Introduction

Collectivisation and Its Aftermath

Collective farms had their origins in the Soviet Union of the 1930s when Stalin’s dominance was unchallenged. In the Stalinist concept of socialist agriculture,¹ that sector was not only subordinated to the interests of industrial development but also represented a sort of “inner colony” to be exploited (Viola 2013; Fitzpatrick 1994, 117–27). The planned economy, and the socialist agricultural production system within it, ensured a concentrated extraction of peasants’ incomes and the control of the agricultural population. It was based on three pillars: the machine and tractor stations (MTS), which functioned as both channels providing the state supply of crops and political control over the countryside; the state-owned state farms (sovkhozes); and the artel’-type collective farms (kolkhozes).² Sovkhozes were financed from the state budget, so their access to capital was greater and sovkhoz labour was paid a regular wage. The kolkhoz was considered to be at a lower level of socialization because it was owned by a group rather than society as a whole. Kolkhozes were seen as a temporary solution in the official ideology; they would develop into sovkhozes over time.

The structure of the kolkhoz was determined by a Model Charter of 17 February 1935 which all farms had to adopt with only minor variations related to regional or local conditions. The Charter held that the kolkhoz was a community of persons, the joint users of a given municipality’s nationalized land, who placed their farming equipment and animals (in large part) into communal use and received remuneration from the kolkhoz for the work they carried out together in the framework of brigades and work teams. The unit of measure for work completed was the trudoden’, “working day”; this working day unit (hereafter work unit) reflected both time expended and the nature and quantity of the given piece of work, while simultaneously bearing no relationship at all to the quality of the work performed (Jörgenssen and Varga 2016). It was not a fixed wage but rather a share of the final annual surplus proportionate to the number of work units performed. Furthermore, the “remainder principle” dictated that this share could only be distributed once all financial obligations to the state had been fulfilled and a contribution had been made to the pooling of production resources.³ The “remainder principle,” thus, guaranteed the absolute priority of state interests while keeping remuneration from kolkhoz work both low and insecure. To compensate, members were permitted a small personal or household plot with a restricted number of animals from which they could supply family needs. But the right to such a plot depended on completing a minimum number of work units annually, a figure that was slightly lower for women than for men. The 1935 model charter remained untouched until 1969. It was, therefore, Stalin’s original kolkhoz model charter that was exported at the end of the Second World War to the Soviet zone of influence in East Central Europe, and with it the other elements of the Stalinist agricultural system (Jörgenssen and Varga 2016).

In the first three-and-a-half years following the end of the Second World War, the Communist regimes of East Central Europe said very little about agricultural collectivization. Mindful of their generally rather limited support in the countryside, they promoted rather anti-feudal land reform, often with nationalist overtones. Countries (Bulgaria and Yugoslavia) and political parties (the National Peasant Party in Hungary) which wanted to move further and faster were curbed. Although the pace of nationalization of industry and commerce was not uniform across the region, it was generally completed before collectivization, which suddenly came onto the agenda at the time of the Stalin-Tito split in 1948. It was as if Stalin, who criticized Tito for not having collectivized, suddenly realized that nowhere else in the Bloc had.

But collectivization in East Central Europe was not an exact copy of the Soviet process. Crucially, land was not nationalized prior to collectivization. In regions incorporated into the Soviet Union itself (the Baltic States, parts of Poland and Romania, Transcarpathia), nationalization of land was a precursor to collectivization. But in the independent countries of the Bloc, land remained formally in the ownership of the peasants. Second, although there were deportations of “kulaks,” the mass deportations to Siberia characteristic of Soviet history did not figure. A further difference was that the term “collective farm” was not universally adopted, in fact it was adopted only in Romania (GAC) and there it was abandoned after 1960 in favour of agricultural producer cooperatives. In Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, which were in the vanguard of creating collective farms (despite Yugoslavia later abandoning them), labour cooperative rather than producer cooperative was used. In Czechoslovakia, the term adopted was “Unified Cooperative” as existing cooperatives were united into the communist model. In Poland and the German Democratic Republic, agricultural producer cooperative was the term used, while in Hungary, initially at least, it was agricultural producer cooperative group. “Collective farm” is used in this collection for convenience. Finally, in order to achieve results as quickly as possible, three types of cooperative were permitted two of which were similar to the Soviet TOZ in principle but more specific about which elements of farming were conducted communally; these differed in detail from country to country. Of the three types, only Type III resembled the kolkhoz. Peasant families who were unable to fulfil their high taxation and compulsory deliveries’ burden initially joined looser cooperatives, but ultimately the party leaderships were not satisfied with their only partial socialization of production.

