Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963

• Published in: Agricultural History Vol. 90; no. 1; pp. 129 - 130
• Main Author: Tauger, Mark B.
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Durham Agricultural History Society 01.01.2016; Duke University Press, NC & IL
• Subjects: Agriculture; Europe; Farming; Livestock; Self sufficiency; Studies
• ISSN: 0002-1482; 1533-8290
• DOI: 10.3098/ah.2016.090.1.129

Smith criticizes earlier scholarship for a "cold War bias" that viewed Soviet agriculture as very different from capitalist agriculture and as a failure, which oversimplifies that literature (6). yet she accepts conventional cold War interpretations of most events, such as her focus on "plans" vs. "reality," her claims about the Virgin lands, and her description of the 1931-1933 famine as manmade by Stalin to punish the peasants for alleged resistance, ignoring the desperate urban food shortages (22, 60). [...]she claims that the "dispersed" and private nature of capitalist agriculture makes it "much harder to account for the complex array of influential authorities and financial structures that undergird contemporary agrarian failures" (230-31). yet uS and european agriculture are less dispersed than Soviet agriculture was, with better roads and communications, and have far more sources and far less secrecy than the uSSr had.