THE USSR COLLECTIVE-STATE FARM SYSTEM IN 1946-1964 IN SCIENTIFIC AND PUBLICISTIC LITERATURE OF THE SOVIET ERA

Abstract

The study objective was to analyze scholars’ and publicists’ views of the Soviet era on the development of the collective-state farming system during two decades after World War II. The key aims were to reveal the influence of ideological and political attitudes of the supreme authority on researchers’ opinion, similarities and differences in the views of historians, economists and publicists regarding the issues. Collective farm peasant problematics have dominated scientific literature. The works of economists of the 1960-1980s have highly assessed «destalinization» of the collective farming system of the mid-1950s and substantiated the necessity of using cooperative starters and market mechanisms on farms. Historians in their fundamental works on this subject published in the second half of the 1980s have cautiously evaluated the agrarian “destalinization” by N. S. Khruschev and paid tribute to the Stalinist strategy of collective farming. State farming issues became popular due to large-scale construction of state farms developed under the guidance of N. S. Khruschev in the second half of the 1950s. During the period of his leadership (1953-1964), researchers gave this undertaking a high appraisal, however after 1964 critical judgments started appearing in the works of scientists, primarily regarding the policy of transforming collective farms into state ones. During the years of Perestroika, the attitude of scholars and publicists towards the Soviet system became more critical from the supreme power. There was an opinion that the collective-state farming system was never and would not be an effective economic mechanism due to incurable «generational traumas» of past experiences. Opponents of this opinion argued that it lost its fundamental shortcomings in the post-Stalin period, and continued to have a future.