Broadly speaking, there were three phases to East Central European agricultural collectivization. First, there was the roughly decade-long Stalinist phase, which, if not a failure, was hard to depict as a success: by 1953 only Bulgaria exceeded 50% collectivization at 60%, with Czechoslovakia at a third, Hungary at just over a quarter and elsewhere fractions of that (Brus 1986, 52). The Stalinist phase of collectivization was characterized by his crude Marxist suspicion of peasants, seeing them as unreliable class allies for the proletariat because they were incipient capitalists. Suspicion turned into outright hatred in the case of the “kulaks,” never very precisely defined except by their relative wealth, who were seen as actual capitalists in agriculture. Policy was determined by distrust of peasants generally and war against the class enemy, the kulaks, in particular; they were excluded from collective farms. In concrete terms, this meant that purchase prices for agriculture were kept low, even when a distinction was drawn between quota and above-quota prices; and, as a consequence, remuneration on collective farms was also low and pensions and health-care insurance less generous. In addition, farms were not trusted with their own mechanical equipment and depended on state-owned machine and tractor stations for tractors and all forms of agricultural machinery.

Collectivization faltered after Stalin died in 1953, but the bankruptcy of the Stalinist system became clear with the outbreak of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, to which accumulating problems in food supply contributed significantly (Varga 2006). The widespread social dissent manifest in Hungary and less dramatically Poland in 1956 had an impact throughout the socialist world and collectivization stalled again.

The signal to renew collectivization came in November 1957 and policies began to be implemented in 1958. In this second phase, with the exceptions of Poland⁴ and Yugoslavia which abandoned it entirely, the process was achieved within 5 years: by 1962 every country that had continued with collectivization claimed its successful completion. Historians for the most part have ignored this dramatic development, focusing more on the manifold injustices of the early period of failure. But there is a question to be answered: why was the second phase twice as successful in just over half the time? The answer has little to do with the techniques used, because these remained very much the same: brutal and bullying. Part of the explanation must relate to a sense of resignation, and perhaps increased realism: after 1956 it was clear that the West would not ride to the rescue and that socialism was there for the long haul. But the key explanation appears to be that countries quietly abandoned Stalin’s policy of class war in the countryside.

Kulaks were not embraced as class allies, but middle peasants were, and the divide between kulaks and middle peasants was fluid. Once successful peasants (middle or kulak) no longer feared deportation and penury, they were more open to the argument that, as successful farmers, they understood how to farm well in local conditions and would be the ideal people to lead the collective farm. Once they were persuaded, other peasants followed suit and joined. In the years following 1956, nearly all countries passed measures allowing kulaks to join and eventually lead collective farms; Hungary had taken measures such as abolishing the kulak list even earlier (Varga 1992).⁵ There was also a greater willingness to make concessions in order to persuade peasants to join the farms. In Romania, these appear to have taken the form more of individual deals to suit individual circumstances; in Hungary, there were changes to regulations to allow more animals on household plots, bigger household plots, and the payment of a notional rent for the land that members contributed to the farm. In Hungary too, there was a recognition that social tensions were involved in grouping former independent farmers with former estate workers and the rural poor, so no barrier was placed (initially) on forming more than one collective farm per village. Bulgaria was always in the vanguard of collective farm formation, with Czechoslovakia not far behind. The GDR stood out by focusing the bulk of its activities into the “Socialist Spring” of 1960. Hungary and Romania abolished compulsory deliveries in agriculture in 1956. In Hungary, this was a prelude to general economic reforms, but Romania retained most elements of Stalinist economic planning.

