21, art. 136. 62. Decree, SNK SSSR, 13 Sept. 1937, SZ 1937, no. 60, art. 261. 63. Sotsialisticheskoe Zemledelie, 14 Sept. 1937. 64. Sotsialisticheskoe Zemledelie, 9 Jan. 1938. 65. Information from the NKVD, 28 April 1938, on deficiencies in the spring sowing on 25 April 1938, in Tragediia sovetskoi derevni : Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh. 1927‑1939 [The tragedy of the Soviet village : collectivisation and de‑kulakisation. Documents and materials in five volumes. 1927‑1939], vol. 5 (1937‑1939), part 2 (1938‑1939) (M. : ROSSPEN, 2006), doc. 47, 113‑118. 66. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” signed by the People’s Commissar for Agriculture, Benediktov, on the draft of the Third Five‑Year Plan, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 178, 360‑373, here 372‑373. 67. According to the decree, SNK and ZK, 10 August 1939 (Sobranie zakonov 1939, no. 47, Art. 360), the grain from selected seed areas could now be utilised “after total coverage of the demands for sowing and security” to satisfy the obligations of delivery to the state. 68. See, for example, Sotsialisticheskoe Zemledelie, 5 Feb., 5 April and 18 May 1940. 69. Stephan Merl, Politische Kommunikation in der Diktatur : Deutschland und die Sowjetunion im Vergleich, (Göttingen : Wallstein Verlag, 2012). 70. Nonetheless, this is indeed the argument advanced by Sheila Fitzpatrick, see her Stalin’s Peasants : Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York : Oxford University Press, 1994), 296‑312.
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71. Izvestiia, 6 April 1937. 72. Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Boston : Unwin Hyman, 1958), 59‑61. 73. WKP (cf. footnote 49) 238, l. 211‑214, extract, Minutes of the meeting of the West Obkom, 31 July 1937. 74. That is a typical phenomenon in political communication within a dictatorship, which can be interpreted as “regressive learning,” see Merl, Politische Kommunikation in der Diktatur, 24‑25. 75. M.A. Chernov, “O vvedenii pravil´nykh sevooborotov : Doklad na Plenume TsK VKP (b), Iiun´ 1937 g. [On the implementation of correct crop rotations : Speech at the plenum of the TsK VKP (b), June 1937],” Sotsialisticheskaia Rekonstruktsia Sel´skogo Khoziaistva, no. 7 (1937) : 25‑34, here 26. 76. Chernov, “O vvedenii pravil´nykh sevooborotov…,” 26‑28, 33. 77. Report, NKVD, 29 Jan. 1939, on the basis of investigation materials for 1936‑1938, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 1, appendix 2, 550‑571. 78. Report, NKVD, 29 Jan. 1939, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 1, appendix 2, 551. On the so‑called “wrecker activity” in connection with selected seeds, see ibid., 555‑558. 79. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 1, appendix 2, 551, 558f., 562‑566, 568. 80. Eikhe, 18 Jan. 1938, before the January TsK plenary, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 3, 31. 81. See Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 234‑242 ; Report, NKVD, 3 Jan. 1937, from Oblast´ Orenburg, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 1. doc. 5, 77‑79. 82. See Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 247‑256. On the prohibition of exclusions from kolkhozes, see : Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 30, 79‑81, and doc. 42, 100‑102. 83. Decree, SNK and TsK, 19 April 1938, on the “incorrect distribution of incomes in the kolkhozes,” Sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazenii pravitel´stva SSSR 1938 [Collection of acts and instructions of the government of the USSR], no. 18, Art. 116 ; see also Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 386‑391. 84. Speech by Stalin, 22 May 1939 at the TsK plenary on questions pertaining to the construction of the kolkhoz, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 206, 416‑424. 85. Speech by Stalin, 22 May 1939, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 206, 417. 86. Speech by Stalin, 22 May 1939, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 206, 420. 87. Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 247‑256 and 386‑391. 88. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 208, 27 May 1939, point 5, 427. 89. Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Christian Noack, eds., Allah’s kolkhozes : Migration, De‑Stalinisation, Privatisation and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s‑2000s) (Berlin : Klaus Schwartz Verlag, 2014). 90. See Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 191‑197 ; M.P. Kogtikova, Ukreplenie zemlepol´zovaniia kolkhozov v 1938‑1941 gg. [The consolidation of the land‑use of collective farms, 1938‑1941] (M. : ms. diss., 1965). 91. Report, Gosplan, 8 April 1938 to Stalin et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 37, 90‑97. 92. Izvestiia, 12 March 1941 ; Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 371‑417. For annual reports of the kolkhozes, see : RGAĖ, f. 7486, op. 7. 93. Decree, SNK and TsK, 28 Dec. 1939, SZ 1940, no. 1, Art. 3. 94. Decree, SNK and TsK, 28 Dec. 1939, SZ 1940, no. 1, Art. 3. 95. See Merl, Bauern unter Stalin, 327‑417. Campaigns from 1935 on repeatedly castigated the indebtedness of the state organs toward the kolkhozes. 96. Merl, Politische Kommunikation in der Diktatur. If Benediktov continued to attribute many problems to the activity of “enemies of the people”, he was making use of the official discourse of his time. 97. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 360‑373 (see footnote 66).
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98. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 360‑373 (see footnote 66). 99. Josef Stalin, “Neue Verhältnisse – Neue Aufgaben des wirtschaftlichen Aufbaus. Rede auf der Beratung der Wirtschaftler, 23. Juni 1931,” idem, Werke, vol. 13 (Frankfurt/M. : Druck‑Verlags‑Vertriebs‑Kooperative, 1972), 47‑72. 100. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 368. 101. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 187, 384‑387. 102. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 366‑369. 103. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 366‑369. On the directives issues in 1940‑1941 for the individual regions, see below, sec. 9, The Plans for Reshaping Nature. 104. Kogtikova, Ukreplenie zemlepol´zovaniia kolkhozov v 1938‑1941 gg. 105. On this, see János Kornai, Economies of Shortage, 2 vols. (Amsterdam : North‑Holland, 1980). 106. Eikhe, 18 Jan.1938, before the TsK January plenary, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, 31. 107. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 371‑373. 108. “Memo, 4 March 1939,” 372‑373. 109. NKVD, on the spring sowing, 28 April 1938, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 47, 113‑118. 110. NKVD to Ezhov, 25 July 1938, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 72, 171‑172. 111. Report from Beriia, 23 Oct. 1938 to Stalin, Molotov and Ezhov, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 137, 293‑ 294 ; doc. 158 (31 Dec. 1938), 326‑327. 112. Gosplan on the harvest yields 1939, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 246, 500‑512, here 502‑505. 113. Cf. Inter alia the decree, SNK and TsK, 4 Jan.1939 on the expansion of the winter sowing and measures to increase yields per hectare in the eastern regions, Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 5, part 2, doc. 161, 330‑333 ; SZ 1939, no. 3, Art. 10. 114. Von Poletika, “Lagebericht nach Reise im Juli 1941” and “Wirtschaftsstab Ost. Kurzes Konzept. Reisebericht 24.‑27.7.1941,” in W.P. von Poletika Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford. 115. Decree, SNK SSSR, 5 March 1940, SZ 1940, no. 5, Art. 149. Corresponding decrees were issued for several economic regions. 116. Decree, SNK SSSR, 5 March 1940, SZ 1940, no. 5, Art. 149. 117. Decree, SNK SSSR, 5 March 1940, SZ 1940, no. 5, Art. 149. In this connection, by 1942 public gardens were to be laid out in every kolkhoz. 118. RGAĖ, f. 7486, op. 1, d. 2611, on the dispute between the planning drafts of the NKZ, the SNK, Ukraine and the Mikoian Commission. 119. See, for example, RGAĖ, f. 7486, op. 1, d. 2620 for the Oblast´ Smolensk. 120. See RGAĖ, f. 7486, op. 7, for example, d. 141‑143 and 173 (1941‑1943). 121. See Stephan Merl, “Steht die Privatisierung der sowjetischen Landwirtschaft bevor ?” Deutsche Studien, 28, 4 (1990) : 289‑305. 122. See Merl, Politische Kommunikation in der Diktatur, 24‑25.
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ABSTRACTS
This article seeks to explore why the Soviet Union failed to achieve the two aims associated with the transition to “Socialist agriculture,” namely the industrialization of agricultural production and a rapid increase in agricultural yields. In the 1930s, the party leadership under Stalin launched four large-scale campaigns for the implementation of these aims. These included land consolidation, the introduction of progressive crop rotation and the use of selected seeds. The paper describes what informal institutions acted to deter the agricultural producers and those officials with relevant responsibility in the Soviet party and state bureaucracy from introducing crop rotations, and why agricultural producers under Stalin lost interest in increasing per hectare yields. The study reveals the contradiction-ridden character of Stalin’s agrarian policy and highlights its long-term consequences.
Cet article étudie les raisons pour lesquelles l’Union soviétique a failli dans la concrétisation de deux objectifs qui devaient permettre la transition vers « l’agriculture socialiste », à savoir l’industrialisation de la production agricole et une augmentation rapide des rendements. Dans les années 1930, la direction du parti sous l’égide de Stalin lança quatre grandes campagnes pour mener à bien ces objectifs. Cela incluait le remembrement des terres, l’introduction progressive d’une rotation des cultures et l’utilisation de semences sélectionnées. L’article décrit quels organismes informels entrèrent en action pour dissuader les producteurs agricoles et les officiels responsables concernés – que ce soit au sein du parti ou dans l’administration –, d’introduire la rotation des cultures et pourquoi les producteurs agricoles d’alors perdirent tout intérêt à augmenter le rendement à l’hectare. L’étude révèle le caractère hautement contradictoire de la politique agricole de Stalin et souligne ses conséquences à long terme.
AUTHOR
STEPHAN MERL
University of Bielefeld, smerl@uni‑bielefeld.de
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Wildscapes In Ballyhooland Shock construction, Soviet colonization, and Stalinist governance* Paysages sauvages au pays de la propagande : grands chantiers, colonisation soviétique et gouvernance stalinienne
Christian Teichmann
AUTHOR'S NOTE
*Research for this article was made possible by research grants of Volkswagenstiftung (Hanover, Germany) and the Hoover Archives Summer Workshop (Stanford, California). Heartfelt thanks for help and advice are due to Samantha Taber, Johannes Arens and Philine Apenburg, as well as the patient editors of this special issue, the supportive anonymous reviewers and the diligent journal editors.
