The economic balance of a peasant household in the European north in 1917 - mid-1920s

The aim of this article is to study the evolution of the industrial infrastructure of the parcel farming industry in the European North of Russia in the first half of the 1920s in order to understand the specifics of the rehabilitation processes in the region's agriculture and to answer the question of how the state's agrarian policy took into account the region's uniqueness. The analysis is based on the materials of the budget statistics of the peasant economy, as containing the most complete information on the topic. If necessary, the author supplemented his analysis with mass statistical material. The methodological dominant of the study was the episte-mological positions of the Russian agrarian science of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in particular, the theory of the family organization of peasant farming, which were formulated within the organizational and production line of research. The author adheres to the foundations of the system approach and the principles of historicism, which presupposes a systematic structural analysis of the livelihoods of the peasant household as an integral entity with inherent internal connections and their interaction in the context of the general historical changes of 1917 and the first half of the 1920s. The global leveling of the socioeconomic structure of the village in 1917-1921 led to the establishment of the organizational type of the consumer agricultural household in the European North of Russia. The return to the integral foundations of production began in the North in 1922-23 and ended in 1926-27. In 1922-23, the average indicators, with their overall homogeneity, emphasized the poverty level of the real income of the peasantry, but nevertheless concealed the diversity of the domestic economic opportunities of the peasant economy. To detect this diversity, the analysis includes socio-economic groupings of statistical material, based on the size of the sowing of the household, since the crop area is to a certain extent a cumulative sign. The revealed stability of the share of material inputs to gross agricultural production (expenditure and income) by 1 desiatina of agricultural area in different types of households is an important reason for a conclusion that the profitability of farms of different sizes depended not so much on the different degrees of the art of production organization but on objective differences in the availability and proportions of factors of production. By the mid-1920s geographical regions, for example, Volog-dsky, Gryazovetsky, Kholmogorsky and Pudozhsky counties, were distinguished in which the peasant economy was based on fundamentally new organizational bases and differed in its productivity, best organizational forms and rational use of labor and capital.

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