A Survey of Soviet Russian Agriculture

Excerpts from the Introduction: With an enormous crop area of nearly 340 million acres and more than half its population engaged in agriculture (before World War II), the Soviet Union is one of the leading agricultural countries in the world. Before World War I it was also one of the foremost exporters of agricultural products, particularly of wheat and other small grains. Although agricultural exports declined drastically during the interwar period and the country underwent considerable industrial development, agriculture has nevertheless continued to be the backbone of Russian economic life. This situation has not been changed by the acquisition, since World War II, of new territory, for that, too, is predominantly agrarian in character. In dealing with agriculture, as with other branches of the Soviet economy, the question of the adequacy and reliability of statistical information immediately arises. More or less detailed statistical data on crops, livestock numbers, various types of farms, foreign trade, and population are available for the period preceding World War II, tapering off, usually, after 1937-38. In general, published statistical material in the 1930's was much less abundant and less regularly released than during the 1920's. Since World War II, statistical information has been scarce and even when published it has been fragmentary in character, often given in the form of percentages of a base that is not stated, rather than in actual hectares, tons, or numbers of animals. Territorial changes that have taken place since the war, not only through incorporation of new territories into the Soviet Union but also through the reshuffling of administrative divisions within the old frontiers of the USSR, aggravated the situation by making comparison of postwar and pre-war data extremely difficult. In general, for the period since World War II, whenever Soviet estimates of acreage and production of crops and of livestock numbers were lacking, attempts have been made to supply them in this monograph if at all possible. But often they have been made on the basis of highly incomplete data that tend to increase the margin of error of such estimates.