1 “People came into the Vakhsh Valley. Not simple people but Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, organized by will, came for victory. They brought technique with them into the steppe. The technique began to move along the sun‑burnt steppe by means of its draglines, Fordsons, dredges, and workmen camps.”1 With words like these, journalists and writers hailed the Vakhsh River Valley Project in the many tongues of Soviet propaganda. What seemed like a fait accompli in 1931 newspaper reports, novels, feuilletons and public speeches was, nonetheless, an agricultural colonization project beset by great technological obstacles and deathly environmental risks. The valley’s geographical isolation in the southernmost periphery of the Soviet Union, the borderlands between the Tajik Soviet Republic and Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province, only compounded the challenge that Soviet planners, regional party bosses and irrigation engineers had set for themselves.
2 Neither its geographical remoteness nor its infrastructural isolation separated the Vakhsh River Valley Project from other Stalinist shock construction sites of the 1930s. On the contrary, Soviet economic planners sought to reverse hitherto familiar geographical hierarchies. They proclaimed that the distant peripheries were to be the new political centers and that the invincible natural borders were to be the new
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frontiers of socialism.2 Widely publicized landmark building projects such as the Magnitogorsk steel plant or the White Sea Canal—intended to open unexplored landscapes to the exploitation of natural resources in order to strengthen the country’s military capacity—emerged at geographically isolated sites with no reliable infrastructure in place.3 At the same time, the secret police deported several hundred thousand disenfranchised peasants and city‑dwellers into remote regions for the purpose of agricultural colonization.4 3 In their interpretations of Stalinist shock construction, historians often drew on the concept of authoritarian modernization. They heeded the Bolshevik battle cry that Soviet socialism should be understood as a struggle against backwardness and underdevelopment. Accordingly, they presented Stalinist policies as a radical utopian drive towards progress and modernity.5 Despite difficulties and setbacks, construction projects eventually achieved their goals as new factories, infrastructures, and urban agglomerations arose in previously barren peripheries.6 From this perspective, the transformation of societies, geographies and natural spaces lent legitimacy to the Bolshevik project and made it palpable to the peoples of the Soviet Union. Moreover, through its anti‑capitalist ideology the Stalinist regime constantly generated mobilization in the new “landscapes of possibility” where construction sites such as Magnitogorsk became “powerful levers in the fight to build socialism.”7 The Vakhsh River Valley Project, by contrast, experienced a different trajectory. Malfunctioning technology, environmental hazards, mass deportations, and a lack of political legitimacy undercut the project’s very existence. In May 1937, the Tajik government launched an inquiry into the state of the irrigation scheme and had to admit that it suffered from an “irregular and unreliable supply of water.” After seven years of costly construction work and difficult attempts at colonization, the Vakhsh project had transformed the river valley into a wasteland of salty marshes and swamps. Finally, the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture in Moscow earmarked the project for “liquidation.”8 4 The Vakhsh River Valley Project was one of the 150 prominent sites of “shock construction of all‑Union importance” during the First Five‑Year Plan.9 Unlike similar large‑scale irrigation ventures in Stalinist Central Asia—the Great Ferghana Canal of the late 1930s or the Turkmen Main Canal of the early 1950s—it sank into oblivion outside the region of its creation. All leading personnel involved in the initial phase of construction fell victim to the Stalinist purge and terror campaigns between 1936 and 1939. Archivists destroyed large parts of the documentation.10 When a major technical overhaul of the Vakhsh irrigation scheme began in 1956, Soviet historians and propagandists invented an appropriately heroic version of the construction sites’ early days. This version of the story shapes local memory up until today.11 Only during the short years of perestroika were scholars in Tajikistan able to carry out thorough archival studies of Stalinist colonization policies.12 Their efforts were cut short by the outbreak of the civil war in Tajikistan when, in 1992, the Vakhsh Valley became a site of military conflict, material destruction and ethnic atrocities. 5 While the following pages trace the Vakhsh River Valley Project in the decade from its inception in 1929 to the Soviet entry into World War II, three overarching questions will be raised. First, the paper asks how Soviet bureaucrats and engineers struggled to manage a grand construction scheme in an austere and war‑torn landscape. It traces the ways in which engineering expertise and agronomical knowledge were nullified by
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stiff decision‑making hierarchies and widespread state terror. Second, the paper aims to treat the natural environment as an actor in its own right, thus seeking to demonstrate how the forces of nature played out against the initial goals of colonizing and cultivating the isolated river plain. Third, it characterizes the ways in which Stalinist governance intentionally deepened, instead of remedying, the ongoing environmental and social crises in the valley. Rather than portraying the Vakhsh project as another key site of Soviet modernization, the paper scrutinizes the local consequences and legacies of violent state building. The Vakhsh Valley Project tells the story of a landscape and its people that remained outside the neat binaries of the Bolshevik utopia and the supposedly solid grids of Soviet modernity.
The gringos of Tashkent
6 On March 31, 1930, the American engineer Willard Livermore Gorton arrived in Tashkent. He brought with him two huge trunk suitcases and a rich engineering experience. Born in 1881, he had started his career at the North Platte Project in Wyoming in 1904. Based in Boise, Idaho, since 1909, he had continuously worked in the field of irrigation and reclamation. “My work covers the investigation, design, construction and operation of irrigation works,” Gorton wrote when applying to be employed by the Soviet government. In a stroke of luck, Gorton’s application was facilitated by the renowned constructor of the Panama Canal, Arthur Powell Davis, who already was working at the time in Tashkent as a Chief Consulting Engineer of the Central Asian Water Administration.13
7 When Gorton embarked on the Soviet Ark in 1930, his prospects looked exceptionally promising. Arthur Davis informed him that the Soviet government was planning “a very ambitious irrigation program,” which involved spending “over 100,000,000 rubles per annum during the next 6 or 8 years.” Moreover, “a project for irrigating 465,000 hectares of raw land has been under investigation for many years, and this has been ready for construction for two years,” Gorton read in Davis’ inviting letter. “It is possible that they are considering placing this construction under your charge.”14 Like thousands of American and European professionals at the onset of the Great Depression, Gorton chose to try his luck with the Bolsheviks both out of necessity and curiosity.15 “Whatever else their governmental scheme is,” he wrote to a fellow American engineer in an atmosphere of departure, “it is most assuredly a great social experiment.”16 8 Upon his arrival in Tashkent, Gorton soon discovered that the advertised Hungry Steppe Project in Uzbekistan had “gone cold” after its Russian Chief Engineer, Georgii Konstantinovich Rizenkampf, had been arrested by the secret police and disappeared in the Belomor camp.17 Instead of overseeing a conveniently located and thoroughly explored construction scheme, Gorton shortly after his arrival found himself sitting in an airplane headed for southern Tajikistan. He was to investigate “a project known as the Vakhsh,” which was “feverishly being examined” by Soviet engineers in the spring of 1930: With an optimism typically Bolshevik, and an utter disregard of realities, also typical of the Communists —Gorton later sardonically remarked—, they decided that the job, involving the reclamation of 250,000 acres of land, should be completed in one year. Only the most preliminary engineering examination had been made and final surveys and plans were still somewhere in the future.
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9 Yet, Gorton also admitted that at his new job, “it was difficult at times to retain that objective attitude toward the great experiment.”18
10 Gorton was not the only one caught up in the feverish atmosphere of the First Five‑Year Plan. Vasilii Ėmil´evich Sproge arrived in Tashkent approximately at the same time as did Gorton. A Ukrainian of Swiss descent, Sproge was a son of Russia’s three revolutions: a graduate of Moscow’s prestigious Railroad Engineering Institute, a committed Kadet, a soldier of the Voluntary Army during the Civil War and, after the White’s defeat, an enthusiastic builder of the Dnepr Hydroelectric Dam. His close association with the mastermind of the Dnepr Dam, Ivan Gavrilovich Aleksandrov, resulted in Sproge’s promotion to the position of a Deputy Director of Dneprostroi in 1926.19 In 1929, Ivan Aleksandrov moved his team from Ukraine to Moscow and, from his new headquarters, ran the newly founded State Institute for the Design of Water Works. This institution was, in Sproge’s words, responsible “for the design of all problems and major projects that previously had been managed by several different agencies in Central Asia, located mainly in Tashkent.”20 Sproge’s and Gorton’s technical expertise was a valuable replacement for those prominent engineers who possessed long years of work experience in Central Asia’s irrigation sector but, in 1930‑31, were being feverishly persecuted by the secret police.21 11 By the outlandish standards of the First Five‑Year Plan—as demonstrated at Dneprostroi, Magnitorsk, Belomor, and many other shock construction sites—the Vakhsh Valley Project was hardly an exceptional case. In Central Asia, however, the political and social conditions differed significantly from those in the Soviet Union’s Russian core. Here, the revolutionary war of the Bolsheviks had lasted until 1924 and had had the character of a colonial conquest.22 Soviet nationality policy, consequently, had failed in its goal to create stable and locally rooted governmental institutions.23 Instead, until 1934 party politics in the region were overseen by the Central Asian Bureau, the powerful representative of the Moscow Central Committee of the Communist Party in Tashkent, which also steered economic and cultural policies.24 Moreover, the turmoil of collectivization and enforced cotton cultivation was aggravated by crises and instability in the neighboring countries. In January 1929, for instance, the Afghan king and Soviet ally, Amanullah Khan, was toppled and Afghanistan slid into a protracted civil war. The deterioration of the Afghan state led the Moscow leadership to reconsider its administration of the southern borderlands. In November 1929, after five years of lobbying on the part of the Tajiks, the Moscow Central Committee finally granted the Tajik Autonomous District the breakaway from Uzbekistan.25 12 The newly established Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic not only needed new ministers, an appropriate capital city and a state budget but, due to its enhanced political status, it was also entitled to run its own prestigious construction project. The Chairman of the Tajik Executive Committee, Nusratullo Maksum, therefore advocated the Vakhsh Valley as a potential building site. He had good reason to do so. On one hand, the hot climate of the valley offered a unique opportunity to cultivate long‑fibred high‑quality “Egyptian” varieties of cotton. This fact provided valuable arguments to enlist the support of the resource‑hungry Moscow government for the adventurous irrigation scheme. On the other hand, the advocated scheme opened up the possibility for proactive Tajik nation‑building. Hitherto, Turkic nomadic tribal peoples (identified at the time as “Uzbeks” and “Lakai”) inhabited the plains of the Vakhsh Valley. By
