A failed turn: from the history of organizing implementation of scientific research in agriculture in the USSR in the 1970s.

The article considers the problems of organizing the introduction of scientific recommendations into agricultural production in the USSR. The difficult, and sometimes even tragic, history of agrarian science and production in our country was the reason why organizational and innovative problems became the subject of a serious discussion of scientists and practitioners only in the 1970s. Two approaches emerged in the search for the most acceptable and effective implementation model. The first of them, represented by the leaders of agrarian scientific institutions, provided for the de-bureaucratization of the management of agrarian science by higher administrative structures, the formation of a more flexible system of production relations in the agrarian sphere, taking into account interests of various links in the scientific and production chain. Perhaps, these changes would have prevented future negative scenarios of the country's development. After all, if successful, the trade network would have been saturated with high-quality agricultural products, the menu of the Soviet man would have become more diversified and plentiful and social well-being would have been more qualitative and optimistic, the ideological landmarks of the population would not have changed. The second approach, formulated by the heads of the "scientific" units in the union and republican ministries of agriculture, aimed at improving the organizational and scientific aspects of implementation: improving planning, coordination, financing of innovative works, optimization of the scientific and experimental network, etc., which would have allowed to formulate more informed and effective recommendations. An important role was assigned to the "demonstration effect" of the organized network of basic farms. Actually, both approaches could lead to a positive result, used in a complex as complementary to each other. One aimed at increasing the level of the proposed developments, while the other aimed at a wide adoption of these recommendations by production. The production, personnel, scientific potential created in the country made it possible to carry out the reorganization of the agrarian economy in the necessary direction without social cataclysms. However, the highest party structures directed the country's development by a different, most inefficient, bureaucratic scenario. Within its framework, agricultural research and production integration could be realized only in the narrow local scales of individual farms, or, at best, of individual regions. And the failed "union of the state, science and the soil" was one of the harbingers of future upheavals. Thus, according to the author, of all the possible options for the development of the agrarian sphere in the USSR in the 1970s the authorities chose the most unfavorable: the bureaucratization of the branch led to administrative chaos, the fall of labor discipline and theft. The "scientification" of agriculture under these conditions was much complicated.

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