One hundred per cent numerical collectivization ushered in the third, almost three-decade phase of functioning collectivization. It is not true to say that all peasants hated collective farms. There was a substantial minority of the rural population everywhere, from either very poor individual peasant backgrounds, or from backgrounds as essentially tied labour on large manorial estates, who had not benefitted substantially from the post-World-War-II land reforms, had failed as independent farmers, and welcomed collective farming, even if they were not particularly well qualified to make a success of it either. But however substantial, they were the minority. Most peasants valued their independent farming and were reluctant to participate in communal work. The “socialist consciousness” of the peasantry was not sufficiently “advanced” for it to work enthusiastically for long hours on tasks allocated and supervised by others for minimal material reward. Some form of realistic material incentive was necessary, but the “work unit” was inadequate to the task. The situation was not so bad in mechanized branches, where little labour was required and an elite force could be adequately remunerated, and, over time, mechanization became increasingly extensive; but for labour-intensive production, an alternative had to be found. At different stages, to different degrees, and using different terminologies (such as “acord global” in Romania, the “akord” system in Bulgaria, and “family cropping” in Hungary), the solution that was adopted was some sort of variation on the theme of sharecropping: families or groups of neighbours were allocated land and then left to farm it more or less independently of the collective (although with services provided by it) in return for a share of the final crop. In mechanized branches, the more Stalinist countries stuck with the work unit and state-owned machine and tractor stations, while other countries moved beyond Stalinism, allowing farms to purchase their own machinery, and slowly replacing the labour day with wage payment schemes which gradually approximated industrial wages both in the form and level of reward.

The exact strategy for ensuring adequate remuneration differed from country to country. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it was common in the early years for only a portion of “wages” (70% or 80%, or less, depending on the strength of the farm) in mechanized sectors to be paid throughout the year, with the rest coming at the end of the farming year, sometimes in addition to an annual bonus, if the farm could afford it. Regular payment of 100% wages throughout the year was normalized in Hungary in 1977. The GDR, by contrast, guaranteed a minimum annual income from the outset. This was very expensive, but it was made possible by the fact that the GDR retained many more of the simpler Type I and Type II cooperatives for much longer than elsewhere. On the latter, behind the socialist façade, peasants preserved the economics of traditional peasant farming and remuneration for their labour was not in the form of a wage but from the value of their sales, essentially analogous to sharecropping. The GDR was also distinctive in that there the key distinguishing feature of the Type III farms was the presence of communal animal husbandry. The GDR later, uniquely, established separate livestock and arable farms. Like other countries, the GDR gradually supported and encouraged the commercialization of household plot farming but did not advertise the fact or encourage the collective farm to become part of it: sales were made via state purchasing offices.

In Hungary, abandonment of the Stalinist Model Charter was confirmed legally in the 1967 cooperative law. Hungary also went further than any other country in the extent to which it integrated household plot production into the activities of the collective. A genuinely symbiotic relationship was encouraged whereby activities on the “private” household plot could lead to rewards in terms of income and social security benefits from the communal farm, while household plot agronomists were appointed by the communal farm whose bonuses depended on expanding production from the members’ private endeavours. Despite the liberalism of Kádár’s “goulash socialism,” Hungary briefly politicized dramatically the issue of non-agricultural “ancillary activities.” In the early years of the 1970s, when every aspect of Hungary’s New Economic Mechanism was coming under attack from hard-liners and Soviet advisors, a series of “show trials” was conducted against collective farm presidents because their “ancillary activities” were thought to be seducing labour away from state enterprises by paying higher wages (Varga 2013a, 2013b, 2021, 232–240). This political attack came to an end by the mid-1970s and thereafter diversification began again. In both Hungary and Czechoslovakia, at least one collective farm was manufacturing personal computers in the last decade of socialism, and in Hungary, in 1985, the country’s 1278 collective farms and 62 specialized cooperatives were actively producing goods under 824 separate product codes for “other (non-agriculture-related) industrial products” (Termelőszövetkezetek Országos Tanácsa (TOT) 1986). Near the shores of Lake Balaton, the Noble Grape agricultural producer cooperative had turned its Python cosmetics into a successful national brand (Swain 2000).