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contrast, the Persian‑speaking sedentary groups (identified as “Tajiks”) were a tiny ethnic minority in the southern lowlands. In the minds of Chairman Maksum and his Tajik comrades, the Vakhsh Valley Project provided a unique chance to redraw the ethnic balance sheet in the southern plains and to revamp their mountain republic into a truly Tajik country.26 13 Engineers like Sproge and Gorton were hardly in a position to apprehend this situation. Being newcomers to Central Asia, they lacked a clear understanding of the murky political landscape and complex social realities of the region. Instead, the two men were preoccupied with time‑consuming struggles with the Soviet bureaucracy over payment delays, food provisioning and poor working conditions. Due to his privileged status as a foreign expert, Gorton freely criticized the Vakhsh Valley scheme because of its isolated location, inadequate survey data and general unpreparedness. Still, his technical expertise was decisive for the planning of the future irrigation scheme.27 Meanwhile, Sproge and his Soviet colleagues conducted a number of reconnaissance missions all over Central Asia between 1930 and 1932. In his memoirs, Sproge pondered the “totally impossible and unpredictable weather conditions” and the “constant danger to fall into the hands of native rebels and be tortured to death by them.”28 14 Despite their different backgrounds, both engineers shared similar attitudes towards Central Asia and its people: while painting colorful Orientalist pictures, they neither appreciated nor studied local irrigation techniques and methods. Rather, a combination of ignorance (“a civilization that hardly changed during the past two thousand years”) and disdain (“Bolshevik Turkestan is no dirtier than other countries east of the Suez”) shaped their attitudes when working towards Soviet technological progress.29 Moreover, the two engineers’ social contacts were limited to fellow professionals and Soviet officials. Their activities were circumscribed by arbitrary government orders, subject to ad hoc political decisions, and buffeted by frequent and chaotic change. Engineers experienced the hardships of “socialistic building” like everyone else. “Russia may be a workman’s paradise,” Gorton quipped after his return to Boise in 1932, “but it is a (Soviet) engineer’s hell.”30 Still, the American had a point when recognizing that Russian engineers work under great difficulties due to the peculiar type of organization utilized by the Communists whereby every important office, bureau, or project, has at its head a Communist, whose principal, and sometimes only, qualification for the position is his knowledge of Communist party ballyhoo.31
Burnt by the sun
15 The Vakhsh River cuts through the Pamir Mountains from north‑east to the south‑west and, at its confluence with the Panj River, forms the Amu Darya. Nineteenth century sources report that “just to the north of the Kurgan‑Tiube settlement, the Vakhsh River enters into a plain and diverts into several arms, where it forms low banks covered with water reeds and a diversity of shrubs.” On the plain, stretching approximately 100 kilometers from north to south, the main river stream formed meandering beds on a width of 170 meters.32 Prior to 1917, geographers portrayed the valley as abundant with waterways and carpeted with vegetation. The terrain was “barely known” to outsiders, “sparsely populated,” and the river banks were “overgrown by extensive jungles.”33 Only a decade later, the Bolsheviks saw the Vakhsh Valley as little more than a desert wasteland. It was not just the hot summers, snowy winters, and downtrodden
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post‑Civil War population that shaped their perception.34 The barren landscape represented a dark past that was to be overcome. Bruno Jasieński, a Polish Communist writer who visited Tajikistan in 1930 and 1931 with the task of propagandizing the Vakhsh Project in a novel, described the construction site in the upper part of the valley as a “huge desert plateau that is stretched out between two chains of mountains on an area of about two hundred thousand hectares.” In a rather unsurprising turn of socialist realist dialectics, Jasieński then informed his readership that the territory “lends itself wonderfully for the cultivation of Egyptian cotton.”35
16 According to Soviet planners, the “combat mission” of the engineers was to construct a canal network that would allow for the reclamation of 50,000 hectares of desert land within three years. Plans eventually foresaw the cultivation of more than 100,000 hectares in the valley. The construction of a concrete sluice over the Vakhsh was the cornerstone of the project.36 In 1930, Ivan Aleksandrov, the prominent mastermind of Dneprostroi and influential Director of the Moscow State Institute for the Design of Water Works, even advocated the building of a hydropower station and the erection of an industrial complex in the southern parts of the valley that directly bordered with Afghanistan.37 The American engineer Willard Gorton, for his part, repeatedly made it clear to the Soviet authorities that the envisioned construction program was “practically impossible.”38 Other foreign visitors concurred. Egon Erwin Kisch, an ardent admirer of the Bolshevik regime and popular journalist in Weimar Germany, was amazed by both the enthusiasm of the people he encountered during his 1931 visit to the Vakhsh Valley and by the Bolshevik “phantasmagoria to turn a stone desert parched over thousands of years into a blooming cotton garden.”39 17 At first glance, the site where the head sluice and main feeder canal were built looked like any other Soviet shock construction site of the early 1930s: chaos, scarcity and mismanagement reigned wherever observers turned their eyes.40 Willard Gorton noticed that the “appearance of feverishness” on the construction site was “due to the utter confusion, bordering on chaos, which obtains practically everywhere.”41 Although construction had already started, the technical plans had not yet been finalized. Unsurprisingly, transportation and infrastructure were disorganized: neither roads nor railroads connected the site to the outside world. Functioning building machinery was scarce. Horses and camels died of neglect and starvation. The majority of the 7,000 workers and 700 Red Army soldiers on the site lived in tents, yurts, and mud houses because wood for the construction of barracks was unavailable. Workers lacked the necessary workwear, shoes, and soap. Salaries were paid out irregularly. Even a functioning party organization was missing.42 18 In the spring of 1931, conditions further deteriorated due to hunger and war. “Kurgan‑Tiube sits without grain,” reported the secret police. A caravan of 1,000 camels tried to cross the mountain range between Stalinabad and the Vakhsh Valley but failed because mock state functionaries and con party officials demanded road tolls and transfer royalties. Armed robbers made food deliveries to the valley virtually impossible. By June, Tajik Prime Minister Abdurakhim Khodzhibaev had to ask the Moscow government to take over responsibility for adequate food provisions to the valley.43 To make things worse, an insurgency broke out when Afghan warlord Ibrahim Bek crossed into Tajikistan with his sizeable army. He had fought against Soviet rule throughout the 1920s but his troops had grown from a few dozen warriors in 1929 to 1,200 fighters in 1931. Ibrahim, a 42‑year‑old Lakai from Hissar, collected tributes from
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the population and recruited fighters in the valley and the surrounding lands.44 Alarmed by the deteriorating security situation, Moscow sent in OGPU Special Troopers under the infamous commander Efim Georgievich Evdokimov. After two months of ruthless counterinsurgency operations, Ibrahim was finally arrested and subsequently shot. His fighters went into hiding. A Soviet holiday was celebrated. Evdokimov and his radicalized troops moved into Turkmenistan to quell a nomad uprising in Karakum desert. In a continuation of their counterinsurgency operation, his soldiers used air bombardments and poison gas to end anti‑Soviet resistance.45 19 Despite massive food shortages and an epidemic of malaria, new people continuously arrived in the valley. Some were workers and soldiers recruited in Tashkent to toil on the construction site. The majority, however, were destitute Kazakh herders trying to escape famine in their homeland. They used the dangerous passage through the Vakhsh Valley as a gateway to Afghanistan. Between January and March 1932, more than 1,200 refugee families were able to flee from Soviet territory despite the massacres and man hunts employed by Soviet border patrols to prevent them from doing so. Tajik Prime Minister Abdurakhim Khodzhibaev complained to the secret police about the “masses of anti‑Soviet elements” that “roam the border districts” and demanded that the border be sealed off.46 Amid masses of deprived refugees, disease, and shortages, Soviet officials could hardly ensure the fulfillment of the construction and cotton sowing plans. “The reason for the lagging plan fulfillment is that the plans took into account neither the out‑migration of the population to Afghanistan nor the non‑arrival of new settlers,” Tajik secret police chief, Ivan Dorofeev, dutifully mused.47 20 How could an ambitious Soviet agricultural development scheme thrive in this situation? It certainly could not. In late March 1932, a report cabled to Stalinabad from the Lubianka secret police headquarters in Moscow alerted the Tajik government to the dire state of affairs: The entire territory of the construction site is littered with various objects and materials (tractors, trailers, carts, pieces of metal, ropes, canvases, and so on); the living conditions for workers are heinous: barracks are leaking and unheated; there is no hot water, no crockery, and no bathing facilities. 21 Characteristically for secret police reports of the period, data on the bad state of the machine outfit and livestock mortality supplanted any precise information about the living conditions of the population: only 40 out of 127 cars were in operation, only 15 out of 28 excavators, only 90 out of 213 tractors; half of the original number of 800 camels had died as had over 1,000 out of 2,600 horses.48 This devastating result, achieved at a cost of 38 million rubles, was, however, only one in many missteps of shock construction during the First Five‑Year Plan in the Soviet Union.
