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"Agriculture and state Russia (Federation) History."
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Agrarian reform in Russia : the road from serfdom
This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the stolypin reforms, the New Economic Policy (NEP), the collectivization, the Khrushchev reforms, and finally the farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises - rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and of their effectiveness in transforming institutions. --Book Jacket.
Book
Black Earth, White Bread
Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced
and citizens ate-or, in some years, didn't eat-underwent radical
shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir
Putin's presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this
time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods.
Susanne A. Wengle's important interdisciplinary history of Russia's
agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex
story of the interactions between political policies, daily
cultural practices, and technological improvements. Examining
governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing
vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Wengle reveals the intended
and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since
1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention
to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government
impact life on a daily, quotidian level.
eBook
Marx went away-- but Karl stayed behind
When it appeared in 1983, Caroline Humphrey'sKarl Marx Collectivewas the first detailed study of the Soviet collective farm system. Through careful ethnographic work on two collective farms operated in Buryat communities in Siberia, the author presented an absorbing--if dispiriting--account of the actual functioning of a planned economy at the local level.
Now this classic work is back in print in a revised edition that adds new material from the author's most recent research in the former Soviet Union. In two new chapters she documents what has happened to the two farms in the collapsing Russian economy. She finds that collective farms are still the dominant agricultural forms, not out of nostalgic sentiment or loyalty to the Soviet ideal, but from economic and political necessity.
Today the collectives are based on households and small groups coming together out of choice. There have been important resurgences in \"traditional\" thinking about kinship, genealogy, shamanism and mountain cults; and yet all of this is newly formed by its attempt to deal with post-Soviet realities.
Marx Went Awaywill appeal to students and scholars of anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology.
\"The book should be on the shelf of every student of Soviet affairs.\" --Times Literary Supplement
Caroline Humphrey is Fellow of King's College and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
eBook
moral economy reconsidered
Sure to be controversial and spur debate, this book presents a powerful analysis of rural change to marketization and globalization. Using Russia as a case study, it examines the how the rural population responded to reform policies during the transition away from communism. Wegren draws upon extensive field work, survey data, interviews, and wide-ranging Russian language source material to investigate adaptive behaviours by different groups of the rural population. The differentiated and nuanced analysis sheds considerable light on debates over whether actors are motivated mainly by rational or moral considerations.
eBook
Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1900-1990
Between 1900 and 1990 there were several periods of grain and other food shortages in Russia and the former Soviet Union, some of which reached disaster proportions resulting in mass famine and death on an unprecedented scale. New stocks of information not previously accessible as well as traditional official and other sources have been used to explore the extent to which policy and vagaries in climate conspired to affect agricultural yields. Were the leaders' (Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev) policies sound in theory but failed in practice because of unpredictable weather? How did the Soviet peasants react to these changes? What impact did Soviet agriculture have on the overall economy of the country? These are all questions that are taken into account. The book is arranged in chapters representing different time periods. In each the policy of the central government is discussed followed by the climate vagaries during that period. Crop yields are then analyzed in the light of policy and climate.
eBook
In search of the true West
This ground-breaking work documents Russian efforts to appropriate Western solutions to the problem of economic backwardness since the time of Catherine the Great. Entangled then as now with issues of cultural borrowing, educated Russians searched for Western nations, ideas, and social groups that embodied universal economic truths applicable to their own country. Esther Kingston-Mann describes Russian Westernization--which emphasized German as well as Anglo-U.S. economics--while she raises important questions about core values of Western culture and how cultural values and priorities are determined.
This is the first historical account of the significant role played by Russian social scientists in nineteenth-century Western economic and social thought. In an era of rapid Western colonial expansion, the Russian quest for the \"right\" Western economic model became more urgent: Was Russia condemned to the fate of India if it did not become an England? In the 1900s, Russian liberal economists emphasized cultural difference and historical context, while Marxists and prerevolutionary government reformers declared that inexorable economic laws doomed peasants and their \"medieval\" communities. On the eve of 1917, both the tsarist regime and its leading critics agreed that Russia must choose between Western-style progress or \"feudal\" stagnation. And when peasants and communes survived until Stalin's time, he mercilessly destroyed them in the name of progress. Today Russia's painful modernizing traditions shape the policies of contemporary reformers, who seem as certain as their predecessors that economic progress requires wholesale obliteration of the past.
eBook
Assisting Russia's transition : an unprecedented challenge
This evaluation assesses the development effectiveness of the World Bank's lending and non-lending assistance to the Russian Federation since 1991, a 10-year period of tumultuous political, economic, and social change. This report concludes that an assistance strategy, concentrating on analytical and advisory services with limited financial support for Russia, would have been more appropriate than one involving large volumes of adjustment lending.
eBook
Soil resources and agriculture in the center of European Russia at the end of the 18th century
Soil-geographic and socioeconomic data were compared with the use of geoinformation technologies. The history of agricultural development of the East European Plain and distribution of population in Russia in the 18th century were studied by the example of Yaroslavl, Vladimir, and Ryazan gubernias (governorates). The analysis of the obtained data demonstrated considerable differences in land uses between the regions of the old (prior to the 16th century) development and the regions actively populated since the end of the 16th century. The soils of Vladimir and a half of Yaroslavl gubernias were most developed; in some local districts (uezds), the maximum possible efficiency of the use of the natural soil fertility was achieved. In contrast, in some chernozemic areas, considerable opportunities for the further extensive development were preserved, and the limits to the population growth were not reached. The level of agricultural loads on the territory remained relatively low.
Journal Article
Assembling Fordizm: The Production of Automobiles, Americans, and Bolsheviks in Detroit and Early Soviet Russia
The expansion of the Ford Motor Company into Soviet Russia has been understood as part of a unidirectional spread of American economic power and cultural forms abroad following the First World War. This essay looks beyond the automobiles and manufacturing methods sent from Ford facilities in Detroit to the emerging Soviet automobile industry to examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system. Workers, managers, engineers, and cultural, technical, and disciplinary knowledge moved back and forth between factories in Soviet Russia and the United States. Efforts to define, track, and shape workers in both countries as Americans, Russians, or Bolsheviks were integral to the construction of the products and methods that Ford sold. But many workers fell in between and contested these classifications and they often defied company attempts to create an efficient and homogeneous American workforce. In Russia, too, more than Soviet and American automobiles were produced: people and ideas were created that crossed and blurred boundaries between “American” and “Soviet.” There, “Fordizm” became a popular watchword among Soviet commentators and workers as a near-synonym for industrialization, mass production, and efficiency. Many saw it as a potentially valuable component of a new socialist world. These multidirectional movements, recorded in Ford Motor Company archives and related documents, suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.
Journal Article
U.S. Military Information Operations in Afghanistan
The U.S. Marine Corps, which has long recognized the importance of influencing the civilian population in a counterinsurgency environment, requested an evaluation of the effectiveness of the psychological operations element of U.S. military information operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010 based on how well messages and themes were tailored to target audiences. This monograph responds to that request.
eBook