After the war, the extraordinary public trauma of 27 million dead was targeted by Stalin, who warned an exhausted populace that the Soviet Union was once again threatened by economic collapse, internal enemies and foreign nations intent on obliterating 'the Red menace'. Accordingly, Stalin demanded the forcible relocation of 'suspect' populations, and crackdowns on suspect economic activity. Millions of Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and Chechens were deported to Central Asia, the Urals and Siberia, where collective and state farms were required to accept them as new members. An accelerated policy of forced collectivisation was imposed in the former Baltic states and other newly acquired territories; in Estonia alone, peasant resistance in 1949 triggered the deportation of several thousand supposed kulaks to Siberia.[51]
In the late 1940s, Stalin also targeted 'suspect' economic activity on the peasantry's private plots, and increased taxes upon their agricultural output. The peasantry's time-honoured niche at the bottom of the Soviet hierarchy left them with wages and benefits far lower than those accorded urban workers. Within the rural population itself, state farmers received a fixed wage, but collective farmers still received only what remained after compulsory deliveries were provided to the state. In 1947, fears of a too-quickly resurgent peasantry triggered a carefully designed currency reform that completely wiped out peasant savings. By the late 1940s, Soviet women - like America's 'Rosie the Riveter' - were displaced from their wartime positions of leadership and higher status. Although males were still in short supply, the number of women managers and policy makers declined after 1945, as did the number employed as tractor drivers. By 1959, only 0.7 per cent of the latter group were women.[52]
Post-Stalin: the question of reform
From the peasantry's perspective, the most notable feature of the post- Stalin era was the abandonment of mass murder and deportations as core instruments of state policy. The familiar alternation of abundant harvests and crop failure did not result in massive purge trials, executions or accusations of treason. In the i950s and i960s, official exhortations and economic 'campaigns', and a variety of non-lethal pressures and constraints fostered agricultural initiatives that relied on ever-larger economic enterprises managed by ever-larger contingents of supervisors and inspectors. In the reforms of this era, the southern-born Nikita Khrushchev played a central role. Notorious for the failure of his grandiose agricultural projects, Khrushchev was also notably responsible for initiating a fundamental reversal in the relationship between the rural sector and the rest of the economy. Under Khrushchev, the traditional Soviet view of the countryside as 'an internal colony' that supplied funds for industrial development began at last to give way. By the i960s, the rural sector became - for the first time in Soviet history - the recipient of significant government investment.
It turned out to be far easier for the Soviet 'command system' to foster dramatic, nationwide increases in income, educational levels and life expectancy than to guarantee consistent improvement in rates of agricultural productivity. Between i953 and i967, the average income of the collective farm worker increased by 311 per cent in real terms.55 In 1956, pension benefits for the aged, disabled and sick were significantly expanded, and in the i960s, the wages for collective farm workers were fixed (and made no longer dependent on the requirements of the latest Five-Year Plan). Peasants began to enjoy higher incomes from labour on collective and state farms than from their private plots. During the Khrushchev years, agricultural workers were at last restored their freedom to move from one job to another. Compulsory grain deliveries to the state were abolished, and some collective farms were permitted to set up small teams of family members and neighbours to cultivate a given number of fields. Allowed to sign contracts with state enterprises and determine their own production objectives,[53] team members also received individual wages and bonuses based upon the success of the team. Although such reforms produced only mixed results, they represented an outbreak of economic flexibility within the Soviet Union's command economy.
By the 1960s, collective and state farms had become a source of important social benefits, particularly in the area of education. While in 1938, only 9.4 per cent of the rural population possessed eight years of schooling, by the 1960s the figure stood at over 55 per cent, with women frequently better educated than men. Although literacy levels for Soviet rural women far outpaced those of women in predominantly peasant societies like Turkey or India, women who became teachers, nurses, veterinarians and agronomists did not thereby gain entry into positions of leadership. They continued as well to bear primary responsibility not only for childcare and other traditional 'women's work', but also for labour on the private plots - where even by the 1960s most farming was still done by hand.[54] These tasks, in addition to the collective farm's labour requirement continued to constitute the Soviet peasant woman's 'triple burden'.
In important respects, the Khrushchev era introduced the dichotomies and contradictions that eventually contributed to the downfall of the Soviet system. Between 1953 and 1958, agricultural productivity increased by 50 per cent, with private plots continuing to significantly out-perform the collective and state farms. Exhorting the rural populace to 'double and triple' their agricultural output, Khrushchev launched a massive 'Virgin Lands' campaign in Kazakhstan and Siberia. This venture was fatally undermined not only by the usual climatic reversals, but also by the Soviet state's penchant for bureaucratic national directives that ignored local conditions and local knowledge. In Kazakhstan, for example, collective and state farmers were ordered to expand the land area sown with corn regardless of whether the necessary equipment or seeds were available; tractor drivers were everywhere paid according to the size of the area they ploughed (thus encouraging them to plough as shallowly as possible).[55] In 1963, a disastrous harvest - together with the setbacks of the Cuban Missile Crisis - contributed to Khrushchev's fall from power.
The Brezhnev era: stagnation, or deepening contradiction?
Although the Brezhnev years are frequently described as an era ofstagnation, from the perspective of the rural populace, they were not. Less constrained than in the 1950s, the rural populace began to create a world that differed from the Stalinist model, recalled the values of an older peasant community and incorporated changes that not only widened village perspectives, but inspired many peasants to abandon the countryside for the city.
51
R. Abraham, 'The Regeneration of Family Farming in Estonia',
52
Bridger,
Gertrude Schroeder, 'Rural Living Standards in the Soviet Union', in Robert Stuart (ed.),
53
Moshe Lewin,
55
Alec Nove,