A leap in the dark
22 The Tajik Central Committee in Stalinabad now pushed for an “assault to liquidate the plan backlog” and for a “decisive breakthrough” on the construction site. Lengthy party resolutions and government orders, however, did nothing to consolidate the construction site. Directors came and went. Repressions by the secret police in the Vakhsh Valley against “criminal and enemy elements” continued. The food situation did not improve despite the accommodation of “Soviet bazaars” where private trade was officially sanctioned.49 Unrestrained improvisation substituted for any serious
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advance in the construction process. When a new director was sent in directly from Moscow in September 1932, he summarized his first impressions with the statement that the Vakhsh Project was an “ideal example and wonderful role model of how not to build.” According to him, construction “moved forward tentatively like a blind man” and was characterized by “lack of method, disorganization, sloppiness, and excursiveness.” Despite two years of building, the “most difficult and complex work” was “yet ahead.”50
23 The new director of the Vakhsh Project, Ivan Aleksandrovich Tolstopiatov, was the right man in the right place. Born in 1892, the trained machine operator had built a career in the Soviet Ministry of Labor and, in 1928, climbed to the position of Deputy Minister. In 1930, however, he had to quit the job, officially “due to illness.”51 In 1932, at the age of forty, Tolstopiatov had regained his energy. Being both a committed Bolshevik and a capable industrial manager, he represented a rare type of Soviet official in Tajikistan. His knowledge of the Soviet state bureaucracy as well as his resolute and assertive behavior set him apart from his predecessors and colleagues. He ignored the downtrodden atmosphere on the construction site, which he likened to a “prison camp or place of forced exile” where “convicts and sinners on parole” worked side by side with “swindlers, thugs, and other vermin.” In the Vakhsh Valley, Tolstopiatov encountered only a “very small stratum of people” that “shouldered all the responsibility” and, unlike the majority, worked “not out of fear but out of good conscience (ne za strakh, a za sovest´).”52 24 Fear was a natural reaction to the life‑threatening conditions in the valley. In the autumn of 1932, malaria returned on a grand scale and the region suffered from a plague of locusts; typhus spread, and the secret police continued its hunts for starving refugees from Kazakhstan, Tajik resettlers on the run, as well as active and former anti‑Soviet rebels.53 Climatic conditions were rough during the 1932‑1933 winter of starvation. Still, production targets had to be met. The Tajik government had lowered the original plan to cultivate 50,000 hectares of cotton by 1933 to 24,500 hectares. Tolstopiatov reported that 17,600 hectares could be sown in spring only if a number of “uncertainties” were resolved. (Since 1929 the size of arable irrigation land in the valley had decreased by a staggering 12,000 hectares.)54 As a consequence of failure, the party organized public show trails while the secret police combed the valley in search of “anti‑Soviet elements.”55 Attempting to make progress on his assignment, Tolstopiatov willingly collaborated with the secret police. The well‑paid and well‑fed OGPU troopers were the only available resource to protect vital transport facilities, organize food deliveries, and successfully supply 2,000 forced labor camp inmates who served as a welcome and cheap source of manpower.56 25 The 1933 construction season in the Vakhsh Valley began as a wave of state terror hit Tajikistan. Karl Bauman, the Chairman of the Central Asian Bureau of the Communist Party in Tashkent, specifically targeted Tajik indigenous functionaries. Allegedly, secretive “nationalistic organizations” were “uncovered.” In April 1933, Stalin granted Bauman permission to operate a special tribunal (troika) with the right to execute suspected “insurgents and counter‑revolutionaries in Central Asia.”57 The tribunal ceased its bloody operations after three weeks, but Bauman continued his campaign of terror into the summer: state ministers in Stalinabad were prohibited from using their telephones or sending telegrams. Up to 600 Tajik party and state functionaries were arrested. Bauman did not rest until the influential Chairman of the Executive
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Committee, Nusratullo Maksum, and the Tajik Prime Minister, Abdurahim Khodzhibaev, who were already under strict secret police surveillance, were relieved from their posts by Stalin in the fall of 1933.58 26 To fend off the swirl of terror, Tolstopiatov began securing special powers and privileges, as a means of making the Vakhsh Project more independent from its superior organizations in Stalinabad and Tashkent. The director was able to attain financial autonomy, decision‑making powers over the development of local infrastructure, and the management of agricultural colonization. In return, he was required to ensure the successful completion of the construction scheme.59 This assignment presented unexpected difficulties and unknown surprises. In 1931 and 1932, engineers and agronomists had realized that the location of the main sluice had been chosen “not entirely felicitously” and that the construction plan was “not sufficiently thought out and worked through.” One year before construction work was scheduled to be finished, the director and his staff knew very precisely that the core objects of the scheme were ill‑conceived and premature. Hurried planning and the unfamiliarity of the engineering team (under Gorton’s supervision), with the terrain, combined with the local ecological conditions, produced a first negative result. Regardless of his doubts, Tolstopiatov fatalistically reasoned that “in the current situation there is no turning back because it is already too late.”60 27 The construction proceeded incessantly until the last days of August 1933. Despite the fact that it was not carried out by the “best shock brigades with the strongest of workers” but by “local indigenous laborers unaccustomed to hard work,” Tolstopiatov was confident enough to guarantee that the main sluice would be completed and exploitation could begin by October 1933.61 Behind the scenes, however, conflict ripened. The Vakhsh River Valley Project’s chief engineer, Sergei Ivanovich Syromiatnikov, could regularly be seen arguing with workers instead of “quietly explaining to them their duties and requirements.” Tolstopiatov complained that the inspection trips of the “difficult” and “pigheaded” chief engineer usually ended in “fights and yelling.” At the same time, he accused Syromiatnikov of displaying “contempt” towards young engineers and noted that “his behavior and manners aroused the wish in many of the engineering personnel to quit their job.”62 28 Tolstopiatov’s personal dislike of his chief engineer was fed by suspicion. Born in 1886, Syromiatnikov had been an aspiring and capable irrigation engineer in Central Asia during the 1910s and 1920s. Shortly after he turned forty, however, he was arrested and subsequently presented as one of the main culprits in the 1928 show trial against the Central Asian Water Administration in Tashkent. Two months before the beginning of the much publicized Shakhty trial in Moscow, Syromiatnikov was indicted in Tashkent along with a dozen fellow “bourgeois” engineers and convicted to five years in prison. Yet luckily for him, his prison term ended after a couple of weeks and he returned to his former workplace as if nothing had happened.63 The experience of becoming a Soviet engineer had shaped Syromiatnikov’s personality without remaking him into a Soviet new man. Still, the Bolshevik Great Leap Forward heavily relied on engineers like Syromiatnikov. The “old guard” of “bourgeois” engineers had not disappeared from the scene in the late 1920s but instead found itself in the eye of the storm at the landmark Stalinist shock construction sites throughout the 1930s.64 29 Tensions between Syromiatnikov and Tolstopiatov mounted as their collaboration approached completion. The last and risky step was the demolition of the cofferdam
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(an auxiliary construction 82 meters in length and 7 meters high, which shielded the excavation pit from the river waters). Despite having sought advice from Moscow and Italian experts, the construction team and its director could not find an agreeable solution to the following dilemma: how to calculate the right amount of explosives needed to detonate the cofferdam without also destroying the main sluice. For six months, expert reports circulated between the Vakhsh Valley and the responsible agencies in Moscow’s Ministry of Agriculture. By August, Tolstopiatov decided to circumvent the stiff bureaucratic procedures and act at his own discretion. Engineer Syromiatnikov, for his part, grew increasingly worried about the negative consequences of this decision.65 30 Disasters were part and parcel of Soviet shock construction and had dreadful consequences both for Soviet workers and Soviet engineers.66 Syromiatnikov had learnt his lesson the hard way in 1928: in the world of the Soviet judiciary, responsibility was attributed to the failure of individuals rather than to the failure of state institutions. Despite the careful preparation of the demolition operation under Tolstopiatov’s supervision, on August 31, 1933—a day before the scheduled demolition—an explosive device detonated ahead of time and tore a deep hole in the cofferdam. Twelve days of emergency work “under the most difficult and sometimes life‑threatening conditions for the workers” were necessary to seal off the damaged cofferdam. When faced with disaster, Tolstopiatov and Syromiatnikov followed different strategies of action. While Tolstopiatov struggled like a Bolshevik, Syromiatnikov was paralyzed by fear. At the height of the emergency, Tolstopiatov finally fired his “cowardly” chief engineer. The latter was allegedly overheard asking members of the engineering team, “Why do you follow Tolstopiatov? He is a powerful man. If the operation fails, he will sneak out. But we will end up in the clink.”67 31 At last, the cofferdam was successfully demolished. The sluice and canal opened on September 12, 1933. Nevertheless, few people on the construction site were in the mood to celebrate. Due to the continuing purges in Tajikistan and the beginning of the cotton harvest, state and party officials from Central Asia skipped the grand opening. No official speeches were delivered, no flags were waved, and no portraits of the leadership were on display. Meanwhile, the workers were starving and sick. Even at the height of the shock construction campaign, food deliveries to the valley had been irregular, which led to an “unsatisfactory provisioning of the workforce” and the “factual breakdown of public feeding.” Pappataci fever and malaria occurred “on a massive scale.”68 One Bolshevik battle was won, but several new fronts opened up immediately.
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Fig.1: Opening Ceremony at the Vakhsh Canal Main Sluice, September 12, 1933
Natural forces
32 The opening of the main irrigation canal was the beginning of a descent into nature’s hell. The lack of food and the abundance of disease led half of the 5,000 families (originating from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Tajik mountain areas) who were resettled by force in 1933 to return to their regions of origin or take refuge in Afghanistan.69 Those who had no choice and stayed behind faced a harsh winter in the severe continental climate of the valley. The party committees and the secret police were aware that many kolkhozes, especially those made up of resettlers, had exclusively cultivated cotton and melons and, for that reason, start the year of 1934 without fodder and seeds, and with only minimal amounts of grain that they received in exchange for cotton.70 33 Tolstopiatov was wise enough to pretend that difficulties did not exist. When he delivered his official report to a plenary session of the Central Asian Bureau in Tashkent in November 1933, he talked at length about the “absolutely satisfactory results with irrigation on the reclaimed lands” while he did not mention during his report that “over long periods of time, resettlers did not even have the possibility to receive drinking water.”71 Planners, experts and party officials in Tashkent were, however, acutely aware of the bitter and deadly struggles at the Vakhsh River. “In view of their current state, none of the large‑scale irrigation objects in Central Asia will deliver any meaningful results in the years to come,” an internal report by the Central Asian Water Administration concluded in late 1933, “even under the condition of an exceptionally energetic state funding.”72 Accordingly, the responsible government agencies scaled down large construction schemes and turned to smaller but better
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manageable irrigation ventures.73 Still, what was to become of the prestigious Vakhsh Valley Project once it was in operation?