Collective farms were made to work by solving the remuneration problem through a combination of paying adequate wages and encouraging private economic endeavour on household plots and sharecropping, second class status persisted nevertheless in so much as pensions and health insurance remained less generous than other sectors. Farms became large-scale, industrial-like production units with complex divisions of labour, offering careers via the acquisition of educational qualifications in agricultural universities. They required agronomists, economists, and lawyers; their bureaucracies required administrative and secretarial staffs; industrial skills were required for mechanized farming and for industrial ancillary activities. They provided well-paid professional and skilled jobs, producing a highly educated workforce with transferable skills. In the early 1990s, in stark contrast to prospects when collectivization had begun, the accepted wisdom in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, and Hungary was that agriculture was the only sector of the socialist economy that had worked.

One of the great surprises of the 1990s was that, with the collapse of socialism, there was no mass return to private, small-scale, family farming. Collective farms transformed into cooperatives that were compatible with market economies, but, with the partial exceptions of Romania and Albania, where Stalinist agriculture had hardly been reformed, there was no mass exodus to family farming, despite an economics literature that predicted that this would happen because of the high “transaction costs” associated with large-scale farming. Large-scale (initially cooperative but increasingly private and corporate) farms continued, renting land from those whose title had been fully restored, but only a minority embarked on private commercial farming. This persistence of large-scale farming was ultimately explained in terms of high “transaction costs” too: the costs associated with establishing private farms and claiming or reclaiming land and equipment. The minority that did embark on private, family farming in the wake of post-socialist restructuring faced unequal competition. Restitution policies might have returned their land or its equivalent, but not what they lost. They had lost a viable farm, but four decades on the economics of farming had changed, and they were returned a holding too small to be competitive. Nevertheless, they experienced something of a boost after EU membership, when they became eligible for EU subsidies. Many Central and Eastern European family farms were considerably larger than the EU average and so benefitted disproportionately from their subsidies, as, indeed, did the much larger-scale corporate farms.

But the concept of cooperatives compatible with market economies and the region’s dramatic espousal of neo-liberal economics hid an unpalatable truth: socialist-era cooperatives had to shed labour dramatically. Between roughly one-half and two-thirds of jobs on cooperative farms disappeared, as the economically unnecessary socialist edifice, with its complex division of labour, was dismantled. In locations near commercial centres, those who lost their jobs might, if they were lucky, commute to new jobs, but in less well-favoured areas, rural unemployment became widespread. In certain parts of certain countries, the precarity of employment in post-socialist conditions took on an ethnic dimension in the form of rural Roma ghettos. The small-scale gardening of the socialist years went into decline too in the early years of the transition as the subsidies that had maintained it were removed, but it never disappeared among the rural marginalized and has been newly promoted for those with no tradition of such activities as a way of overcoming extreme rural poverty.

There is an extensive and growing literature on the situation of women in socialist Eastern Europe in terms of consumption, work-place identities, urban development, gender relations, and sexuality (Massino and Penn 2009; Fidelis 2010; Lebow 2013)⁶; and the debate about the extent to which women’s interests were defended and/or promoted by official women’s organizations continues, not entirely resolved (Funk 2014). But, with the exception of the contributors to this volume and contemporary ethnography such as that produced by Gerald Creed (1998), Christopher Hann (1980), Deema Kaneff (2004), David Kideckel (1993) and Katherine Verdery (1983), there is very little on women and collective farming and what followed. In the three-decade era of functioning collectivized agriculture, collective farms became socialist working communities of a specific type; they combined household plots and sectors remunerated on the basis of sharecropping (where the working environment was similar to that of the traditional peasant farm) with waged labour in environments similar to the workplace communities characteristic of socialist industry. When mapping gender onto this structure, it is overly simplistic to suggest that the industry-like “first economy” was male and the peasant-like “second economy” female.⁷ Women played the leading role in supporting the household plot economy and, on average, spent more time on it, especially in the early years when farms did not pay well and men sought employment in industry (as the Bodnár and Varga contribution confirms). But in the professionalized, even credentialist collective farm of the last two decades of socialism, there was plenty of “first economy” employment for women (although rather little at the very top – as documented in the Hetzer and Scholze-Irrlitz contributions), and after returning from industrial employment men worked hard till late on “second economy” household plots. Women as well as men became part of the mature socialist economy, and when they joined a socialist workplace for waged remuneration, they shared the strong sense of identity of the socialist workplace community that has been described by Kott (2014) and Bartha (2013) for the GDR and Bartha (2013) and Tóth (2009) for Hungary.

