WORLD history?

Question

how did russia's agricultural system contribute to its late industrialization?

Answer 1

Russia's agricultural system was feudal under the tsars, and collective under the communists. Neither system was very successful.

Also, bear in mind that Russia was more or less still a feudal country clear up to the time of the Communist Revolution in 1917. Lenin, and later, Stalin, forced through a system of ciollectivization, believing that it would lead to a utopia of agricultural abundance. But it didn't happen--not in the least!

In the years immediately following the 1917 revolution, Lenin instituted collective labor and collective farms, but the results were disastrous. So little food was produced that the peasants hoarded the produce for themselves and refused to share with the cities. Starvation immediately followed.

Under Stalin in the late 1920s things got worse! The organization of land and labor into large-scale collective farms (kolkhozy) grew faster. At the same time, Soviet leaders argued that collectivization would free poor peasants from economic servitude under the kulaks. Stalin believed that the goals of collectivization could be achieved voluntarily, but when the new farms failed to attract the number of peasants hoped, the government blamed the oppression of the kulaks and resorted to forceful implementation of the plan, by murder and wholesale deportation of farmers to Siberia. Further failures of collective farming were blamed on others and more deportations took place, and so on. The Soviet famines of 1932 and 1933 were some of the worst in human history--and collective agriculture was largely to blame.

Russian defector Viktor Belenko described kolkoz (collective farms) as disgraceful, backward places where the machinery always broke down and the peasants didn't care about anything but their own private plots where they grew their own food. Belenko also described huge collective farms where better than half the crops rotted in the fields, and hundreds of people trucked from 200 miles in every direction to harvest the crops. But pay was so small and the motivation of the workers so miniscule that nobody cared.

So, in an atmosphere like this, with the availability of your next meal always a matter of debate, how much effort could really be put into industrial development?

Answer: If you can't do it yourself, you get it from someplace else! Following World War II, many of the German arms factories which survived the war were literally picked up and transported into Russia. The famous Russian assault rifle, the AK-47, was basically a copy of the n**i MG-44. During the electronic revolution, the KGB paid top dollar for industrial espionage.