This book examines the Soviet agricultural crisis of 1931-1933 which culminated in the major famine of 1933. It is the first volume in English to make extensive use of Russian and Ukrainian central and local archives to assess the extent and causes of the famine. It reaches new conclusions on how far the famine was 'organized' or 'artificial', and compares it with other Russian and Soviet famines and with major twentieth century famines elsewhere. Against this background, it discusses the emergence of collective farming as an economic and social system.

ÿThis book explores the interrelated campaigns of agricultural collectivization in the USSR and in the communist dictatorships established in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Despite the profound, long-term societal impact of collectivization, the subject has remained relatively underresearched. The volume combines detailed studies of collectivization in individual Eastern European states with issueoriented comparative perspectives at regional level. Based on novel primary sources, it proposes a reappraisal of the theoretical underpinnings and research agenda of studies on collectivization in Eastern Europe.The contributions provide up-to-date overviews of recent research in the field and promote new approaches to the topic, combining historical comparisons with studies of transnational transfers and entanglements.

First published in 1989. Perestroika, it was widely believed, must succeed in agriculture before permanent change could be affected elsewhere in the Soviet economy. But Soviet agriculture had so far remained stubbornly inefficient and resistant to change. In this book Stefan Hedlund investigates the reasons for this state of affairs. The author gives an account of the emergence, development and performance of private agriculture in the Soviet Union. In particular he describes the essentials of the peculiarly Soviet hybrid of private and socialized agriculture. He places the private sector within the broader framework of Soviet agriculture. He saw Soviet agriculture as a ‘Black Hole’, ready to absorb any resources that came near, be they private plots, urban gardens, factory workshops or military units. Hedlund also examines the impact on the peasants as producers of decades of negative ideological pronouncements in Party propaganda, and of discrimination and at times outright harassment by local officials. He points out that this background makes the prospect of any positive response from the peasants to Gorbachev’s call for perestroika in agriculture extremely unlikely.

This book, first published in 1984, analyses the institutions and decision-making processes that determined agricultural production in the Soviet Union. It addresses the crisis in Soviet agriculture of the early 1980s, examining the problems of low productivity, adverse natural conditions and an underdeveloped infrastructure. The book’s analysis of the ‘crisis’ focuses on the growing gap between demand and supply of agricultural produce, and the pressures on the government to alleviate the food shortages.