The contributions

Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen begins the collection with a wide-ranging essay locating small-scale gardening, mainly but not exclusively the concern of women, from an historical and global perspective, from the first Prussian reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day, taking in the GDR and post-socialist eastern Germany on the way.

Alexandra Bodnár and Zsuzsanna Varga follow with a study of the first decade or so of collectivized agriculture when, to a greater or lesser extent, collective farms were women’s domain, and remuneration was pitiful and insecure. But because of the very different histories of collectivization in Transcarpathia and Hungary, these first decades of collectivization occurred roughly a decade apart. The collective farms were women’s first employment outside the family, which was at once alien and yet offered a tiny degree of independence from husbands and mothers-in-law. Bodnár provides a rare, possibly unique-in-English, insight into collectivization in Transcarpathia; Varga capitalizes on her vast experience of Hungarian collectivization nationally to focus on the micro sphere of a single community.

Nigel Swain similarly moves from the national and international perspectives to the micro level with his study of Red Flag village in Hungary in the mid-1970s. By this time, thanks to the 1967 cooperative law which more or less concludes the Bodnár and Varga study, collective farms in Hungary had consolidated economically and had become industrial-like ventures, with a complex division of labour, and professional, white-collar, and industrial jobs. One element in this new socialist infrastructure was a centrally imposed women’s policy.

Next came two shorter contributions on the former GDR and what followed. Maria Hetzer examines women’s expectations and experiences with a focus on Golzow in the Oderbruch region, a particularly backward region before collectivization. She identifies five different categories of women, including some who welcomed collectivization, and stresses that, from the 1970s onwards, highly qualified outsider women moved in to work within the farm that had become a large-scale, conglomerate enterprise. This afforded them independence in their personal lives and modern, high-quality housing. Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz’s contribution is inspired by the extensive neglect of GDR farming and women’s policy in the western literature. It focuses first on the technical and professional training on collective farms identified by Hetzer and their state-promoted support for child-rearing, but it then moves on to address the negative impact on the employment possibilities of those who had benefitted from such training and support of a federal-German-inspired privatization process.

Ildikó Asztalos Morell’s study is of post-socialist Hungary and focuses on negotiating gender and entrepreneurial relations on small-scale farms which struggled in an economic environment characterized by the dominance of large-scale cooperative successor companies. In the context of contesting neoliberalism, re-traditionalism and the legacies of socialism, precarity is intense. Her concern is not so much the extent of gender inequality but how gender is done and undone in the nexus of running a farming business while caring for the business operators and its successors: the farming family.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Until the death of Stalin, the “Soviet model” was essentially a Stalinist model. However, after 1953 this model changed and became a “moving target,” a changing set of features, due to the Khrushchev reforms (Swain 2013, 502–503). See also Swain (2007) and Zsuzsanna Varga (2021).

2. In the Soviet Union, kolkhoz was a general term, an abbreviation for kollektivnoye khozyaystvo, which covered the different types of collective farms (TOZ, artel’, commune). With the mass collectivization, the artel’ became the preferred form and the term kolkhoz became a synonym for artel’.

3. The collective crop and animal output in kind was to be disposed of in the following way (in order of priority): state delivery obligations and seed loans, payments for work performed by the MTS, other contract obligations, seed and fodder funds for the next year’s production cycle (Jörgenssen and Varga 2016; Wädekin 1977).

4. Poland was unique in that a major political leader, Gomułka, opposed collectivization as a goal. Elsewhere there was only disagreement at the highest level of politics about timing and pace.

5. The “kulak list” officially identified “kulaks” who were seen as class enemies and subject to additional penalties. They were also prohibited from joining cooperatives.

6. For the Soviet Union, see Ilič (2001, 2018) and Ilič, Reid, and Attwood (2004).

7. Verdery (1994) has appeared to suggest this, but Szalai (1991), whose work Verdery cites, presents a more nuanced picture of male and female activity in this sphere, which is not to downplay the importance of women’s role in second economy activity.