By the 1970s, the more horrific memories of the Second World War and the 1930s had started to recede, and a semblance of 'normality' began to re-emerge in the Soviet countryside. Despite the burden of Moscow-devised plans and quotas, observers reported that the pace of rural life in the 1970s reflected the rhythms of the crop-growing cycle - slow in winter and active during the haymaking and harvest times.[56] Like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, Soviet farmers performed a great variety of tasks at different seasons of the year, worked irregular hours and faced unpredictable weather fluctuations. Deliberations by farm assemblies (skhody) were frequently skewed by gender and age considerations or by patronage connections that individuals and households established with the authorities - but the latter no longer freely exercised the life and death powers of their predecessors.
Particularly in regions distant from Moscow, both the formal structures of the collective farm and the requirements imposed by central planners were significantly modified by informal relations and negotiations within the collective farm itself. New legislation gave collective farms the right to assign 'private' plots to member households, and village assemblies continued to honour the pre-1917 commune principles that legitimised land claims on the basis of labour and need. As in earlier years, private plots out-performed the collective and state farms, but they were less crucial to peasant survival once farm wage levels began to rise.[57]
By the 1970s and 1980s, most of the rural populace were state employees, but they bore little resemblance to their Western counterparts. Collective and state farm workers expected - and received from their enterprises - guarantees of education, health, shelter, old-age assistance, month-long vacations, 112 days of paid maternity leave and old-age pensions. Income differentials between city and countryside began to narrow, as did the considerable wage disparities between collective and state farms.[58] In the Soviet Union, agricultural 'jobs' conferred far more than a wage; they mediated as well a set of social, economic and cultural relations and obligations between individuals and a wider community.[59]
The Brezhnev era featured not only an increased reliance on material incentives in the form of bonuses, increased procurement prices, education/welfare benefits and improvements in diet, but also a persistent refusal either to appreciably diminish levels of political constraint, corruption or favouritism, or to increase opportunities for individual freedom of action. Brezhnev's massive grain purchases from abroad provided the Soviet public with a diet based on meat consumption (then considered a global indicator of rising affluence). Between i960 and 1973, foreign grain purchases increased from 42.6 million to 99.2 million tons, and domestic food consumption rose by 400 per cent.[60]The so-called 'grain deficits' of this era were in fact an indicator neither of food shortages nor of disastrous decline in agricultural production; they were instead attributable to what one post-Soviet study describes as 'excessive' consumption of animal feed and non-food derivatives.[61] According to reform economist Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, Brezhnev's policies were a cynical effort at 'pacification through material incentives'.[62]
During the 1970s, educational advances, greater freedom of movement and a diminishing reliance on the private plot and household as guarantees of security began to transform farming into an occupation rather than an inherited status. However, the exercise of free choice increasingly included decisions to abandon the collective farm. Rural women, eager to escape their 'triple burden', moved into non-agricultural occupations as nurses, clerks and teachers - and above all, as independent wage earners. Like their male counterparts - particularly of the younger generation - they left the security of village life for the equal security but higher pay and greater autonomy available in new 'agrotowns' and in the cities. While many sought greater autonomy and higher social status, the surveys conducted by Zaslavskaia in the 1970s suggested that physically arduous working conditions, inequitable wage rates and corrupt officials who rewarded lackeys rather than hard-working people far outweighed the desire for upward mobility as motives for departure from the countryside.[63] The highest levels of out-migration came from European agricultural regions of the country; the lowest were in Central Asia, Kazakhstan and the Caucasus. In 1959, 51 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union lived on the land; by 1979, the figure stood at 37 per cent.67
In the 1970s, living standards, incomes and literacy rates rose dramatically, even as a repressive state bureaucracy fostered the creation of ever-larger collective and state farm enterprises. The Soviet state raised procurement prices for grain and livestock by 50 per cent in 1965, and awarded bonuses for deliveries that exceeded plan requirements. Productivity rates rose between 1966 and 1970 (followed by significant declines due to crop failures in 1972, i979 and i980). Yet overall, according to United Nations estimates, Soviet agriculture achieved a faster rate of growth in volume and per capita than any other major region of the world (including North America, Europe, Africa and Asia). Between 1950 and 1975, Soviet agricultural output more than
doubled.[64]
During the Brezhnev years, the tension between socio-economic improvements and a command system of economic and political governance continued to mount. A highly literate populace no longer feared starvation, and the lives of its younger generation were not shaped by the war, invasion and attempted genocide that had so traumatised their parents and grandparents. These generational shifts undermined a Stalinist social contract that had repeatedly promised modernisation and national security in exchange for repression and bureaucratic control. Throughout the Stalin era, a constant state of emergency was invoked to justify brutal constraints on rural and urban freedom of action; a 'crisis mentality' was subsequently reinforced by the Cold War between the United States and the USSR.[65] However, by the 1980s, a far healthier and better-educated populace had come to believe - with good reason - that no nation was likely to invade the USSR with what Stalin had called 'impunity'.
It was in this context that Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the embodiment of the Soviet social contract and its contradictory tensions. Born on a collective farm and raised by grandparents after losing his father in the Second World War, Gorbachev began work at fourteen as an assistant to a combine harvester operator, and received a Red Banner of labour in 1948 for helping to produce a record harvest on his collective farm. Making the leap from a North Caucasus secondary school to the acquisition of a law degree at Moscow University and eventually to a position at the top of the party hierarchy, he took advantage of the best opportunities offered by the Soviet system. A beneficiary of Soviet guarantees of education and social welfare, Gorbachev made a name for himself as a proponent of incentive-based projects for raising agricultural productivity rates. As the Politburo member responsible for agriculture under Brezhnev during the 1980s, he spoke out in the name of others like himself for economic restructuring (perestroika) that would significantly diminish the powerful Soviet constraints upon individual freedom of action.
Perestroika and the further transformation of Russian rural life
As General Secretary ofthe party, Gorbachev emphasised the production needs of agriculture and the interests of the rural populace. Building on the rural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, his reforms encouraged single families or co-operative groups to take land and implements out of the large-scale collective farm for a given period, and use their own labour and management skills to maximise production and increase their incomes. In 1990, new legislation legitimised a variety of forms of tenure, ranging from outright ownership, possession for life, leasehold and indefinite, permanent or temporary use. Committed to socialism and to economic growth, Gorbachev's reforms produced a 21 per cent increase in health, education and other welfare benefits, a 48 per cent rise in per capita income and an 8 per cent increase in productivity rates.[66] Explicitly rejecting Soviet and pre-Soviet notions of the rural populace as 'raw material' for industrial development, Gorbachev appealed for public input into economic and non-economic decision-making at every level, but especially within the agricultural and industrial workplace.
56
Basile Kerblay,
pp. 74-5.
58
V George and N. Manning,
59
Susan Bridger and Frances Pine, 'Introduction',
60
Harry Shaffer, 'Soviet Agriculture: Success or Failure?' in Shaffer (ed.),
pp. 79-8i.
62
Zaslavskaia, quoted in Andrew Rosenthal, 'A Soviet Voice of Innovation Comes to Fore',
63
Kerblay,
While these figures mark a dramatic rise in rural out-migration, it is useful to recall that between 1950 and 1980, the rates of rural exodus from the American countryside were far higher than in the Soviet Union. See G. Clark, 'Soviet Agriculture', in Shaffer,
65
B. P. Kurashvili, 'Ob''ektivnye zakony gosudarstvennogo upravleniia',
66
W Liefert, 'The Food Problem in the Republics of the Former USSR', in D. Van Atta,