The soviet village revisited: Household farming and the changing image of socialism in the late Soviet period

Abstract

The recognition of family farms and agricultural cooperatives as catalysts for agricultural recovery during the perestroika years went along with the rediscovery of the world-famous theoretician of the peasant farm Aleksandr V. Chaianov. The economist’s rehabilitation resulted from the changing conventions of public discourse towards the end of the Soviet era. Yet, Chaianov’s return needs to be linked also with the official image of the rural economy in the preceding decade when in academic and political debates on private subsidiary farms the socialist village took on new contours. Household farming which had previously been condemned as either a ‘petty-bourgeois’ mode of production or an indicator of the incomplete transition to socialism, was accepted as a component of socialist agriculture. Mirroring a new understanding of socialism, this paradigm shift was an important precondition for the broad public response to Chaianov’s rehabilitation. In the end, the turn towards family farming and co-operation remained an intellectual and political phenomenon with barely any impact on the agrarian order itself. The economic legacy of the Soviet era and local power constellations prevented a fundamental change of the rural order in favor of household-based agriculture.