34 The future looked bleak. In December 1933, Tolstopiatov’s deputy reported that the recruitment of seasonal construction workers was becoming more difficult “year in and year out.” Workers usually came in from Tashkent late in the fall and, after their three‑month contracts ended, returned to their villages for spring sowing, which, as officials complained, “inevitably leads to difficult working conditions in the wintertime and drives up construction costs.” Meanwhile, the permanent settler population was difficult to keep in check and did nothing to hide its resentment towards the Soviet state. Vakhsh officials recognized that the persistent lack of organization and workforce, construction materials and spare parts, clothing and housing, firewood and fuel, “put a question mark behind the effectiveness of all future plans.”74 Many Soviet shock construction projects were in a comparable state of crisis. In contrast to earlier years, engineers and officials were allowed to discuss the ongoing crisis more openly. They were still expected, however, to come up with viable solutions that would guarantee plan fulfillment.75 35 Deprivation, shortages and lack of manpower had diverted the attention of Vakhsh officials and agricultural experts from their most powerful enemy: the turbulent river and its relentless waters. The original purpose of the irrigation scheme had been to reign in the mountain stream and use its waters for irrigation. In spring 1934 when the powerful river floods began pouring onto the wide and deserted valley plateau at a pace of 200‑250 cubic meters per second, the serious defects of the main sluice and the feeder canal became apparent. The sluice’s main defect proved that it was not a dam. With a length of 55 meters and a width of 40 meters, it allowed for the inflow of river water only after the water had reached sufficiently high levels. Given the 500 meter‑wide range where the river bed meandered by the site of the sluice, the necessary levels were unlikely to be reached. Unlike a dam, the sluice could not effectively regulate water volume, as it was neither able to store water nor to effectively control its velocity. It also lacked an antechamber, which could have filtered out sediments and thus prevented silt and sand from entering the main canal and clogging the smaller field canals.76 36 The second menace of the irrigation scheme was the misaligned main feeder canal. Stretching over a distance of 12 kilometers, the feeder cut through bedrock at a depth of 12 meters. This allowed massive amounts of river water to seep into the ground, causing the groundwater table to rise dramatically. In addition, watertight soil layers close under the ground surface transported water over long distances into the valley, leading to excess water, salination, and undercutting of soil stability. Furthermore, the oversized main feeder canal exposed the irrigated lands to unchecked flooding, since the sluice construction proved ineffective at stemming the sudden tidal waves of the Vakhsh River. Severe floods regularly haunted the irrigation system until the mid‑1960s. The forceful floodwaters also washed away the light loess soils of which the field irrigation canals had to be built.77 Rising groundwater tables and excess water led to high levels of soil salination which, in turn, became a major hindrance to land reclamation and cotton cultivation. According to official statistics, 50 per cent of the virgin lands of the Vakhsh Valley were either solid salt fields or marshes in 1939.78 37 The final blow occurred when an earthquake hit the upper part of the Vakhsh Valley in 1935. While experts had been aware of seismic activity in the Pamir Mountains, they
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had no possibility to foresee the precise consequences of such an event. They had, nevertheless, as early as 1932 found fault with the “not entirely felicitous” choice of the sluice’s location. The 1935 earthquake proved them right by causing a shift in the river bed at just the point where the main sluice was positioned. Suddenly, the bulk of the river water passed by the sluice because it now stood parallel to the new river bed. Sand islands, sometimes growing to four meters in height, prevented the inflow of water through the sluice into the main feeder canal. The sand had to be continuously removed by workers in difficult and dangerous manual labor. Engineers had to employ massive makeshift wooden auxiliary constructions to divert at least some amount of flowing river water towards the main sluice. Due to the diminished inflow of moving water into the irrigation system, the field canals, in turn, became clogged with sediment. At the same time, rising groundwater tables led to the formation of lakes and swamps in large parts of the valley. In 1937 the construction of drainage canals was hurriedly initiated, but these flat, hand‑dug canals were quickly silted closed, rendering the measure ineffective.79 38 Rather than the mountain river being tamed, it was the river that brought the Bolsheviks to heel in the Vakhsh Valley. The combination of irregular water supplies and the soft alluvial soils further aggravated the situation, as the valley soil proved extremely sensitive to water. On the one hand, alluvial soils can hold great amounts of pore water which, under solar radiation, is transported through the soil particles to the surface by capillarity. As a consequence, the surface soils become desiccated and salinized. On the other hand, alluvial soils can lose their stability when coming into contact with water. They collapse. In the Vakhsh Valley, strong and uncontrollable streams of water both on the surface and underground permanently undermined soil stability. This had devastating consequences. “You see someone standing in the field, watching over the cotton being watered,” an eyewitness remembered, “and suddenly that person disappears.” When the soil imploded, it left sinkholes of several meters in width and depth. Collapsing soils and quicksand swallowed and buried livestock, tractors and people. Each and every year during the irrigation and field work period in spring and summer, people died in sinkholes. This was such a widespread occurrence that people began only entering the fields if they had two to three meter‑long sticks firmly tied to their backs as a means of saving themselves from a horrible death by quicksand.80
State of chaos, world of disorder
39 Thirty years ago, historian Moshe Lewin famously labeled the Soviet Union a “quicksand society.” His memorable phrase referred to the permanent movement of state officials, workers, and peasants from one workplace, office, or town in favor of another. According to Lewin, Soviet people developed the “habit of leaving in good time, before they were penalized, recalled, brought in for questioning, downgraded, fired, or arrested.” From his observation, Lewin developed two compelling conclusions: first, that “social, administrative, industrial, and political structures were all in flux,” and second, that it was “not difficult to imagine the despair of the rulers and their fierce resolution to put an end to this situation and introduce law and order into the chaos.”81 In the Vakhsh Valley, however, there was little evidence for the “despair of the rulers” or their desire to “introduce law and order into the chaos.” On the contrary,
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decisions made by the Moscow leadership consolidated and deepened the crisis situation. Moreover, Stalinist governance intentionally prevented the emergence of stability and order.
40 In October 1934, Stalin commanded the Politburo member Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev to travel to Central Asia with the assignment of “putting pressure on the cotton harvest campaign.”82 Weakened by heart disease and his longstanding alcoholism, Kuibyshev arrived in Tashkent on November 5, 1934. During his seven‑week peripatetic tour of Central Asia, Kuibyshev spread death and terror wherever he went. Public show trials, special tribunals (troiki), and random executions helped the old Bolshevik to boost the cotton harvest yields. He regularly informed Stalin about his actions.83 Despite his pressured schedule, Kuibyshev found the time to spend three full days in the Vakhsh Valley.84 When the Politburo met to discuss the results of his trip in March 1935, Kuibyshev had already passed away (he died on January 25, 1935). For the Vakhsh Valley and its people, however, a new chapter had opened: Stalin had begun to take a personal interest in the project. 41 Under the direction of the General Secretary, the Politburo declared that the colonization of the Vakhsh Valley had progressed “at an impossibly slow pace” and that “to this date, the majority of the resettlers (kolkhozniki‑pereselentsy) were economically unviable (lack of housing and so on).” Stalin’s solution to the dilemma was to order the resettlement of 12,000 new “households” to the valley between 1935 and 1937 (4,000 annually of which 3,000 should originate from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, respectively, while 6,000 would be “special settlers from other parts of the USSR”). Twelve million rubles were handed out to the authorities in the Vakhsh Valley to cover the cost of accommodation, provision, and preliminary credits. Additionally, the Politburo granted resettlers exemption from all taxes and deliveries for the period of five years—“with the exception of cotton.” The colonization campaign was to be “overseen directly” by the NKVD and was to begin immediately.85 42 To the Tajik Party leadership, the colonization campaign came as a surprise. Unaware of the discussions in the Politburo and unused to deportations of people from outside Central Asia into their mountain fiefdom, they were unprepared and overwhelmed by Stalin’s decision. Tolstopiatov declared that the Vakhsh Project had no virgin lands available to accommodate large numbers of deportees. The Stalinabad party leadership hurriedly organized a government commission which was made responsible for supplying the deportees with basic necessities (building materials, fuel, food, cows, horses, and “at least 1,000 buckets, 1,000 cups, and 1,000 washstands”). On April 10, 1935, the commission members were met with yet another surprise when Moscow informed them that the actual number of new arrivals would exceed the originally announced figure of 2,000 deportees. In fact, between early April and mid‑May, 4,895 people arrived in the Vakhsh Valley. This “special contingent” of future colonizers was a raw product of Soviet penal policies. It consisted of 315 German Mennonites from the Uzbek region of Khorezm, 350 former inmates of the Sazlag labor camps in Uzbekistan, and 408 prisoners from Karaganda. The most unexpected and numerically significant addition were 3,822 “special settlers” (890 “households”) from Leningrad.86 Ironically, resettlers and deportees arrived in a borderland region with an enhanced internal security and passport regime. Periodic cleansing campaigns and the subsequent deportation of former deportees were thus regular occurrences.87
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43 Stalin closely monitored the colonization effort. What is more, his arbitrary decision to choose the Vakhsh Valley as a dumping site for large numbers of “special settlers” mocked Tajik party officials. Despite desperate pleas from the Tajik First Party Secretary, Suren Shadunts, to slow down the pace of the campaign, Stalin urged instead to speed up the deportations.88 He was neither interested in local conditions nor was he bothered by the consequences of his orders.89 Thus, in the spring of 1936, 2,734 “households” from Uzbekistan and the northern parts of Tajikistan were brought into the Vakhsh Valley. Additionally, the NKVD dumped 1,902 “households” of deportees from Russia. To appreciate these figures, one should keep in mind that only 8,307 “households” had peopled the valley as of January 1, 1935.90 Complaints on the part of the Vakhsh authorities did nothing to calm the determination of the NKVD, which “insisted on continuing the resettlement of special settlers in the Vakhsh Valley” on Stalin’s behalf.91 According to official calculations, during the period from 1933 to 1938, a total of 12,434 “households” originating from outside Tajikistan were moved into the valley. Stalinist colonization, moreover, did not stop when the targeted numbers were met in 1938 but continued on a massive scale until 1954.92 44 Meanwhile, Central Asian leaders in Stalinabad and Tashkent had no illusions about the fact that the fragile and dependent economy of the Vakhsh Valley did not allow for the accommodation of thousands of people who had no prior experience in cotton cultivation. Consequently, government officials encouraged the diversification of economic activities in order to allow deportees to feed themselves independently of the state provisioning system. When resettlers and deportees started arriving in the valley in 1935, they were urged to engage in horticulture and handicrafts, to set up “fishery kolkhozes,” or to work as private traders on the local market.93 For a group of “special settlers” who arrived in early 1936, Tolstopiatov and his team were obligated to provide building materials and food and to guarantee the “reclamation of 300 hectares of irrigated land, where they will be settled, for the cultivation of vegetables and foodstuffs for the needs of the special settlers.”94 No one talked anymore about the need to grow more cotton. 45 On the other hand, the Stalinabad government announced measures that aimed at an ethnic division of the colonization administration: while Tajik state institutions assumed the task of monitoring the “voluntary” resettlers of Central Asian ethnic origin, the NKVD was to provision and administer Russian and Ukrainian “special settlers.” Accordingly, the secret police was put in charge of organizing shelter, food, and medical care as well as land surveying, reclamation work, and canal maintenance.95 This ethnographic approach allowed the Tajik leadership to shed responsibility for large parts of the colonist population. Simultaneously, however, it institutionalized the perilous living conditions and economic deadlock in the valley, which was now being administered by three different sets of institutions: the Vakhsh River Valley Project (overseen by the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture), the Tajik party and state institutions, and the Resettlement Administration of the NKVD. 46 At first glance, this institutional arrangement seems to point to a centralized, bureaucratic and modern state. A closer look reveals parallel structures, mushrooming institutions, loss of control, and the unclear allocation of responsibility.96 The outcome was a wretched administrative chaos with instable, illegitimate, and irresponsible state institutions. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, reports called attention to the disorganization of resettlement and the hardships of colonization in the Vakhsh Valley.
