Agriculture under Stalin 1940-1953

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  • Created by: ekmad
  • Created on: 04-06-15 23:42

Agriculture under Stalin 1940-1953

Causes

  • Collectivisation in 1920s/30s devastated Agriculture which was then hit hard by the war.
  • State took between 60-70% from farmers after 1945 to sell, leaving the peasants with just the produce from their own private plots. After 1946 they were refused state food rations
  • The Fourth Five-year Plan (1946-1950) was focused on heavy industry with 90% of the investment being spent on capital goods such as coal, steel and oil.
  • Peasants attempted to sell excess produce from their private plots to make more money
  • State attempted to "fix" agriculture by investing in schemes such as grouping smaller farms together and paying farmers directly based on results. Bureaucracy in rural areas was also cut and experimental procedures such as the planting of millions of trees in the Southern Steppes to make the land more fertile there failed

Effects

  • Agriculture was slow to recover, with pre-war harvests less than that of Imperial Russia. In 1954 the harvest was still below 1913 levels. The 1940 pre-war figure was only reached in 1952.
  • With poor harvests and what was grown being sold there were significant food shortages inside Russia. In particular the 1946 famine was caused by the failure of crops in Moldavia
  • The lack of investment left agriculture sorely lacking in funds
  • Peasants caught selling their own privately grown produce could be heavily taxed and have harsher quotas placed upon them. Many farmers were paid less than half what they earned in the 1920s
  • Between 1950-1952 the number of collectivised farms halved and state attempts to restore agriculture failed

Overall summary

Agriculture under Stalin remained a core fundamental weakness of the USSR's economy. The planned but never executed Fifth Five-year plan (ratified in 1952) promised increased in agricultural production but with little extra investment. The historian Alexander Nove put it best when he said agriculture in the USSR suffered from "ill-judged interventions of authority, excessive centralisation of decisions, extremely low prices, insufficient investment and a lack of adequate incentives".

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