The USSR collective farm and state farm system of 1946-1964 in the modern national historiography

The objective of the research is to analyze modern historians' views on developing and functioning of the collective-farm system in the post-war 20-year period. The task was to reveal main directions of the analysis, the topic degree of knowledge and research prospects, as well as factors influencing the opinion of scholars, similarities and differences in their assessments and conclusions, polemical judgments. At the Soviet stage of historiography, the objective reflection of the development of the collective farm system in the years of post-war Stalinism and the Khrushchev decade was hampered by the need to take into account the doctrinal and political attitudes of power and the restrictions on access to archival materials. The nihilistic assessments of the Soviet agrarian system made during the Perestroika period became the methodological foundation for post-Soviet studies. The author concentrated on studying the life and work of the peasantry in collective farms, machine-tractor stations and state farms, which are mainly portrayed as a mechanism to oppress the rural population and its number reduction. Farming was considered as an alternative to collective farms. Since the late 1990s ideas on the collective farm and state farm system as a “prison” for the peasantry began to be diluted by the conclusions that it was a special social-economic phenomenon, a means (albeit imperfect) of modernizing agriculture. A number of objective factors contributed to the revival of interest to the history of collective farms, machine-tractor stations, state farms, and private subsidiary farms of the population, in particular the dominance of small-scale production of agricultural products over large organizational-production forms. Farms, for which the reformers of the early 1990s laid so many hopes, played a secondary role in agrarian production. Most authors, who believe that the collective farm and state farm system was a peculiar means of agrarian modernization, devote their work to the history of the collective farms. Their publications attempted to reveal new facets of old scientific problems, to answer the questions that were posed, but not fully disclosed in the Soviet era. Various aspects of the activity of machine-tractor stations, state farms, and personal subsidiary farms of the population are analyzed as well. The modern historiography of developing the collective farm system includes works, which search new methodological approaches to analyze the country's agrarian system within the framework of modernization theory in broad problem-chronological frames.

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