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Reports repeated that supposedly “voluntary” resettlers from Central Asia experienced much coercion and violence; that they arrived too late in the agricultural year to produce a sufficient harvest to feed themselves; that they suffered from malnutrition and disease; that they lacked housing, water, and fuel; and that they fled the pitiful living conditions whenever they could.97 Not even the severe hunger in Tajikistan in May 1945, about which Stalin was well informed, prevented the continuation of the relentless resettlement campaign.98 There is no evidence of the “despair of the rulers and their fierce resolution” to “introduce law and order into the chaos.” On the contrary, the “quicksand society” was fuelled by decisions made in Moscow to deport and resettle large numbers of people—in full awareness of the deathly living conditions and the ongoing ecological crisis in the Vakhsh Valley. 47 Law and order in a blossoming cotton garden was a far cry from the realities of the Vakhsh Valley. This became apparent during the years of the so‑called Great Terror. The first victim to fall prey to the purges was the Vakhsh Project’s prominent director Ivan Tolstopiatov, who was arrested as a “counterrevolutionary Trotskyite” in August 1936.99 Tolstopiatov’s ousting triggered fierce criticism of his achievements. In March 1937, the Soviet government finally called for the Vakhsh Valley Project to be “liquidated.” Upon hearing the news, engineers, agronomists, and colonists started to leave the “quicksand” valley. Because of payment delays, the soldiers guarding the irrigation infrastructure unceremoniously abandoned their posts. Contract workers from Tashkent and Stalinabad ceased to arrive. In June 1937, the acting director of the project informed the Tajik government about the “pending collapse” of the irrigation scheme “within the next month or two.”100 Before the liquidation was finalized, however, the responsible First Deputy Minister of Agriculture in Moscow, Nikolai Antonovich Paskutskii, was himself arrested and subsequently “liquidated.”101 48 Engineers and agricultural experts responded to the crisis by raising similar objections to the irrigation scheme that had been voiced at the initial stages of the project in 1932‑1933: the ineffective sluice should be replaced by a dam, a hydropower station should be installed, the main feeder canal should be improved, and “past mistakes should not be repeated.”102 In the face of the terror, the engineers’ calls for major improvements amounted to pitiful cries into the wind. The state of affairs was now fundamentally different from previous years. “Heroes” and “pioneers” of the recent past were now “saboteurs” and “enemies of the state.”103 Party officials even critically invoked Willard Gorton’s mundane 1932 warnings about the inevitable failure of the irrigation scheme as evidence that the “coarse deviational enemy work” of the Vakhsh engineers was to blame: “Just think that our specialists were unable to figure out these problems …”104 49 In 1937, fear triumphed over enthusiasm, and anxiety upset belief. The seemingly solid structures of the Soviet state began collapsing at a breathtaking speed. Was it disenchantment, an admission of defeat, or a moment of true socialist realism? I think that in view of the giant material sums that were invested in the Vakhsh Valley—stated the incumbent director of the Vakhsh Valley Project, Beliakov, in an emotional speech—, it would have been possible to create decent living conditions, a healthy financial situation, and a functioning infrastructure—but down to the present day there is nothing: hospital and school buildings collapsed; we have neither schools nor hospitals, and the infrastructure is in shambles.105 50 Along with the irrigation scheme and the many lives of its unhappy builders, the symbolic landscape of the Soviet state was also falling apart. Since 1936, a statue of
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comrade Stalin, produced at a cost of 90,000 rubles, had been waiting to be erected on top of the main sluice of the Vakhsh irrigation system. Despite reminders repeatedly sent from Stalinabad to the responsible officials in the Vakhsh Valley, the statue was never put up.106
51 Extraordinary violence and unmanaged environmental conditions upset the regular and continuous administrative work that is the vital fundament of modern state‑building. Instead, Stalinist governance in the Vakhsh Valley produced a fragmented, conditional and illegitimate statehood. Under the pale sun of official propaganda, the Soviet First worlds were emerging as capital cities were being reconstructed and new industrial agglomerations were arising from scratch to shine in the bright light. The Moscow Metro, Magnitogorsk, or the much‑hailed industrial landscape around Dneprostroi filled contemporaries of the Stalin period with enthusiasm and pride. At the same time, Soviet Second and Third worlds were emerging. Many places in the Soviet Union were touched upon by the forces of the Stalinist governance through shock construction and colonization projects yet were not penetrated by enduring, reliable, or legitimate state structures. In these places, building socialism amounted to suffering and sacrifices but without a happy end. On the contrary, the “quicksand society” suffered from both relentless state terror and the unruly powers of nature. The Vakhsh Valley stands out as an example for the latter category of Soviet spaces.
NOTES
1. HA GP (Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Willard Livermore Gorton Papers), Box 2, Folder A (Rough English translation of an official speech or newspaper article entitled “An Affair of Honor and Fame,” 29 May 1931). 2. Vladimir Kaganskii, Kul´turnyi landshaft i sovetskoe obitaemoe prostranstvo [Cultural Landscape and Soviet inhabited space] (M. : Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001), 135‑154. 3. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain : Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995), 72‑85 ; Nick Baron, “Conflict and Complicity : The Expansion of the Karelian Gulag, 1923‑1933,” Cahiers du monde russe, 42, 2‑4 (2001) : 639‑645. See also James Harris, The Great Urals : Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1999) ; Nikolai Ssorin‑Chaikov, The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2003) ; Oleg Leibovich, Gorod M : Ocherki social´noi posednevnosti sovetskoi provintsii [Town M : A survey of Soviet provincial everyday life] (M. : Rosspėn, 2008) ; Julia Landau, Wir bauen den großen Kuzbass ! Bergarbeiteralltag im Stalinismus 1921‑1941 [We are building the Great Kuzbass : Miners’ everyday lives under Stalinism] (Stuttgart : Steiner, 2012) ; Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power : An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016). 4. Sergei Krasil´nikov, Serp i molokh : Krest´ianskaia ssylka v Zapadnoi Sibiri v 1930‑e gody [Sickle and Moloch : Exiled Peasants in Western Siberia during the 1930s] (M. : Rosspėn, 2003) ; Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island : Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton : Princeton University
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Press, 2007) ; Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag : The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York : Oxford University Press, 2007). 5. On the powerful intellectual tradition of this argument see David Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore : American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2003), 194‑243. 6. With regard to Central Asia, see Matthew Payne, Stalin’s Railroad : Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 288‑292 and Julia Obertreis, “Infrastrukturen im Sozialismus : Das Beispiel der Bewässerungssysteme im sowjetischen Zentralasien [Infrastructures under Socialism : The example of irrigation in Soviet Central Asia],” Saeculum, 58, 1 (2007) : 151‑182. 7. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 155. 8. BMDJT (Boigonii Markazii Davlatii Jumhurii Tojikiston – State Archive of the Republic of Tajikistan), f. 268 (Upravlenie Vakhshskogo irrigatsionnogo stroitel´stva [Administration of the Vakhsh Irrigation Construction]), op. 5 (Sekretnaia chast´ [Depository of secret documents]), d. 69, l. 37‑38 (Stenogramma zasedaniia SNK Tadzhikskoi SSR [Shorthand Report of Tajik Council of People’s Commissars Session], 10 June 1937). 9. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 7, l. 10 (Postanovlenie No. 215 SNK SSSR [Resolution No. 215 of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars], 2 October 1931). 10. Evidence for the destruction of a great deal of the archival material in 1981 is given by the description of the holding on which this article heavily draws, see BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, inventory, 8‑9. In addition, the Tajik Communist Party Archives in Dushanbe remain inaccessible to researchers. 11. Salomiddin Mirzorakhmatov, “Triumf Vakhshstroia [The Triumph of Vakhshstroi],” Asia‑Plus, 4 April 2013, available online at www.news.tj/ru/print/140648. 12. R.A. Abulkhaev, Razvitie irrigatsii i osvoenie novykh zemel´ v Tadzhikistane [The development of irrigation and reclamation in Tajikistan] (Dushanbe : Donish, 1988) ; Shirin Kurbanova, Pereselenie dekhkanskikh khoziaistv i osvoenie tselinnykh zemel´ v Vakhshskoi doline Tadzhikistana, 1924‑1941 gg. [Peasant resettlement and land reclamation in the Vakhsh Valley of Tajikistan] (Dissertation, Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Universitet, Dushanbe 1993) ; eadem, Pereselenie : Kak eto bylo [Resettlement : How it really was] (Dushanbe : Irfon, 1993). See also Tim Epkenhans, “Zwischen Mythos und Minenfeld : Historiographie in Tadschikistan [Between myth and minefield : Historiography in Tajikistan],” Osteuropa, 62, 3 (2012) : 137‑150. 13. HA GP, Box 1, Folder B (Gorton to Arthur Powell Davis, 1 August 1929). Gorton had previously worked for the U.S. Reclamation Service under Davis’ supervision. Davis was familiar with Central Asia from an earlier visit to the region in 1911‑12. On Davis’ and Gorton’s activities in Central Asia in 1929‑32, see Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology Soviet Economic Development, 1930 to 1954 (Stanford : Hoover Institution Press, 1971), vol. 2, 32‑43. 14. HA GP, Box 1, Folder B (Arthur Powell Davis to Gorton, 17 September 1929). 15. The literature on foreign specialists is vast but often limited to American or German engineers. For a wider international perspective, see Andrea Graziosi, “Visitors from Other Times : Foreign Workers in the Prewar Piatiletki,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, 29, 2 (April‑June 1988) : 161‑180. 16. HA GP, Box 1, Folder B (Gorton to Andrew Weiss, 31 December 1929). 17. A celebrated engineer and associate of Lenin, Rizenkampf (born in 1886) was freed and rehabilitated shortly before the Belomor Canal was opened in June 1933. He continued his glamorous career as Chief Engineer of the Volga Don Project between September 1935 and January 1941. At the onset of the German‑Soviet War, he was rearrested and died in a labor camp in 1943. See RGAĖ (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ėkonomiki – Russian State Archive of the Economy), f. 282, op. 1, d. 4b, l. 40‑41. I am grateful to Julia Obertreis for this reference.
