Editorial: Private Ownership in Russian Agriculture
Communists attack the Labour government’s nationalisation policy on two grounds, that the compensation to former owners is too generous and that the government instead of going in for wholesale nationalisation is leaving most of industry and agriculture to private capitalism. It is therefore interesting to observe to what a large extent agriculture in Russia is in the hands of individual farmers. Farming in Russia is organised in three main groups, the State farms; the farms worked by individual peasant-owners relying on the labour of themselves and their families without hired help; and the collective farms. Some of the latter are on the basis that the whole of the land, buildings, implements and stock are owned by the organisation, and others are merely voluntary associations of individual farmers, each of whom retains ownership of his entire holding; but the great majority of the collective farms are a mixture, part of the farm is owned and worked collectively and part is owned and worked individually by the farmers. On these standard type collective farms the farmers receive produce and monetary income partly from the collective farm and partly from their private holdings. They work part of their time on the collective farm and the rest of the time for themselves. Their income from their private holding is their own but they also receive a share in the collective farm income varying in amount according to the number of labour-days they have worked. The collective farm has to give a certain part of its products to the State, and pay taxes, before the balance is divided up. According to H. A. Freund (“Russia from A to Z,” 1945, p.316), from whom the above details are taken, there is a great difference between the amount of produce and money received by members of the richest collective farms and the amount received on the poorer farms.
As regards the land and stock owned individually by the farmers Freund states that it varies in amount and kind according to the district and the type of farming. The farmer has his own house, and an allotment which ranges up to 2½ acres. In some districts he may also own privately one cow, two calves, one sow with sucklings, up to 10 sheep and goats, 20 beehives and an unlimited number of fowls and rabbits. In more developed stock-breeding districts he may have two or three cows, also calves, two or three sows, up to 25 sheep, also fowls, rabbits and beehives. In districts where stock-breeding is the all-embracing branch of industry he may have 8 to 10 cows, up to 150 sheep or goats, up to 10 horses and 8 camels, with unlimited poultry.
Some further information has been given by Mr. Andrew Rothstein, who is Lecturer on Soviet Institutions at the School of Slavonic Studies and a defender of the Russian system. Recently he has written to the Times correcting correspondents who have inaccurately quoted figures relating to Russian agriculture. In a letter on 19th May, 1949, he made the point that at April, 1949, the 30 million head of cattle that are “the personal property of collective farmers, workmen, employees, and individual peasants” considerably exceed the herds of cattle on the collective part of the collective farms. In addition to the 30 million cattle these private holdings include 26½ million sheep and goats and over 7 million pigs, but these private holdings of sheep, goats and pigs appear to be considerably less than the collective holdings. The overall picture would therefore appear to be that rather more than half of the total stock is owned by the State farms and the collective part of the collective farms, and rather less than half is owned privately.
As a footnote to the above we learn from the Moscow correspondent of Reuters (Manchester Guardian, 27/5/49) that the authorities have been criticising the collective farms because they have been sending lean cattle as the compulsory quota they have to deliver to the State. As the quota requires a certain weight the farmers have been making up the weight in the form of a large number of lean cattle instead of a smaller number of fat cattle, and thus depleting the collective herds.
The collective farm system bears an obvious resemblance to the serfdom that existed in Europe before the rise of capitalism and experience of that system suggests that the individual farmers are likely to be more interested in their private farms than in the collective part.