By Arthur W. Wright

D. J. MALE: Russian Peasant Organisation before Collectivisation. London, Cambridge University Press, 1971. PETER J. POTICHNYJ: Soviet Agricultural Trade Unions, 1917-1970. Toronto, Canada, University of Toronto Press, 1972. KARL-EUGEN WÄDEKIN: The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., University of California Press, 1973.

THE ENTIRE HISTORY of Soviet policy toward agriculture is a record of impatience with the constraints imposed on industrialization by peasant agriculture. That impatience led to repeated attempts to ease or circumvent the constraints administratively, from the top down, with a minimal diversion of resources from industry. At best, the record shows only partial or temporary success, followed by frustration and renewed impatience.

Past writers-e.g., Robert Campbell on Soviet planning as a whole and Erich Strauss and Jerzy Karcz on agriculture-have identified a dysfunctional syndrome which explains why administrative solutions to economic problems so frequently result in frustration. This syndrome consists of three parts: (1) an inherent tendency

for administrative measures not to be effective because they try to substitute exhortation for inputs of real resources; (2) a tendency for cadres, responding to incentives signaled by the center, to apply the measures with excessive zeal and in distorted ways; and (3) a tendency, when both the failures and the excesses become apparent to the center, to resort to new administrative measures. Thus, the campaign may "succeed," but the policy fails-and with the next campaign the cycle begins over again.

The administrative syndrome emerges clearly in the three cases of Soviet agricultural policy examined in the books reviewed here. According to Male, Soviet rural policy in the 1920's included a series of attempts, largely unsuccessful, to replace the peasant mir with rural soviets by urging the soviets onward and by harassing the mir. Potichnyj portrays a rural trade union network decreed into existence in 1919, exhorted to accomplish impossible tasks, almost reorganized out of existence in the 1930's, and finally able to gain institutional integrity only after World War II, when the objective conditions became more favorable. Wädekin details how an overreliance on administrative measures led to interdependence

between the collective farms and the private peasant plots, and how in turn administrative measures against the plots detrimentally affected collective agricultural performance. Let us examine each of these cases of goloe administrirovanie (administration by mere injunction) in some detail.

FOLLOWING THE de facto land reform at the end of World War I, many Russian peasants were reorganized into communes similar to the miry of tsarist times.' Like their predecessors, the new postwar communes could serve both administrative and landholding functions (including the repartition of land). Even peasants owning "enclosed" farms not subject to repartition often affiliated with a nearby commune for economic purposes.

The new central government moved quickly to organize a net

1 According to data assembled by Male, the extent of commune organization varied widely from region to region. The main determinant would seem to have been cultural background: for example, Great Russian peasants tended to prefer the commune, while Ukrainians and Central Asians did not. Tentative and not wholly consistent attempts to relate the variation also to the type of land-use and cropping patterns leave the impression that Male could have derived more insight on this question from his data had he formulated a better economic model of peasant

agriculture.

work of rural soviets to take over taxation and other administrative responsibilities from the communes. The rural soviets were slow, however, in developing any effective capacity to govern because of higher-priority claims on party and state organizational resources. Male shows that, in many instances, it was the communes that exercised effective administrative authority in the countryside, because they still controlled the rights to productive land and could raise funds locally where the soviets could not. Continual reshuffling of the structure and tasks of the soviets had the effect of weakening rather than strengthening those bodies, in spite of considerable exhortation from MosCOW.

One tactic in the campaign against the kulaks was to exclude them from participation in the rural soviets; they were not, however, excluded from the communes, even when (at the end of the 1920's) Moscow tried to force them out by legislation. That the communes were stronger than the soviets was interpreted in Moscow -illogically, according to some Soviet writers at the time 2-as evidence of persistent kulak strength and defiance. This interpretation only hardened the determination of the central authorities to restrict the communes, and the

2 These writers held that repartitioning within the commune worked against the kulaks. Male reports evidence of social mobility, in both directions, within the communes, in part because of the effects of land redistribution; however, he also cites evidence that the richer peasants were able to manipulate commune decisions in their favor (e.g., by getting the commune to allocate pasture rights according to the number of cows rather than per household). The plasticity of the definition of a "kulak" in this period is a good example of the administrative syndrome operating at the local level.

years from 1925 to 1930 saw a succession of ever harsher measures limiting communal landholding and the agricultural techniques that private peasants could employ.

Male tacitly adopts the common view that the crash collectivization begun in 1929 grew out of disappointed expectations for the repartitional commune and other private agricultural institutions. In fact, his own tale of the harassment of private peasants from 1925 on is consistent with the position of Karcz and others that mass collectivization began before a systematic attempt had been made to work with private institutions. Thus, the commune was not shown to be inimical to Soviet goals unless one of those goals was the collectivization of agriculture per se and not just the alleged benefits of increased productivity, released labor, and rural savings. The only demonstrated failure was, in fact, one of policy rather than of institutions.

ants to the level of industrial workers and convey the superiority of socialism in productivity and social arrangements. Unfortunately, instead of glorious achievements, the agricultural trade unions yielded at best feeble results until the 1950's.