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18. HA GP, Box 2, Folder A (Manuscript “The Five Year Plan,” 6‑9). 19. V.Ė. Sproge, Zapiski inzhenera [Notes of an engineer] (M. : Russkii put´, 1999), 362‑363. The book is a concise reprint of a typescript of memoirs written by Vasilii (Wilhelm) Sproge, dated Zurich 1963, which is preserved at the Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City. 20. Sproge, Zapiski inzhenera, 384. The Russian name of the agency was Gosudarstvennyi institut po proektirovaniiu vodnykh sooruzhenii (abbreviated “Giprovod”). 21. Gorton reports that on January 10, 1931, four key protagonists of Central Asian irrigation engineering (Romanovskii, Budassi, Morgunenkov und Khrustalov) were seized by the Uzbek GPU without further explanation or further notice (HA GP, Box 1, Folder F). Many were taken to Belomorstroi. On the engineers’ fate, see Baron, “Conflict and Complicity,” 644. 22. The best available in‑depth study is Marco Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot : Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR [Inverted revolution : Central Asia between the fall of the tsarist empire and the formation of the USSR] (M. : Zven´ia, 2007). 23. See the overtly negative 1928‑1929 assessments in TsK RKP(b) – VKP(b) i natsional´nyi vopros [The Central Committee and the Nationality Question], vol. 1 : 1918‑1933 (M. : Rosspėn, 2005), 574‑592, 619‑621. 24. Benjamin Loring, “Colonizers with Party Cards : Soviet Internal Colonialism in Central Asia, 1917‑1939,” Kritika, 15, 1 (Winter 2014) : 77‑102 ; Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire : Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2004), 209‑241 ; Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation : The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2004), 100‑128. 25. On the Uzbek‑Tajik conflict and partition, see Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan : Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2015), 311‑315, 367‑371. 26. Botakoz Kassymbekova, “Humans as Territory : Forced Resettlement and the Making of Soviet Tajikistan, 1920‑1938,” Central Asian Survey, 30, 3‑4 (September‑December 2011) : 349‑370. 27. HA GP, Box 1, Folder D (Arthur Powell Davis to Glavkhlopkom, 16 March 1931). 28. Sproge, Zapiski inzhenera, 399. 29. Citations from Sproge, Zapiski inzhenera, 394, and HA GP, Box 2, Folder E (“Scholastic Pencil Tablet”). On the context of these attitudes, see Martin Reuss, “Seeing Like an Engineer : Water Projects and the Mediation of the Incommensurable,” Technology and Culture, 49, 3 (July 2008) : 531‑546. 30. HA GP, Box 1, Folder F (Manuscript “I had finished a round of sightseeing”, 3‑4 ; Pencil note “There is a serious lack”). 31. HA GP, Box 2, Folder A (Notepad). With similar observations Sproge, Zapiski inzhenera, 384‑385, 391‑393. 32. Vladislav Ivanovich Masal´skii, “Vakhsh,” in : Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´ [Encyclopedic Dictionary] (SPb. : I.A. Efron, 1892), Tom 5a, 653‑654. 33. Rossiia : Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva. Tom XIX : Turkestanskii krai [Russia : A comprehensive geographical description of our homeland. vol. XIX : Turkestan] (SPb. : Devrien, 1913), 737. For further details, see Sharki Iusupov, Vakhshskaia dolina nakanune ustanovleniia Sovetskoi vlasti [The Vakhsh Valley on the eve of the establishment of Soviet power] (Dushanbe : Donish, 1975), 8‑17, 31‑39, 46‑51. 34. On the protracted civil war in the region, see Beatrice Penati, “The Reconquest of East Bukhara : The Struggle against the Basmachi as a Prelude to Sovietization,” Central Asian Survey, 26, 4 (December 2007) : 521‑538. 35. Bruno Iasenskii, Chelovek meniaet kozhu [Man changes his skin] (M. : Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960 [1932]), 44‑45. An English translation was
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published in Moscow in 1936. On Jasieński’s biography, see Encyclopaedia Judaica : Second Edition (Detroit : Thomson Gale, 2007), vol. 11, 89. 36. RGAĖ, f. 8387 (Glavnoe Upravlenie Vodnogo Khoziaistva NKZ SSSR [Main Directorate of Water Management of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Agriculture]), op. 1, d. 17, l. 6 (Piatiletnyi plan vodokhoziaistvennykh meropriiatii po Uzbekskomu Upravleniiu vodnogo khoziaistva [Five‑Year Water Management Plan of the Uzbek Water Administration], n. d. [1929]). 37. “Tam, gde byla tsarskaia koloniia : Pis´mo iz Srednei Azii [Where once there was a Tsarist colony : A letter from Central Asia],” Pravda, 30 June 1930, 7. 38. HA GP, Box 1, Folder D (Gorton to Issa Khojanov, 14 October 1930). 39. Egon Erwin Kisch, Asien gründlich verändert [Asia thoroughly transformed] (Berlin : Erich Reiss Verlag, 1932), 247. 40. See the magisterial analyses in Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 37‑71. 41. HA GP, Box 1, Folder F (Pencil Manuscript “There is a serious lack”). 42. BMDJT, f. 18 (SNK Tadzhikskoj SSR [Tajik Council of Peoples’ Commissars]), op. 2, d. 49, l. 107‑110 (Protocol No. 145 of the Executive Commission of the Central Asian Bureau, 30 November 1931) ; BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 34, l 23‑24 (Kharakteristika sostoianiia stroitel´nykh rabot Vakhshstroia [Information on the status of construction work at Vakhshstroi], 1 November 1932). 43. BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 51, l. 2, 52, 64, 142 (Correspondence with Tajik GPU, 1931). 44. RGASPI (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv social´no‑politicheskoj istorii – Russian State Archive of Social and Political History), f. 85 (G.K. Ordzhonikidze), op. 27, d. 456, l. 17‑17ob, 21‑26 (David Guseinov to Ordzhonikidze, 6 May and 24 June 1931) ; William S. Ritter, “The Final Phase in the Liquidation of Anti‑Soviet Resistance in Tadzhikistan : Ibrahim Bek and the Basmachi, 1924‑1931,” Soviet Studies, 37, 4 (1985) : 484‑493 ; Reinhard Eisener, “Who was Ibrahim Bik ?” in Gabriele Rasuly‑Paleczek and Julia Katschnig, eds., Central Asia on Display (Vienna : Lit, 2004), 109‑120. 45. Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “Agency and Terror : Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin’s Great Terror,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, 53, 1 (2007) : 20‑43 ; Turganbek Allaniiazov, Krasnye Karakumy : Ocherki istorii bor´by s antisovetskim povstancheskim dvizheniem v Turkmenstane [Red Karakum : Historical Sketches from of the Struggle against the Anti‑Soviet Insurgency Movement in Turkmenistan] (Almaty : OST‑XXI, 2006), 84‑87, 158‑160, 205‑206, 213‑214 ; Dzhumadurdy Annaorozov, “Vosstanie turkmenskikh kochevnikov v 1931 g. [The Turkmen Nomad Uprising of 1931],” Voprosy istorii, 5, 2013 : 36‑53. 46. BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 91, l. 11, 15, 106 (Correspondence with Tajik GPU, 1932) ; Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK – OGPU – NKVD [The Soviet village through the lens of the secret police] (M. : IRI RAN, 2005), vol. 3/II, 80‑81 (1 April 1932) ; Tragediia sredneaziiatskogo kishlaka [The tragedy of the Central Asian village] (Tashkent : Shark, 2006), vol. 1, 510‑512 (17 June 1932). 47. BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 91, l. 27 (Dokladnaia zapiska o khode vesennei posevnoi kampanii khlopkovykh kultur po raionam Iuzhnogo Tadzhikistana [Report on the cotton sowing campaign in the districts of southern Tajikistan], 13 March 1932). 48. BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 91, l. 55 (Zapiska tov. Akulova [Letter of comrade Akulov], 29 March 1932). 49. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 32, l. 1‑5 (Resolution of the Tajik Central Committee, 5 June 1932). 50. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 34, l. 8‑12. 51. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 783, l. 18 (Politburo Protocol No. 124, 25 April 1930). 52. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 34, l 26‑27. 53. BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 81, l. 16, 39, 47, 95, 114, 117‑118, 133‑135 (Protocols of the Executive Bureau of the Tajik Central Committee, November ‑ December 1932). 54. BMDJT, f. 288 (NKZ Tadzhikskoi SSR [Tajik People’s Commissariat of Agriculture]), op. 3, d. 14, l. 12 (Poiasnitel´naia zapiska k planu osvoeniia irrigatsionnykh prirostov v Vakhshskoi doline v
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32‑33 khoziaistvennom godu [Commentary on the 1932‑33 economic year’s plan for land reclamation in the Vakhsh Valley], 13 July 1932) ; BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 34, l. 3. 55. Kurbanova, Pereselenie dekhkanskikh khoziaistv, 92. 56. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 32, l. 12‑15, 24 (Resolutions of the Tajik Central Committee, 1932) ; BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 81, l. 10, 16, 56, 134‑135, 138 ; BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 52, l. 13, 15 (Vypiski iz sekretnykh prikazov po Vakhshstroiu [Secret orders on Vakhshstroi], 1933). 57. Lubianka : Stalin i VChK – GPU – OGPU – NKVD, ianvar´ 1922 – dekabr´ 1936 [Lubianka : Stalin and the Soviet secret police, January 1922 – December 1936] (M. : Demokratija, 2003), 428 (16 April 1933), 435 (7 May 1933). 58. Lubianka : Stalin i VChK, 444 (1 July 1933) ; Stalin i Kaganovich : Perepiska 1931‑1936 gg. [The Stalin‑Kaganovitch correspondence, 1931‑1936] (M. : Rosspėn, 2001), 364‑368 (28‑30 September 1933) ; Reinhard Eisener, Konterrevolution auf dem Lande : Zur inneren Sicherheitslage in Mittelasien 1929/30 aus der Sicht der OGPU [Counter‑Revolution in the countryside : Internal Security in Central Asia in 1929‑30 as reported by the secret police] (Berlin : Das Arabische Buch, 1999), 156‑164. 59. BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 116, l. 39‑40 (Protocol of the Bureau of the Tajik Central Committee, 19 May 1933). 60. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 34, l. 12‑14. 61. RGASPI, f. 62 (Sredneaziatskii Biuro TsK VKP(b) [Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee]), op. 2, d. 3119, l. 29 (Dokladnaia zapiska o sostoianii stroitel´nykh i osvoencheskikh rabot Vakhshstroiia [Report on the status of construction and reclamation at Vakhshstroi], 5 July 1933). 62. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 44, l. 4 (Dokladnaia zapiska po voprosu udaleniia peremychki [Report on the demolition of the cofferdam], 12 September 1933). 63. GARF (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii – State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 374 (TsKK – NK RKI SSSR [Central Control Commission and People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection]), op. 27, d. 1525, l. 27 (Vinokurov and Antonov‑Saratovskii to Ordzhonikidze, 2 January 1929). For an entertaining description of the trial, see Mustafa Chokai‑ogly, Turkestan pod vlast´iu Sovetov : K kharakteristike diktatury proletariata [Turkestan under Soviet power : towards a portrait of the dictatorship of the proletariat] (P. : Iash Turkestan, 1935 [1928]), 113‑127. 64. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 74‑75. Syromiatnikov was active in several construction projects in Central Asia during the 1930s. His name disappears from the record in late 1938. 65. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 44, l. 3‑6. 66. Kurbanova, Pereselenie dekhkanskikh khoziaistv, 64 accounts for “eight major disasters with large numbers of fatalities” at Vakhstroi but she does not specify or qualify this information. 67. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 44, l. 8‑9. 68. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 33, l. 11‑12 (Postanovlenie Ispolkomissii Sredazbiuro Ts VKP(b) [Resolution of the executive commission of Central Asian Bureau], 7 July 1933). 69. RGAĖ, f. 8378, op. 1, d. 97, l. 16‑19 (Dokladnaia zapiska Pred. Upol. TsKK‑RKI v Srednei Azii [Report of the Central Control Commission Plenipotentiary in Central Asia], 17 December 1933). On refugees, see Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK – OGPU – NKVD, 479‑480 (20 October 1933). 70. RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3135, l. 77 (Spravki po Aralskomu raionu [Information on the Aral District], 22 December 1933). One kilogram of grain was handed out for the delivery of one kilogram of raw cotton. 71. RGAĖ, f. 8378, op. 1, d. 97, l. 11. 72. RGAĖ, f. 8378, op. 1, d. 99, l. 330ob‑331 (Rakhimbaev and Askochenskii to Bauman and Paskutskii, n. d. [1933]). 73. A.G. Abdunabiev, Iz istorii razvitiia irrigatsii v Sovetskom Uzbekistane [From the history of irrigation development in Soviet Uzbekistan] (Tashkent : Fan, 1971), 110‑115.