The beginnings of the agricultural unions were not auspicious. Decreed into existence from on high rather than growing up among the workers, they were from the start regarded with distaste by the rest of the Soviet trade union movement. Moreover, the administrative syndrome operated in classic fashion throughout the 1920's: when the agricultural unions failed to produce the desired results by the prescribed deadline, the union structure was overhauled, outsiders from industrial unions and the party apparat were put in charge, union membership rolls were purged of unsavory elements, and everyone was then exhorted not only to make up for lost time but to make new strides as well. At the same time, the agricultural unions (like the rural soviets) never achieved even a semblance of financial independence, being forced to rely instead on central trade union and party subsidies. As a result, no experience was gained by agricultural union officials, and the unions had little effect on wages and working conconsequently earning scant respect from the rank and file. The outcome was precisely what a good Marxist would predict

3 Emphasis was also placed on recruiting batraki, or landless peasant laborers, into the unions. The reason for recruiting these people (the least proficient peasant farmers as a rule) was not, of course, to serve as the vanguard of the proletariat but rather to help foment class divisions among the peasantry.

as a consequence of the basic error of voluntarism.

After 1929, the agricultural unions were continually reshaped -by successive reorganizations in 1929-30, 1931, 1932, 1934, 1937, 1939, and 1941!—to assist in mass collectivization. The administrative measures imposed in this period were, however, even less successful than those taken when agriculture was still largely private. By 1935, with the local and middle-level officials stripped of all authority, the agricultural unions were, in Professor Potichnyj's words (p. 67), "so weak that for all practical purposes they ceased to function." No amount of exhortation or further reorganization seemed capable of reviving them.

Nevertheless, the agricultural unions did begin to come into their own after World War II. As Professor Potichnyj shows, however, the reason was not a new administrative structure but rather (again as a Marxist would argue) the emergence of new "objective conditions." The visible weaknesses of Soviet agriculture following the war led to a shift from political to economic objectives in that sector, and the shift in objectives in turn gave the agricultural unions new scope for a useful role. Now, administrative changes changes followed rather than preceded the tasks assigned to the unions, and those tasks were rooted in basic economic functions. Two specific developments-the Virgin Lands campaign launched in 1954 and the dismantling of the state-run machine-tractor stations (MTS), along with the sale of their assets to the collective farms (kolkhozy), in 1958-highlighted the changed role of the unions after 1945.

The Virgin Lands campaign carried with it a large increase in the

state-farm (sovkhoz) labor force and the relocation of many workers to areas of poor working and living conditions. The agricultural trade unions were reorganized and their staffs expanded in prepara-❘ tion for the campaign-once again to act as a transmission belt from the center, but this time with more resources and greater authority than previously. With the resources and authority, the unions were both willing and able to exercise the functions vested in them, including communication of workers' complaints and negotiation of remedial measures.

The MTS reorganization enhanced the role of the agricultural unions as representatives of the workers' interests. On the one hand, the sizable bloc of agricultural workers transferred from state enterprises to the cooperative structure of the kolkhozy were understandably concerned to retain their rights to the benefits (such as social insurance) associated with union membership. On the other hand, the central leadership was not eager to have large union locals within the kolkhozy, whose members were still cooperants and not yet full-fledged workers. The agricultural trade unions were able to parlay the center's strong desire to effect the MTS reorganization and yet also hold the skilled MTS labor force in the countryside into measures protecting the workers' union status and benefit rights.

Professor Potichnyj concludes, quite persuasively, that by the 1960's Soviet agricultural trade unions had evolved from a mere "channel of direction and control from above" (and an ineffectual channel at that) into an institution capable of serving as a "conduit for communication and pressure from below" (p. 128). Even though

the book is somewhat overburdened with factual detail and strings of numbers and the descriptive material at times overshadows the analytical, it is a work to which specialists on Soviet trade unions and economic administration will wish to have access.

PERHAPS THE MOST striking example of the administrative syndrome in Soviet agriculture involves the relationship between individual private plots and the socialist sector. It is Professor Wädekin's thesis that the kolkhoz economy is a symbiosis, not merely a coexistence, of collective and private farming. As with the lichen, in which the alga provides food for the fungus but depends on the fungus for water, the collective farms provide fodder and other inputs for the peasants' private plots but depend on the plots to produce livestock and laborintensive crops. Moreover, the income from the plots is a not insignificant supplement to the low real incomes the peasants earn from collective work. Wädekin carefully and clearly documents his thesis in a book which will be a standard reference work on the subject, in the same class with Moshe Lewin's major study of the decision to collectivize."

• Wädekin presents data showing that the entire private sector includes more than just the plots of kolkhozniki. He estimates that about 40 percent of total private agricultural output originates outside the collective sphere, primarily on the plots of sovkhozniki and urban dwellers. We shall focus here on the kolkhoz economy, although the analysis applies with some modification to the rest of Soviet private agriculture.

5 Wädekin's book is an enlarged and revised version of an earlier work published in German; the German edition contains numerous data and calculations cited as the basis of arguments advanced in the English version but not printed there. The translation by Keith Bush is excellent.