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74. RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 3119, l. 52‑54 (Dokladnaia zapiska Zam. Nachal´nika Vakhshstroia Vinokurova o sostoianii i podgotovlennosti irrigatsionnoi seti [Report of Vakhstroi deputy director Vinokurov on the status and preparedness of the irrigation system], 8 December 1933). 75. RGAĖ, f. 8378, op. 1, d. 99, l. 307‑329 (Stenogramma vystuplenija po dokladu t. Popova ob obsledovanii Karasuiskogo sistema [Shorthand protocol of reactions to comrade Popov’s presentation on the inspection of the Karasu irrigation system], 10 November 1933. 76. Valentin Vasil´evich Koshkin, Vakhshskaia orositel´naia sistema : Iz opyta stroitel´stva i ėkspluatatsii [The Vakhsh irrigation system : Construction and exploitation] (Dushanbe : Irfon, 1967), 47. 77. Koshkin, Vakhshskaia orositel´naia sistema, 39, 76. 78. Koshkin, Vakhshskaia orositel´naia sistema, 25, 63‑64. 33,200 out of 67,000 hectares (in 1939) and 31,100 out of 70,000 hectares (in 1950) were heavily salinated or marshy lands. 79. Koshkin, Vakhshskaia orositel´naia sistema, 29, 47‑48, 60. 80. Mirzorakhmatov, “Triumf Vakhshstroia,” n. p. ; Kurbanova, Pereselenie dekhkanskikh khoziaistv, 64‑66. 81. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York : The New Press, 1994 [1985]), 221. 82. Stalin i Kaganovich : Perepiska, 519 (28 October 1934). 83. Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House : Stalin and His Inner Circle (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009), 124. 84. RGASPI, f. 79 (V.V. Kuibyshev), op. 1, d. 695, l. 4 (Kalendar´ poezdki V.V. Kuibysheva v Sredniuiu Aziiu [Itinerary of Kuibyshev’s trip to Central Asia], 1 November ‑ 24 December 1934). 85. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 961, l. 35‑36 (Politburo Protocol No. 23, 19 March 1935). 86. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 68, l. 11‑12, 30‑32, 38‑40 (Protocols of the Bureau of the Tajik Central Committee, 26 March, 16 April, and 22 May 1935). On the 1935‑1936 “mass operations” in Russia’s major cities, see David Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism : Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924‑1953 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009), 205‑215. 87. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 65, l. 106 (Protopopov to Stalin and Ezhov, 30 December 1937). The telegram sent by the Tajik First Secretary states that 6,366 “households” (26,000 people) out of a total 16,940 “households” were scheduled for deportation from six border districts during a “passportization” campaign despite harsh wintertime conditions. 88. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 971, l. 69 (Politburo Protocol No. 33, 29 September 1935) ; RGASPI, f. 558 (I.V. Stalin), op. 11, d. 54, l. 82 (Stalin and Molotov to Akmal´ Ikramov and Faizulla Khodzhaev, 4 February 1936) ; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 975, l. 44 (Poliburo Protocol No. 37, 9 March 1936). 89. Dva sveta vremeni : Dokumenty iz lichnogo fonda N.S. Khrushchëva [Two shades of time : Documents from the personal archive of N.S. Khrushchev] (M. : Demokratiia, 2009), vol. 2, p. 323 (Beseda N.S. Khrushcheva s zaveduiushchimi otdelami TsK KPSS [Discussion between Krushchev and Department Heads of the Central Committee], 11 December 1956). 90. Kurbanova, Pereselenie dekhkanskikh khoziaistv, 93. 91. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 21 (Paskutskii to Zaprometov, 14 October 1936). 92. Abulkhaev, Razvitie irrigatsii, 162, 166‑168, 188. 93. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 68, l. 39‑40 (Protocol of the Bureau of the Tajik Central Committee, 22 May 1935). 94. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 11‑12 (Resolution of the Tajik Council of People’s Commissars, 9 February 1936). 95. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 8‑10. 96. Nicolas Werth, “Staline et son système dans les années 1930,” in Henry Rousso, ed., Stalinisme et nazisme : Histoire et mémoire comparées (Bruxelles : Éditions Complexe, 1999), 55‑60. 97. See, e.g., BMDJT, f. 18, op. 2, d. 126, l. 9‑32 (Dokladnaia zapiska ob itogakh pereselencheskoi kampanii [Report on the results of the resettlement campaign], 29 April 1933) ; Lubianka : Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1937‑1938 [Lubianka : Stalin and the main directorate
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of State Security, 1937‑1938] (M. : Demokratiia, 2004), 630 (Malenkov to Stalin, 17 December 1938) ; RGANI (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv noveishei istorii – Russian State Archive of Contemporary History), f. 6 (Komisiia Partiinogo Kontrolia [Party Control Commission]), op. 6, d. 610, l. 60‑71 (Dokladnaia zapiska Upol. KPK pri TsK VKP(b) po Tadzhikskoi SSR [Report of the Party Control Commission Plenipotentiary in Tajikistan, 11 March 1941) ; Abulkhaev, Razvitie irrigatsii, 152‑191. 98. GARF, f. 9401 (“Osobaia papka Stalina” [Stalin’s secret archive]), op. 2, d. 96, l. 147 (Tajik NKVD Kharchenko to NKVD SSSR Beriia, 21 May 1945). The document can also be found in the Dmitri Volkogonov Papers (Box 2, Reel 14). 99. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 980, l. 59 (Poliburo Protocol No. 42, 1 September 1936). 100. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 43‑44. 101. On Paskutskii’s background and early career, see Edgar, Tribal Nation, 113‑114. 102. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 33. 103. BMDJT, f. 288, op. 5, d. 155, l. 44‑45 (Kratkaia kharakteristika irrigatsii Tadzhikistana [Short information on irrigation in Tajikistan], n.d. [1938]). 104. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 38. 105. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 69, l. 45 (“Na segodniashnii den´ nichego net : bol´nitsy, shkoly razvalilis´, u nas ni shkol, ni bol´nits, a transport ves´ raziuit.”) 106. BMDJT, f. 268, op. 5, d. 92, l. 5‑6 (Tajik Deputy Minister Mazaev to Vakhshstroi Director Nechai, 14 September and 16 October 1939).
ABSTRACTS
Writing the history of yet another Stalinist shock construction site cannot be an end in itself. Hence, the article treats the story of the Vakhsh River Valley Project, a showcase irrigation scheme located at the Soviet border with Afghanistan, not merely as a humanitarian, economic and environmental disaster. While deprivation and fear were key factors that hindered knowledgeable engineers and capable managers from reigning in an unruly natural environment, the article scrutinizes how Stalinist political ambition and Soviet institutional disorder intertwined with unfavorable environmental conditions which, ultimately, prevented the irrigation and colonization scheme from succeeding. The imminent collapse of the Vakhsh Project in 1937, thus, revealed some fundamental limitations of Stalinist governance in a politically and ecologically sensitive borderland.
Écrire l’histoire d’un autre grand chantier stalinien ne saurait constituer une fin en soi. Aussi l’auteur fait-il le choix de relater l’histoire du Projet de la vallée de la rivière Vahš, projet exemplaire d’irrigation près de la frontière soviétique avec l’Afghanistan, qui n’est pas seulement un désastre humain, économique et écologique. Alors que la précarité et la peur étaient autant de facteurs majeurs qui entravaient l’exercice des ingénieurs et des responsables compétents dans un cadre naturel incontrôlé, l’article examine comment l’ambition politique stalinienne et le désordre institutionnel soviétique, cumulés à des conditions environnementales défavorables ont, finalement, abouti à la mise en échec du projet d’irrigation et de colonisation. L’imminence de la faillite du Projet Vahš en 1937 révèle ainsi quelques-unes des limites importantes de la gouvernance stalinienne dans une région frontalière politiquement et écologiquement sensible.
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AUTHOR
CHRISTIAN TEICHMANN
Humboldt University Berlin, teichmac@hu‑berlin.de
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Livres reçus Books received
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Livres reçus Books received
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